RafaelFajardo

The Weimar Bauhaus was founded in 1919 on the premise that art “cannot be taught and cannot be learned.” Art is not “a profession which can be mastered by study,” wrote Walter Gropius in the school’s first program; rather, it blossoms “in rare moments of inspiration” by “the grace of heaven.” That Gropius launched what would become the most influential art school of the twentieth century on such contradictory grounds underscores the problem implicit in the teaching of art. Gropius was not the first to claim that art cannot be taught, and its corollary, the ideal of the “born artist,” runs long and deep in the current of Western civilization. Pliny the Elder asserted in the first century that the Greek sculptor Lysippus “was no one’s pupil”; Albrecht Dürer, in the sixteenth century, praised the Dutch artist Geertgen tot Sint Jans as “truly a painter in his mother’s womb.” The tradition continues into the present with the art historian Robert Pincus-Witten’s description in the early 1980s of David Salle as a “painter born.” And yet most artists from Lysippus forward have been someone’s pupil; David Salle’s Master of Fine Arts degree is only the latest way that the title of artist is bestowed.