Drawing a blank: can artistic talent ever be taught?

Genius cannot be taught but skills can. And even the wildest, most visionary of artists relies on the techniques they were taught. If you want to make digital art, you need to learn to code. A training in film will help with moving-image art. So much is obvious. But today we’re in thrall to a vacuous Romanticism that insists artists are born not made.

The first modern artists rebelled against a style of art education that had become deadening 150 years ago. The “academic” teaching tradition that evolved in the 18th century forced every aspiring artist to learn the same rules and habits – drawing from the nude, calculating perspective. The likes of Monet and Cézanne broke with this academicism, and by 1913 artists such as Duchamp were putting bike wheels on stools, making collages and doing lots of other things no teacher had ever taught. Now we have art schools that teach Duchamp’s readymade to kids who discovered collage at primary school. But what if there was something in the older drawing-based art education after all?

“Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master,” said Leonardo da Vinci. He outstripped his own teacher, Verrocchio, when as a teenager he added a brilliant angel to his elder’s Baptism of Christ. That’s genius. Yet the originality of Leonardo was made possible by a medieval art education. The kid from Vinci joined Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence as an apprentice when he was 17, and worked constantly at drawing and painting. He probably also studied sculpture at an academy founded by Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The disciplines that Leonardo gained from his education gave him the freedom to design flying machines as well as paint the Mona Lisa. So teaching young artists refined skills doesn’t necessarily crush creativity. This is true across the arts – being hothoused as a child gave Mozart the knowledge to compose Don Giovanni, learning Latin at school helped Shakespeare write Hamlet.

They were boys, of course. Education was much less available to women in the past and the apprenticeship tradition in visual art was all male. Only rarely did women get access to art teaching at all. Artemisia Gentileschi was taught at the beginning of the 1600s by her father, an artist friend of Caravaggio. When she was 17 she was so skilled she painted a canvas of Susanna and the Elders that is both perfect and personal. She went on to use her skill to paint visceral scenes of suffering and strength.

It is not just as students that artists learn, however. Artists who constantly revolutionise their art are looking and studying all their lives. Paula Rego and Lucian Freud are examples of artists who develop as they get older: Rego took up pastels, learning a whole new technique in her later career, while Freud gradually taught himself to paint like Rubens with grand, fleshy freedom. Titian, Michelangelo and Rembrandt also got better as they aged – maybe because they learned to use their youthful skills more freely.

We wouldn’t want to go back to the fixed rules of the past. Art can be anything. But what we need is an art education system that lets kids emulate Leonardo da Vinci as well as Marcel Duchamp.