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WD_180/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0180 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"A School's Colorful Patina" By HOLLAND COTTER.
Published: September 9, 2005.
I'M going to be a great painter, and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girl's school."
Well! I would never have thought, much less dared, to say such a thing to Georgia O'Keeffe. But an exasperated fellow art student, Eugene Speicher, did so one morning in 1908, when he stopped her on her way to a life drawing class at the Art Students League of New York.
For ages, he had been nagging O'Keeffe, then 21, to sit for a portrait. And that morning, for the umpteenth time, she gave him the brushoff. I'm too busy, she said.
But Speicher's comment got her attention. She went on to her class but, as she remembered years later: "The model happened to be a very repulsive man who gave me the creeps, so I gave up and went back to Speicher. He worked very quickly and the portrait was soon finished."
The Van Dyckian likeness, with O'Keeffe, firm of lip and gaze, looking like a Portia come to judgment with her black smock and utilitarian bob, is a good one. Now part of the league's permanent collection, it is also a sliver of New York City art history set within a larger piece of that history. And you can get a glimpse of both beginning on Sept. 19, when the painting goes on view at the school's West 57th Street headquarters in a survey of work by students, past and present.
The League is putting on the show to celebrate the 130th anniversary of its founding. And it won't be partying alone. As an anniversary salute, more than a dozen Manhattan art galleries have organized smaller shows, some already on view, devoted to artists associated with the institution.
They range from protean teachers like Robert Henri to an entire art world of student luminaries, among them Lee Bontecou, Jackson Pollock, Burgoyne Diller, Isabel Bishop, Mark Rothko, Steve Wheeler and Red Grooms. All of them at one time called the league's once genteel, and now seriously funky, chateau-style building home, as hundreds of artists do today.
Despite its age, the Art Students League isn't the oldest of the city's art schools. The National Academy of Design has that distinction, and the league was actually created as a substitute for it and an alternative to it. In 1874 the academy temporarily suspended activities - rumors flew of financial trouble - and its students felt they had nowhere to turn.
Other institutions like the Cooper Union School of Art were geared primarily to artisanal instruction, or, like the Water Color Society, were medium-specific. Still others - the Ladies' Art Association, for example - were identified with the decorative arts. So there was room for a new school, and a group of National Academy students started one.
New, in the sense of advanced, even utopian, is what the Art Students League was. In contrast to the aesthetically programmatic, hierarchically structured National Academy, it was a laissez-faire democracy. It dictated no course of study and offered neither grades nor academic degrees. It was a pay-as-you-go cooperative endeavor, conceived by students for students.
Collectivity, "a spirit of unselfishness," was written into its constitution. Members were expected not only to share materials, books and information, but to provide one another with "sympathy and practical assistance (if need be) in time of sickness and trouble."
Egalitarian intimacy was put to a concrete test when dozens of artists had to squeeze into a small rented space over a shop at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 16th Street for classes. (The building still stands.) No problem. So a daily schedule of studio instruction went into effect, with women studying in the afternoon, men at night. Tuition was uniform for all, admission requirements somewhat less so, as applicants were initially evaluated not only on their draftsmanship but also on character.
Enrollment swelled, perhaps because criteria for judging character were lenient, or because the league's radically casual format - based on Parisian models - suited an expandingly cosmopolitan urban culture. And it swelled so much that the school had to move, not once, but three times.
In 1882 it relocated to three floors of a building on West 14th Street, then in 1887 to a still larger space on East 23rd. The faculty, by this time, was stellar. The magnetic William Merritt Chase was on board, joined by Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John H. Twachtman. But the 23rd Street space turned out to be a trial. Rodents scampered around in search of crumbs from the dried bread that students used as erasers. Pungent aromas from neighborhood stables and sewer gas filled the rooms.
Enough was enough, even for artists, hardy souls that they are. In 1889 the league - or rather its governing board, a third of which must consist of enrolled students - decided to secure a permanent home. And it did so the way it did everything else, cooperatively.
It teamed up with several other footloose local institutions, including the Architectural League of New York and the Society of Painters in Pastel, to form the American Fine Arts Society. And as a corporation these groups commissioned a jointly owned building on West 57th Street, between Seventh Avenue and Broadway.
The neighborhood was already shaping up as a cultural district, with swanky apartment buildings, and Carnegie Hall soon to rise. The American Fine Arts Society Building, designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, architect of the Dakota Apartments and the Plaza Hotel, made a perfect ornamental fit with its French Renaissance facade. And along with giving the league three full floors of state-of-the-art amenities, it provided a flatteringly elegant stage for its exotic personalities.
Chase was one. "When he entered the building a rustle seemed to flow from the ground floor to the top," said O'Keeffe, who studied under him. With his silk hats, spats and fresh-flower boutonnieres, he projected an artist-as-pasha chic. And the semi-improvised method he taught, one associated with study in Munich, was hugely influential.
For him, painting seemed to be an extension of personal flair, an exercise in controlled excess, and, like all conspicuous virtuosity, a self-justifying pleasure. He would periodically mesmerize his students by executing a picture as they watched, jabbing and swiping an image into existence with a quality of tense, balletic energy that he called "go."
Then as now, the New York art establishment was Diva City, one difference being that in those days its colliding egos made the news. When Chase tried to get the league to drop drawing from antique casts as an entry requirement, other instructors, led by the conservative Kenyon Cox, who had studied in France, put a collective foot down. Suddenly, war: Munich versus Paris; experiment versus tradition. Chase, with an assortment of students in tow, left in a huff and started a school of his own.
But after the turn of the century, his Gilded Age art-for-art's-sake approach to painting went out of fashion. It was replaced by an art-for-life's-sake philosophy, a turning-point development in American art that unfolded at the league under another charismatic teacher, the zesty realist Robert Henri.
At least institutionally, modern art in America began with Henri. But when his paintings of New York street life appeared in the 1913 Armory show alongside the work of Duchamp, Matisse and other earth-shaking European avant-gardists, two very different definitions of modern faced off. They continued to do so at the league during and after Henri's tenure, and they were in place when Pollock arrived in the 1930's to study with Thomas Hart Benton.
The Depression era was a bumpy, parochial patch in American culture; no one more fully exemplified its regressive side than Benton, who taught at the league from 1926 to 1935. But during the same years and under the same roof that saw his jingoistic figurative art gain popularity, the atoms of a future, combustive American abstraction were gathering.
Pollock, lumbering around as a busboy in the school's cafeteria, was very aware of visits from Arshile Gorky, who had once taught at the league and still dropped by for coffee. And he was only one of many artists with connections to the school who would be important in the 1940's. Painters like Rothko, Diller, Wheeler, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston and James Brooks were all students, as were the sculptors Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Dorothy Dehner. Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann taught there.
Even after World War II, the school attracted important talent; Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist started out here in the 1950's. But gradually over the second half of the 20th century its reputation as a germinative force faded.
There are reasons. Art schools became a cash-producing academic industry. The league's laid-back spirit was out of sync with the driven professionalization of the field, as was its loyalty to easel painting when photography, video and installation art dominated the international market. In short, it was perceived as a bastion of modernism in a postmodern age.
Given all that, its very survival is remarkable, its vitality even more so. The school long ago took over the entire premises of the American Fine Arts Society Building, from sculpture workshops in the basement to painting studios on the top floor. Alterations were made, but despite an all-over patina of grit and grime, Hardenbergh's original design is there to see.
Atmospherically speaking, though, aspects of the past can now only be imagined: the electric buzz when Chase made an entrance, or when Henri lectured like an exhorting prophet; the caffeinated late-night fervor that must have charged the air in the 1930's and 40's when definitions of "American" and "modernism" were up for grabs, and everybody knew it, and the scramble to nail them first was fierce.
Not that the celebration of the league's 130th birthday is entirely about what was. The place still hops. There are plans for expansions to the building; the curriculum is growing ever more varied. Artists, young and old, stream in and through. Some, like O'Keeffe, are here to work, and only to work, thank you very much; others to hang out, soak up some vibes, pick up a date. True, Chase's old studio, with its high, north-facing windows, looks badly timeworn, as does some of the art now coming out of it. But there are also interesting things being done, and the price for a place to do them is hard to beat.
Crucially, the league is still a place where you are an artist if you say you are. Nobody - except maybe a fellow painter with outsize ambitions and an unrequited crush - is likely to say: "You're going nowhere. You're not cool." And if somebody does, fine. Don't leave. Show up on time for class, get down to business and feel a New York art monument, one that we can all be a part of, breathe.
©2005 The New York Times Company
-www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/arts/design/09cott.html
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