THE GROOVE - How to Successfully Handle Criticism

THE GROOVE

Welcome to the 130th issue of The Groove.

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If you are an artist, an “intrapreneur”, or an entrepreneur, you are in the business of selling your own ideas to others. And the way to succeed and transcend is by doing things with excellence and in ways that are unique enough to stand out.

It doesn’t matter what your chosen field is, if you really are expressing something truly yours there will be critics and detractors along the way. Jeff Bezos said this in a 2018 interview: “we would be very naïve to believe that we’re not going to be criticized… you have to be willing to be misunderstood. If you cannot afford to be misunderstood, then for goodness’ sake, don’t do anything new or innovative.”

The way you handle your critics will determine your success. You can give up, you can pay attention and see if there’s some truth in the criticism, you can attack back (usually not helpful but each circumstance demands its own specific responses), or you can continue doing what you are doing and aim to get even better at it.

In the early 1800s a young painter called Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres faced some serious critics. Luckily for him and for all the many generations of artists that he has inspired, he opted to stand firm on what he had started and continued improving on it with great conviction and hard work.

When you are honest with yourself and you know that you are doing excellent work while coming up with a different way of doing things, it’s very likely that you have experienced moments of success that back up your efforts even if you find your work misunderstood by a few.

Ingres had been born to a family of modest means in the South of France and moved to Paris to learn from the neoclassical master Jacques-Louis David. While there in 1892 he won the coveted Prix de Rome: a scholarship to live in Rome for three to five years with all expenses paid by the French state.

Unfortunately, his residence in Rome was postponed due to shortage of state funds, but in the meantime, Ingres developed his own style: a mix of Italian Renaissance with Flemish Art imbued with his own vision. Ingres' work was different and considered eclectic and rebellious against academic rules.

In 1806, he received the funds to travel. He also finished a painting that none other than Napoleon Bonaparte himself had commissioned, which encouraged Ingres to submit to the Salon again.

The artist was just arriving in Rome when he got the news, accompanied by many press clippings that his art had received the worst reviews ever. Some called it “gothic;” others said Ingres intended to “regress the art”.

He was obviously hurt as he wrote to his friend Joseph-Marie Vien: “They cannot understand my art, and they try to bring me down to their level. But I will not give up. I will continue to paint as I see fit, and I will not be swayed by their opinions."

And that’s what he did: he found a studio on the grounds of the Villa Medici away from the other resident artists and painted tirelessly regardless of what people said.

Having this attitude while producing the work in his own style eventually helped Ingres hit the motherlode. He had decided to stay in Rome after the scholarship was over and the French governor of Rome and a wealthy patron of the arts, General Miollis, had fallen in love with his work. Miollis commissioned several paintings for which he paid top coin, helping Ingres’s name gain even more recognition in the right circles.

You see, Ingres was not contentious and didn’t become the victim of the system. He simply didn’t let the critics dictate who he should be or what he should do. He let his frustrations be known by his close friends and was objective enough to see that his paintings, albeit not fulfilling the standards that the Parisian establishment expected of him, were very good.

He believed in hard work more than in God-given talent and diligently proved that. Not only was the money pouring in from commissions, but he received praise by collectors and one day was summoned by the Murats: Queen Caroline (who was Napoleon’s sister) and King Joachim of Naples, both of whom commissioned several works to Ingres, including his masterpiece and one that would be written about in every art history book: “La Grande Odalisque,” finished in 1814.

But the Murats never took possession or paid for the Odalisque because their regime collapsed at the same time that Napoleon's dynasty did. Ingres found himself essentially stranded in Rome without patronage, but he knew that throughout all the years he had been painting both in Paris and Rome his name had grown in stature regardless of what the critics had said.

It didn’t matter that the commissions from the nobility had dried up, because Ingres’s name was already very well known in Western Europe. Being dependent on his work, he started accepting visits by wealthy tourists, especially the English, who were in Rome eager to get their portraits done by this excellent artist. For several years, pencil drawings of exact precision became his bread and butter. He made more than 500 of them which have been celebrated as some of his most admired works, while rarely, if ever, negotiating his prices down with his seaters.

I’ve crossed paths with a lot of people who want to cut corners. I’ve also crossed paths with a lot of people who haven’t put in their 10,000 hours of mastery work but they lack the self-awareness to accept that. Being excellent is becoming a rare thing, but that wasn’t Ingres' problem. His problem was his critics.

He was very clear about the quality of his work and in 1817 he wrote to his friend François Souchon: “They want me to be something I am not, and cannot satisfy their demands. But I will not give up. I will continue to paint with all my heart and soul, and I hope that someday they will understand what I am trying to achieve."

In an effort to get the critical acclaim that he longed for, Ingres knew that all the many hours of work he had put into Odalisque deserved praise, and in 1819 after having kept the painting in his studio for five years, he submitted it to the Salon. Once again, critics weren’t kind, and one remarked that the work had "neither bones nor muscle, neither blood, nor life, nor relief, indeed nothing that constitutes imitation" and others poked fun at it for having "two or three vertebrae too many”.

This didn’t prevent Odalisque from being sold shortly thereafter to Count de Pourtales-Gorgier, chamberlain to the king of Prussia.

Eventually in 1824, The Vow of Louis XIII brought Ingres the critical success he had dreamed of. This opened the floodgates for him, and in January 1825 he was awarded the Cross of the Légion d'honneur by Charles X. In June of the same year he was elected a member of Académie des Beaux-Arts.

The following year, lithographs of the Odalisque, the painting that had been mocked to death, was printed in two competing versions by Delpech and Sudré, found eager buyers, and Ingres received 24,000 francs (about $50,000 today) for the reproduction rights – twenty times the amount he had been paid for the original painting six years earlier. When the Odalisque entered the collection of The Louvre in 1899, Ingres had become an acclaimed artist.

According to Edouard Manet, he was the master of the masters. Edgar Degas owned more than ten of the painter's works; Matisse and Picasso always acknowledged their debt to Ingres.

None of this would have been possible had Ingres not put in the effort and continued his dedication to sharpening his skills. Even when the conditions were less than favorable and the critics wanted to shred him, Ingres remained committed to his ideals and principles.

He was always careful to maintain his independence and to stay true to his own vision, although that meant going against the popular trends and tastes of his time. This is ultimately how every visionary has prevailed and thrived, even at times when their detractors seemingly had the upper hand.

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