Accident is a relative term,” Anton Ehrenzweig tells us in The Hidden Order of Art, published in 1967 by the University of California Press. Six years later, I was devouring it in Spanish, highly recommended by my mentor and art teacher Luis Felipe Noé. It was the first time I had heard the concept of happy accident in art.
“The accident is incorporated into the artist’s planning and to this extent becomes indistinguishable from his more intentional design,” continues Mr. Ehrenzweig, an Austrian-born British art theorist and psychologist born to an eminent Viennese Jewish family. Living in London, he was arrested for suspicion during World War II and sent to prison camps in Australia. After his release in 1942, he returned to London and continued his work in art and psychology.
“It is the subjective relation to the artist’s planning that decides the character of the accident. Accidental in this sense is anything in the medium that does not conform with the artist’s preconceived planning, something which is felt wholly extraneous and not controlled by him.[…] The same unpredictable incident which may severely disrupt the planning of a rigid student and appear to him a frustrating ‘accident,’ will come as a welcome and indeed invited refinement of the more flexible planning of the mature artist.”
—Raúl Rodriguez, La Bergamote, NYC, 11.4.2018