Proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!
Interpretation
Mastery of skills is crucial for artists to unleash their creativity.
Walter Gropius emphasizes the importance of skill proficiency for artists, suggesting that true creativity stems from a solid understanding of one's craft. He advocates for the creation of an inclusive community of craftsmen and artists, free from class distinctions that hinder collaboration and mutual respect.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire art students in a workshop about mastering their techniques.
The ultimate aim of all artistic activity is building! ... Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all get back to craft! ... The artist is a heightened manifestation of the craftsman. ... Let us form ... a new guild of craftsmen without the class divisions that set out to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! ... Let us together create the new building of the future which will be all in one: architecture and sculpture and painting.
A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities.
The utilization of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns; for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft.
Architecture begins where engineering ends.
Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts.
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.
Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.
Theatre is not supposed to represent psychology but passions, which is totally different. Its role is to represent the soul's different emotional states, and those of the mind, the world history.
Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.
My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury.
Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
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