Should Art Be About Personal Expression?

The case for impersonality

Many writers on art have described painting in terms of personal expression. The job of the artist is to filter reality through his or her distinctive viewpoint. Émile Zola, for example, wrote that painting allows us to see a little corner of nature through another’s temperament.

Others have shifted the view even more inward, suggesting that art is essentially an expression of the artist’s inner life. From this perspective, personal expression is the ultimate goal the artist.

But these ideas have not always prevailed.

The Old Factory, Akerselva by Fritz Thaulow

Hamilton Easter Field, in his 1913 book The Technique of Oil Painting argued that greatness in art, music and literature is defined not by personal expression, but by impersonality:

“Impersonality is in no way the antithesis of personality, but its fulfillment. As a great man gets bigger and broader he drops a lot of his prejudices and meannesses, and his heart, like that of St. Francis, goes out in sympathy to all manner of men, to the birds of the air, and even to inanimate nature, until he gets to feel in harmony with the universe. Gradually he has passed beyond the personal into the impersonal. Whatever the hand of such a man finds to do will bear the stamp of his breadth of vision. It will remain personal because it will be true to his inmost self. It will, however, also be impersonal, because the man has so broadened in character that in his work he no longer expresses the emotions of one man, but those of mankind."

Is this just a rhetorical flourish, or is it a genuinely fresh way for artists to think of their work? Is impersonality desirable, or even possible in our age of navel-gazing and psychoanalysis? Haven’t all the great works of art history, from Rembrandt’s self portraits to Beethoven’s symphonies been founded on a deep level of introspection and inner discovery?

What Field seems to be advocating is a way seeing beyond the limits of the self into the resources of collective experience and of nature itself.

Australian painter Charles Conder expressed a similar feeling of selflessness in a letter to his good friend Tom Roberts, after a couple of blissful summers they spent painting together in Heidelberg, 1888-1890.

Conder said:

"I feel more than sorry that these days are over, because nothing can exceed the pleasures of that last summer, when I fancy all of us lost the ego somewhat of our natures, in looking at what was Nature's best art and ideality."
—From Australian Impressionism by Terrence Lane.

Many of the greatest works of art have come from enigmatic individuals like Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Homer, about whom we know very little. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. The miracle of their work is that the range of their emotional expression seems to extend beyond the scope of a single person’s experience.

Each of these creators looked into themselves, but in so doing, they saw beyond themselves.