How to Survive Even Though You're an Artist - Part II
Different Ways Artists Managed Throughout History
by
Dan Koon
In our opening article, we established the understanding that some kind of exchange has to occur if one is going to continue to call oneself an artist and not, say, an art teacher or an art writer. Not that there's anything wrong with teachers and writers, but if you want the creation of artworks to be the first and foremost activity in your life, you need to take them to market and sell them and get paid for them.
Kind of a Humble Start
In earlier days it was much the same. In medieval times, artists as we understand the term today didn't exist. There were artisans and they were among the lower strata of society, (In the opinion of some, not all that much has changed over the centuries.) Artisans were servants of the rulers and they worked with their hands. (Even in Greek and Roman times, sculptors and painters were lumped together with mechanics and held in low esteem, notwithstanding the acclaim of the famous Greek sculptor, Praxiteles.) If you thought of yourself as an artist in those centuries, you were the only one who did so; you worked at a craft making things out of wood, or metal, or stone, or leather, or wool, or glass.
Basically, everyone who wasn't in the upper class was in the lower class, and if you had to ask, you didn't really want to know. In 1100, you practiced a craft and were a craftsman. The "work of art" as we think of it didn’t exist until the Renaissance.
But various guilds did exist, and that's where you learned your craft. Your parents contracted you out to the local blacksmith or cooper (barrel maker) or carpenter, possibly as early as the age of seven, you started learning your profession. (And you were a boy—girls weren't allowed into the guild system until nearly 1600.) The master provided you with training in the craft along with food, clothing and shelter; you exchanged your labor, and in the process, learned the trade. The guild regulated the production of a specific commodity, enforced standards of quality and looked after members who fell on hard times.
During the 14th century, painting began to come into its own. In Italy painters were, oddly enough, part of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild of physicians and pharmacists. Painters had to grind their pigments, much like pharmacists ground their medications. Also, doctors and painters shared the patron saint, Saint Luke, who was both an artist and a physician. (More logically, sculptors belonged to the same guild as carpenters and workers in wood and stone.)
An open market for art did not exist at the time. You made your money on a commission basis. A patron would come to your studio to discuss the altarpiece his family was sponsoring for the new church being erected in town, or something to decorate his villa. Integral to your career as a painter were the business skills to draw up contracts, deal with financial matters and other legalities, run the studio, pay your assistants and so on. These were your marketing functions, possibly also including the public relations tactic of having enough food and wine on hand to put your patron in a more agreeable frame of mind.
Your life as a painter began in the studio of a master as a junior apprentice grinding the lapis lazuli. Later, you worked on commissions the master had secured, painting in the sky or backgrounds, while he painted the faces and hands. For obvious reasons, you developed a technique similar to your master's. Mimicry, rather than originality, was a necessity.
One Artist's Story
A fairly typical example was the Dutch genre painter Judith Leyster (1609-1660). The eighth child of a brewer and weaver, she seems to have been a prodigy who decided to take up painting as a profession to help support the family when her father went bankrupt in 1624. She may have been trained in Franz Hals’ studio, as the influence was apparent in her work.
Within four years Judith was accomplished enough to receive favorable mention in a book on the cultural life of Haarlem. Her status improved to that of journeyman and by now she was being paid.
By her 20s she was ready to strike out on her own; not, however, until she created a "masterpiece" and submitted it for acceptance by the guild. Once she was declared a master, she set up her own studio, started to develop her individual style and began taking on male apprentices and training a new generation of painters. While Judith's story was a typical one, the fact she was a woman made her unique among other artists. She was the only female artist in the local painter’s guild and became an esteemed colleague of Rembrandt and the other Dutch masters of the day.
A newly prosperous European middle class opened up subjects for artists beyond religious or historical themes. Like Hals, Judith painted happy scenes of Dutch life: a trio of musicians, smiling children and tavern scenes as well as still lifes. Though she more or less gave up painting after her marriage and devoted herself to raising a family, her considerable talent received recognition starting around 1900 when the Louvre bought a painting they believed to be a Hals, only to find the monogram Judith used to sign her paintings underneath a forged Hals signature. The art world was astonished to discover that another painter, an unknown and a woman no less, had created work that had been mistaken for a genuine Hals for 250 years. (Their relationship continued once she left his tutelage—Hals had to pay a fine for stealing one of Judith’s apprentices to come work in his own studio.)
Finally, Some Status
But as a painter you, like Judith, worked with your hands and so were still not considered among the class of gentlemen who concerned themselves with the liberal arts (logic, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music or astronomy). Painting was a mechanical art until the Renaissance and we can thank the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer who campaigned to raise your status to a practitioner of the liberal arts. As discoveries in optics, perspective and other scientific developments became incorporated into your knowledge, your status became more acceptable to the upper classes.
The Church was no longer the only consumer of art. Well-to-do merchants and civic leaders could compete for your paintings or sculptures. Art had become a commodity. Your signature in itself became another marketing tool. As a master, your identity would naturally command more in the marketplace than one of your assistants.
By the late 1600s, the guild system was dying out and the Academy replaced the master's shop as the training ground for artists. But as the Church's power declined, a new power, the State, arose and painting, which had been constrained by religious themes for hundreds of years, soon served a new master, Classicism. Led by the French Academy, the goal of art was dictated to be attainment of perfection, as defined by Plato's concept of the Ideal. This suited the new power structure just fine since it perpetuated the status quo. If you wanted a career in art, you trained at the local Academy, pursued perfection and created works that appealed to the prevailing tastes.
Beginning in the Renaissance, however, society's perception of you underwent a change. Your use of scientific knowledge and methods in your paintings let you argue that you were on equal footing with those who practiced the other liberal arts. You claimed sisterhood with poetry and once the public bought that, you had a lineage that stretched back to the Greek Muses. And when Michelangelo knocked everyone’s socks off, you could no longer lay claim to being a craftsman, but a creator. Quite a public relations coup, since that appellation had been reserved for God for more than a thousand years. Two centuries earlier, you were a stonemason with a 50% chance of dying in the Black Death (because you couldn’t afford to leave the city when the plague struck, unlike the privileged few who moved to the country and waited until it passed.) Now, you were connected to the divine, a genius, and your eccentricities, temperament and odd behavior were accepted as part of the package. Well done, maestro!
Why Marketing?
Marketing's purpose is to generate desire for an item or service which results in it being sold and acquired.
The new status conferred on you in the Renaissance certainly enhanced the desire of the art buying public to acquire your creations. Who wouldn't want something that sprang from a genius with a direct line to higher forces?
Still, as in earlier days, the demand usually came from commissions: royalty who wanted their portraits, a group of civic leaders who wanted to memorialize their standing in the community or well-to-do merchants looking to decorate their homes with still lifes of a gutted rabbit or vase of flowers. But demand there was. Photography hadn't been invented and neither had the mechanical means of reproducing paintings, such as exists today. The only copies were original copies. If you had training and talent you had work.
The absolute power of the Church had been broken by a simple idea germinated during the Renaissance, the notion that man, not God, was the measure of all things. This idea grew into the Enlightenment, which postulated that reason alone could lead to a better world and that mankind could achieve perfection. Thus, education became essential as the means to improve the individual and society. Artists had a significant role in the enlightened times of 18th century Europe. Your paintings contributed to elevating society through portrayal of such themes as the perfection of the natural world or moral values that people could admire and strive to cultivate.
For some time, the art dealer had been a part of the art world and operated much as they still do today, acting as a middleman between artist and collector. If you had a dealer who liked your work either out of personal taste or astute business sense, your work had visibility in the marketplace and you could put bread on your table.
However, the Academy, as de facto arm of the State, wasn't too sure about this new movement to elevate the natural world (considered "ugly") with all its passion, warts, knotted trunks and storm clouds. "Pursuit of ideal beauty" remained its story and they were sticking to it. Painters who toed the party line tended to be the ones who achieved success in their day, though few are remembered now. The status quo had the money and bourgeois taste was more or less dictated by the Academy.
These factors conspired against progressive trends in art. The struggles that the Impressionists and their successors had in trying to gain acceptance for their work is legendary. And had Van Gogh not had a guardian angel in the person of his brother Theo, it's unlikely anyone would ever have seen his work. As it was, he never sold a painting during his lifetime and only Theo and his wife cared for the astounding legacy the world enjoys today.
Four Simple Parts of Marketing
In either case, survival as an artist in that era depended in large measure on the dealer, the gallery owner, the patron. Not too different from today. So here is as good a place as any to place everything outlined above in the context of one of the systems that marketing people use to analyze the activities of marketing called the Four Ps. The Four Ps are product, price, promotion and place. Each one is necessary to some degree for you to survive as an artist.
Product is simply your painting, sculpture, drawing, etching or what it is that you create.
Price is what you can get as an exchange for your product. As an apprentice in the master's shop it was a hunk of bread, some straw to sleep on and drawing lessons. Today, it's usually money.
Promotion includes many possibilities: your sales pitch to a client, or a flier announcing your show, or your attention-getting antics (Dali comes to mind) or, if you really want to go all the way to raise the price of your work, drunk driving yourself into a tree (Pollock, totally in keeping with the reputation that his inner demons helped him create). This last option, however, isn’t recommended.
Place refers to the means of distribution, the channel on which your art makes it out into the world. Convention has held that a brick and mortar gallery was the most legitimate means of distribution for an artist’s work. In other words, you had to fit in with prevailing trends or you didn’t get seen.
Well, those days are finished, and we'll begin to explore this in our next article.
Read Part I: How to Survive Even Though You're an Artist
— Dan Koon
|
August 13, 2007
|
Print Version - 
PDF (1.21 Mb
Discuss article | 
Print this page | 
back to top
The views and opinions of individual authors/contributors expressed on the FAR® web site do not necessarily state or reflect those views and/or opinions of Fine Art Registry™ or its agents or subsidiaries.
Fine Art News Feed
