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I would like to talk to you today about the problem of the artist with respect to his special aptitudes and his special limitations. this is, I suppose, a problem which does not often enter into the calculations of an artist during his apprentice period. He thinks then that it is only a matter of time and the acquisition of more technical skill before he becomes able to interpret any subject under the sun equally well in any style he may choose. He does not take into account the psychological limitations nature has imposed upon him--those affinities for certain subjects and certain styles rather than others---which determine the qualitative success of his work in the long run. Sometimes he resists the first awareness of these limitations, refuses to accept them because they are repugnantly to his ambition; he may even persist in efforts to do artistic tasks which lie beyond his personal powers of interpretation, attempting to portray subjects which are not for him or to portray them in styles which are not for him.
This is not altogether his fault. The critics and their taste, the public and its taste, the fashions and this year and that year and their control of economic markets, affect him---and often very unfortunately. I think we have seen a good deal of self-conscious and artificial striving after affects in art the past ten years, as well as in music, in painting, in sculpture, and in literature. People have tried to please the current style in order to gain recognition without any regard to the affinity between this style and themselves.
I confess that personally this forced approach to creative work is antipathetic to me. I believe that if an artist is going to develop an original and personal style, he will do so by a gradual rather than a forced process of development. The other method---the tendency to take the fort of fashion by storm---leads only to the artist's violating his own nature and producing work which, not being true to himself, is not likely to be true art. 
When people look at these paintings of New York and ask me, why do