Nigel Whiteley, a cultural historian, is Professor of Visual Arts in the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. He has been a visiting professor in India and China, and lectured widely in the USA and Europe. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (MIT, 2002), and other solo books include Design For Society (Reaktion, 1993, regularly reprinted), and Pop Design - Modernism to Mod, (Design Council, 1987). Whiteley is editor of De-Traditionalisation and Art: Aesthetic, Authority, Authenticity (Middlesex University Press, 2000). He has had essays published in journals such as Visible Language, Art History, The Oxford Art Journal, Artforum, the Journal of Architectural Education, Design Issues, Architectural History and Cultural Values, and his work has been translated into Indian, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian and Korean.
Thinking Artists: the Art News series, 1953-1958
Between 1953 and 1958, Art News in the USA included a series that focused on a particular contemporary artist who was interviewed while making an artwork. Amongst the artists, usually American, were de Kooning, Gottlieb, Diebenkorn, Mitchell and Lippold, and the series title used the artist’s name, followed by “paints a picture” or “makes a sculpture”, or some variant. Interviewers/writers included Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, Thomas B. Hess, and Irving Sandler.
As well as providing an informative survey of contemporary art practice in New York, the series was innovative in that it provided an insight into the artist’s work in progress and her/his thoughts about creativity. The format enabled the artist and commentator to talk about a particular work in terms of its aims, theme, preoccupations and interpretations, and for the commentator to provide not only a formal analysis, but also to describe some of the decision-making processes of the artist – why the artist had made a particular decision and rejected other alternatives, and to what effect. Furthermore, a certain amount of detailed technical information about materials and methods was disclosed, as well as information about the artist’s working environment, such as the size of the studio, whether the artist worked close-up, and whether the work stood on an easel or lay on the floor.
The overall result was to create a series that gave a reasonably intimate insight into the everyday creative processes of artists in the USA in the early to late 1950s. Rather than romanticizing the creative act, so giving yet another breathless account of the intuitive, inspired or tortured genius, the making of art is demystified by an openness about the making process, and a making explicit of what is usually tacit knowledge. This paper surveys the Art News series, and evaluates its contribution in terms of a better understanding of how artists think about works they are creating.