Authenticity and the Self

One’s art is always, in some sense, autobiographical. This is not necessarily intentional. Visual artists, musicians, dancers, actors, writers — all who create — are to a degree inimitable if their work is authentic. Such work is like a fingerprint. Fosse dances like Fosse; Martha Graham dances like Martha Graham. The brushstrokes of Van Gogh cannot be mistaken for those of Renoir and vice versa.

Style is one aspect. Content is another. What an artist displays in his or her work reveals interests, concerns, thoughts, feelings, and so forth. For example, Picasso’s Guernica is the artist’s reaction to the bombing during the Spanish Civil War of the town of Guernica by German and Italian warplanes in 1937. Joan Miro’s 1938 Black and Red Series of etchings is this artist’s response to the Spanish Civil War. These artworks are at once similar but remarkably different and distinctive.

Actors in their own way put a personal stamp on their stage or screen portrayals. Some are able to submerge themselves to a high degree. But nonetheless their characters are nuanced by the individual personality beneath the makeup. Likewise, composers create works for many and varied purposes and yet retain, from composition to composition, a unique sound. Mozart sounds like Mozart; John Williams sounds like John Williams.

Of course, some artworks are specifically autobiographical. Rembrandt was a prolific self-portraitist. His life is documented through a succession of self-portraits, which served him as a way to study portraiture through the examination of his own visage but must also be read as a display of ego. Playwrights, novelists, and poets also often are specifically autobiographical, even when they chose to fictionalize their lives. Even then, the disguise may be rather thin. Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms are noteworthy examples of the autobiographical novel.

Education in the arts sometimes results in students trying more to imitate than to create, and so it is a necessary instructional strategy to help students rediscover themselves, to become authentic. Picasso put it this way: “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”