Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit (1923). New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
The Art Spirit is a collection of essays, quotes, texts, and letters of Robert Henri, a member of the "Immortal Eight" that painted urban America during the turn of the century. The Eight's style and selection of subject matter was unique in American art because it showed America in it truest sense. The Eight concentrated their artistic efforts toward New York City, a bustling metropolis with multitudes of people moving in a discordant throng. Like New York, the focus of Henri's The Art Spirit is a bustling collection of vivid ideas, thoughts, and opinions that are thrown together with little regard for organization.
Henri's main concern throughtout the entire book is for the artist not to lose the main reason for creating art; expression. The following are a few quotes from a single page. Henri writes,
Make the hill express its bulk as a hill. . . . Make the wagon express its carrying power.... I am not interested in color for color's sake and light for light's sake. I am interested in them as means of expression.
For Henri, expression was the key to all art. It didn't matter what media, what style, or at what speed you created in as long as expression was the main focus and underlying theme to your work. This underlying theme of expression is extremely evident in Henri's work. It is so evident that there seems to be a veil of expression that the viewer has to dig through to get the subject of Henri's work.