150 Stories: Lives of the Artists at the League

THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

1875‑2025

150 STORIES

LIVES OF THE ARTISTS AT THE LEAGUE

EDITED BY STEPHANIE CASSIDY

As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of our beloved institution, I find myself reflecting on the journey that has brought us to this remarkable milestone. It is with great honor and gratitude that I pen this letter to you, not merely as the President of “the League,” but as a fellow artist and dreamer who has been profoundly touched by our collective art spirit.

The League has stood as a testament to the power of creativity. Our strength has always been our community. We have been more than just a place of learning: we have been a sanctuary for artists. Here in our halls, friendships have been forged, movements have been born, and the spirit of collaboration has thrived. This anniversary is a celebration of our achievements that weave throughout our rich history and the cultural landscape of American art.

As we look to the future, we commit to fostering an environment where art challenges and provokes thought and inspires change. Our goal is not merely to continue, but to evolve, ensuring that the Art Students League remains a vibrant hub for artistic excellence and expression.

Here’s to another 150 years where every stroke of the brush and every pencil put to paper adds to the masterpiece called the Art Students League of New York.

With deepest respect and admiration,

ROBIN LECHTER FRANK President, Board of Control, 2019–

Director’s

It is an honor to help lead an organization as venerable and revolutionary as the Art Students League of New York. It is an even greater privilege to have the opportunity to shepherd the Art Students League through its 150th anniversary. No art school in the history of this country has been as influential as the League, and no institution can look back on a history as storied as ours with the confidence it has remained true to its founding principles.

Since its founding in 1875, the Art Students League has been a home for and a beacon to all artists. The League has remained true to its mission of providing the highest-quality fine art education to anyone who wishes to pursue it. Through subsidized tuition for all students and a robust program of merit and need-based scholarships, I am proud to say the League turns away no artist—that anyone with a passion for art can find their voice here.

The League has long held the belief that only artists can teach artists. History, and our long list of accomplished alumni and instructors are proof that this founding principle is one that will carry us forward into the next century. The stories contained within this book are merely a fraction of the successes that the League has produced, and they are only a hint at the future successes to come.

The next generation of artists is studying at the League today. They are honing their skills in studios that have been populated by the great artists discussed in this book. As you read about their forebearers, I invite you to contemplate what the next one hundred and fifty years of League artists will produce. You may not know their names yet, but you soon will.

MICHAEL HALL Artistic/Executive Director

WHAT IS 150 STORIES?

150 Stories is a collection of short essays documenting the lives of art students and instructors at the Art Students League of New York over the last 150 years. The volume revolves around artists learning and teaching within its walls. The entries—organized chronologically by the subject’s first contact with the League—are not confined to discussions of classes, techniques, materials, or the elements and principles of design. Instead they offer vignettes that embrace a more expansive view of education. The League, like any art school, offers a realm for new inquiry into the generative relationships, formative ideas, and creative inflection points that can illuminate an artist’s lifelong evolution.

THE SUI-GENERIS ART SCHOOL

Throughout its history, the League has remained committed to offering instruction in the basic skills required to produce unique objects made by hand in drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Students have taken these skills with them to pursue varied directions of personal expression in nearly every field of visual art and design— arenas that have been considered together only in recent decades as the world of art has become less siloed.

From a research standpoint, the ASL takes work to pin down. It deviates from the familiar structures of American

higher education, starting with its open enrollment policy. Anyone can enter the building, register for a class, and, within minutes, sit down to sketch a model in a studio. Those who describe the League often point to what it lacks— entrance exams, prescribed curricula, prerequisites, syllabi, semesters, majors, grades, graduation, and diplomas—rather than what it offers—the recognition of students’ autonomy in pursuing and shaping their education. Students register by the month, decide how many classes to take, with whom to study, and whether to transfer from one instructor to another. There is no sequence to follow, no formal beginning or end, just choices from a list of classes. For

ABOVE: SUSAN N. CARTER’S CAST DRAWING OF THE VENUS DE MILO WAS ONE OF THIRTY BY STUDENTS PUBLISHED AS A PORTFOLIO IN 1872 TO RAISE FUNDS FOR THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN’S SCHOOL. A STUDENT INITIATIVE, THE PORTFOLIO EVINCES A BUDDING ACTIVISM THAT, A FEW YEARS LATER, CULMINATED IN THE FOUNDING OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE. SEE PHOTOGRAPHS OF DRAWINGS FROM THE ANTIQUE EXECUTED BY THE STUDENTS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN UNDER THE INSTRUCTION OF L.E. WILMARTH (NEW YORK: CLASS OF 1871–72, [1873?]) OPPOSITE: THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OPENED IN A SMALL STUDIO, THIRTY FEET SQUARE, ON THE TOP FLOOR OF WEBER’S PIANO FORTE SHOWROOMS ON THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF SIXTEENTH STREET AND FIFTH AVENUE. THE LEAGUE’S SIDE ENTRANCE APPEARS AT THE FAR LEFT, C. 1882. PHOTO: CORLISS & BANCROFT, COLLECTION OF SUSAN HERZIG & PAUL HERTZMANN, SAN FRANCISCO

generations, students have dropped in for late afternoon sketch classes, signed up for a weekly lecture series on human anatomy, or enrolled in a workshop on portrait painting that can last a day or a week. This à la carte approach to education encourages movement between studios. The open admissions policy makes for a fluid student body while also helping to replenish the turnover of shortterm entrants. Nevertheless, devoted cohorts have formed around instructors in studio classes, with some students staying for years. With little need to filter, regulate, and measure students and their learning, the League’s administrative staff has remained lean, student-run, and economical for much of its history.1

Over the decades, the League’s appeal has remained steady. It has weathered cataclysmic global events that prompted sudden downturns

in registration—including the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the COVID -19 pandemic. The low tuition and low-friction signup have kept it nimble and competitive. As BFA and MFA degrees became the norm for artists during the postwar period, the League remained steadfast as a nonaccredited and economical alternative in an education market that has become increasingly exclusive, expensive, and contentious, recently contributing to the closure of several notable art schools. 2

FINDING COMMUNITY

Equally important to students’ forging individual paths has been a community ethos pulling them together as a collective. The first version of the League’s constitution, printed in late 1875, reveals that affiliating as a community of students was not just

a priority but its very purpose: “The object of this Association shall be the attainment on the part of its members of a higher development in Art Culture, the encouragement of a spirit of unselfishness and true friendship, mutual help in study, and sympathy and practical assistance (if need be) in time of sickness and trouble.”3 In other words, before the League became a school, it took the “exceedingly humble” and provisional form of a grassroots learning group for art students. 4

BREAKING THE MOLD

The catalyst for this organized student action, perhaps the best-known part of the League’s origin story, was the anticipated closure of the National Academy of Design’s schools in the fall of 1875. The Academy’s council had been struggling for several years to cover the cost of its free schools. As enrollment grew, academicians disagreed over the school’s need for greater oversight and resources. While the Academy’s school garnered support from the New York press during the early 1870s, its annual exhibitions featuring academicians’ artwork elicited more criticism than praise.5 In May 1875,

the council adjourned for the season without an official announcement about the fall, leaving nearly 250 students in limbo and uncertain about the school’s survival.6 Their instructor, Lemuel Wilmarth, encouraged their idea to form “an association for mutual help and criticism.”7 In helping to form a “league,” the name proposed by student Theodore Robinson,8 Wilmarth shifted away from the model of an art academy to “conduct the various classes on the principle of the Parisian ateliers.”9 This “atelier system” was simply a collection of studios, each overseen by a different artist, encompassing “many methods of instruction.” Those studios held seasonal public exhibitions, allowing a student to “judge for himself [/herself], draw his [/her] own conclusions, and lay out his [/her] own course” of study.”10 In this arrangement, the art student is empowered with choice.

The League’s founders adopted and continued to modify this thriving educational alternative from Paris, recognizing in its open and democratic features an antidote to their disenfranchisement at the National Academy. “[S]tudents themselves, unable to rely on the leaders of the profession,” art historian Lois Marie Fink has observed, “began to take charge of their own education.”11 The circumstances also provided the fertile ground for women students to demand the League fully commit to co-education. To that end, the ASL’s constitution enfranchised women

art students and provided that they would serve on its governing Board of Control.12 A columnist for The Art Union wrote in 1885, “The organization in its construction has always illustrated an ideal equality,” unusual for its time.13

PARSING THE LIST

Lists of names have played a surprising role in preserving and relaying the Art Students League’s history. One of the earliest examples, a list of current and past instructors, appeared in the simple accordion-folded course catalogue of 1901–02. A few years later, the League published its first list of notable alumni. Over decades, these lists became a mainstay of every printed course catalogue, growing from a few dozen names to nearly a thousand. An easy means of recordkeeping, their utility is obvious. They testify to the stature of its teaching corps of artists and alumni, a powerful shorthand for the ASL’s

historical significance as an art school. 14 Yet, those long columns of names, alphabetically arranged, are ahistorical. They offer no chronological, thematic, or analytical framework. They reveal no relationships, nor do they suggest connections to a specific kind of art. Moreover, only a handful of these names have found a place in its institutional narrative. To be fully understood beyond the marquee names, these lists depend upon a reader’s familiarity with an art historical canon and well-versed recognition of artists from the past, many of whom are now obscure. Still, a list can be suggestive and ripe for exploration. The Art Students League’s list and its expanded cultivation over the last few years form the basis for the 150 Stories project. My rethinking about the list was prompted by the Museum of Modern Art’s inclusion of a newly acquired painting by Haitian-born Hervé Télémaque,

No Title (The Ugly American) (1962/64), in their collection rehang and reopening in October 2019.15 Unlike several other familiar artists in the gallery, his name was new to me. A Black Caribbean Francophone, Télémaque arrived at the League in the fall of 1957 at age twenty and studied for three years with Julian E. Levi, who came to regard him as one of his most exceptional students. In New York, “[t]he racism was very strong,” Télémaque recalled, and, unable to rent a studio, he departed for Paris. The work No Title (The Ugly American) was part of a “reckoning with my time in America,” he explained, looking back at age eighty-one, and “has some of the flavor of New York City and all of the problems I had there as a negro boy from Haiti.” Télémaque’s art and this formative period of his life reveal complex themes of immigration and race that have yet to be examined and brought to bear on how we understand the League

during the postwar period.16

Ann Temkin, MoMA’s MarieJosée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, told an audience about the rehang, “It’s our job to present these different histories, and these different communities, and these different moments, and these different approaches…to modern art that retain the same…sense of excellence and…quality,” The “overhaul of the curatorial thinking of the museum,” she admitted, “prompted soul-searching” but ultimately could help reawaken dormant works and broaden the presentation of MoMA’s vast, largely unseen collection in fresh rotations.17 Similarly, how many unique narratives, like Télémaque’s, are buried in the League’s long list of alumni and instructors? What might they reveal about its history?

Several months later, the COVID -19 pandemic provided an unexpected and extended opportunity to consider these questions and revisit the list. Digitized reference works and new curatorial and academic scholarship helped accelerate our discovery of artists whose names could be added across media, geographies, and centuries. Google searches revealed the newly minted collection databases of museums and galleries, large and small. Tracing the lives of ASL alumni from previous generations in online archives became possible. Finally, we could follow the careers of living alumni globally and in real time.18 With names tagged

ABOVE: AMERICAN FINE ARTS SOCIETY BUILDING. POSTCARD, UNDATED (BEFORE 1921). COLLECTION OF THE AUTHOR OPPOSITE: ARCHITECT HENRY JANEWAY HARDENBERG BASED HIS DESIGN FOR THE AMERICAN FINE ARTS SOCIETY ON THE MAISON DE FRANÇOIS I, WHICH WAS CONSTRUCTED IN MORET-SUR-LOING, FRANCE IN 1528. FALLING INTO DISREPAIR, THE BUILDING WAS SOLD IN 1826, “TRANSFERRED IN FRAGMENTS” FORTY MILES TO PARIS, RECONSTRUCTED AND RESTORED AT THE CORNER OF RUE BAYARD AND COURS-LA-REINE. EUGÈNE ATGET, MAISON FRANÇOIS, COURS-LA-REINE, 1899. ALBUMEN SILVER PRINT, 7 1/8 × 8 11/16 IN. THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES, GIFT OF MARY AND DAN SOLOMON IN HONOR OF JIM CUNO, 2022.45.61.5. DIGITAL IMAGE COURTESY OF GETTY’S OPEN CONTENT PROGRAM.

with metadata, a once static paper list transformed into a dynamic relational database, and this book project was born.

HISTORY OUTSIDE THE FRAME

The Art Students League has traditionally celebrated its major anniversaries with exhibitions.19 The first shows were large, encompassing, in-house affairs. They mixed established artists with current instructors, long-term members, and up-and-coming students in the first-floor galleries of the American Fine Arts Society building, the ASL’s residence on West 57th Street since 1892. The exhibition in 1900, for example, included 548 works.20 The next, in 1925, was nearly as large, at 480 works. In a notable postwar shift, commemorative shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951 and Kennedy Galleries in 1975 offered taut curated surveys of 75 and 101 works, respectively. American Masters from Eakins to Pollock, organized by the League, presented 25 works by 25 artists in 1964, and American Masters: Art Students League, an exhibition circulated in 1967–68 by the American Federation of Arts (AFA), was pared down to 45 works.21 These smaller surveys became less comprehensive, narrowing their focus to a subset of the list, “masters,” largely white male artists, and favoring painting over other media. Like most exhibitions of the period, these shows adhered to a midcentury art historical canon that reflected neither the League’s more diverse student body nor the many artists who forged influential careers outside of its orbit in a range of different media and various

commercial fields of visual art.

The League is a school and not a museum, though a good measure of its reputation is tied to the esteemed artwork and careers of affiliated artists. Art—its creation, history, and appreciation—is the point of the League’s agenda. But a painting or sculpture is, at best, an indirect artifact of that “League education” and inevitably reflects an amalgam of other influences. As for careers, many artists’ biographies mention the League, contributing to its renown. Most of these references turn out to be perfunctory.22 Few studies delve deep enough to explain precisely how time studying or teaching there influenced an artist. Much about what happened educationally within the Art Students League, to say nothing of its chronicle as a landmark institution, remains ripe for exploration.

LIVES OF THE ARTISTS AT THE LEAGUE

150 Stories takes an artist-first approach to exploring the League’s history and documenting its impact. Grounded in first-person accounts and archival research, these succinct entries describe artists’ early efforts in learning to make art. They conjure the instructors’ unwritten teachings passed down through oral histories. They situate the art student in a matrix of formative relationships with mentors, friends, collaborators, and, in some cases, romantic partners. They reveal the side hustles that paid tuition and covered living expenses in New York City. This anthology includes artists who embraced traditional materials, techniques, and modes of expression, aligning themselves with established stylistic lineages, as well as those who, just as vigorously, challenged, dismantled, and diverged from all of those conventions in search of the new. Some note the aspirations that drew students to the League, the motives for their departure, and, for others, the reasons for their return to study again or to teach. In this volume, the Art Students League’s history is not just one story but many.23

T he artists selected for this book traverse the cultural hierarchy, including celebrated painters, sculptors, and printmakers alongside commercial artists who designed textiles, furniture, dinnerware, and jewelry boxes and those who made fashion illustrations, comic art, posters, and field guides. It includes a line of artistic anatomists and

drawing instructors stretching from the 1880s to the early 2000s and those who captured life through the lens of a camera. Museum and gallery founders, collectors and curators also appear, as do new names surfaced, researched, and exhibited by the recent transformative efforts of scholars and curators to create a fuller, more inclusive art history. The 150 Stories volume, with its subtitle a nod to Giorgio Vasari’s influential text Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), contains only a sliver of the thousands of possible artists who could be included. It marks a beginning and provides scaffolding for the ongoing discovery and embrace of more League stories in the future.

Unlike Vasari’s classic, the lives in this volume are captured by many writers, nearly 140, a fittingly collective effort to create a snapshot of a collective. Six extended essays offer perspectives on public controversies that involved the League, a few of its distinctive customs, and, of course, its Woodstock Summer School. Connected by their shared references, these entries reveal a mosaic of the aesthetics, politics, education, and community that testifies to the Art Students League’s inimitable role in American art.

150 Stories pays tribute to the Art Students League of New York as a place and as an enduring idea. It is dedicated to the next generation of dreamers.

STEPHANIE CASSIDY

1. The Art Students League’s lean operational model has been crucial to its long-term fiscal viability. In a recent essay, Derek Thompson discusses a trend identified by many others over the past decade: administrative bloat in higher education driving up tuition and bringing with it “too many administrative functions [that] can make college institutionally incoherent.” See Derek Thompson, “No One Knows What Universities Are For,” The Atlantic, May 8, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2024/05/bureaucratic-bloat-eating-american-universities-inside/678324.

2. On the National Academy of Design’s challenges that led to the closure of its school, see Robin Pogrebin, “Branded a Pariah, the National Academy Is Struggling to Survive,” New York Times, December 22, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/ arts/design/23acad.html and Emily Conklin, “New York’s 200-year-old National Academy of Design Won’t Ever Reopen,” The Architect’s Newspaper, July 12, 2019, https://www.archpaper.com/2019/07/national-academy-of-design-wont-reopen/. For an in-depth analysis of the University of the Arts closure, see David Murrell, “The Inside Story of the University of the Arts’s Stunning Collapse,” Philadelphia, August 8, 2024, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2024/08/08/uarts-philadelphia-closure/. For a general overview of recent art school closures, see Rick Seltzer, “Art School Shakeout,” Inside Higher Ed, February 6, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/07/ art-schools-show-signs-stress-what-can-liberal-arts-colleges-learn and Kathryn Palmer, “Enrollment Declines Threaten Small, Independent Art Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed April 8, 2024, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/institutions/specializedcolleges/2024/04/08/enrollment-declines-threaten-small-independent.

3. “Article II,” Art Students’ League, Constitution, By-Laws and List of Officers, Committees and Members ([New York]: Art Students League, 1875), [5]. As part of its incorporation in 1878, the League’s board revised its objective to be “First,—The establishment and maintenance of an Academic School of Art, which shall give a thorough course of instruction in drawing, painting, and sculpture. Second,—the cultivation of a spirit of fraternity among Art Students.” Art Students’ League Constitution and By-Laws ([New York]: Art Students League, 1878).

4. “An Art Students’ League,” New York Times, July 26, 1875, and “The Art Students’ League: Its Twenty-fifth Anniversary to be Celebrated This Week,” New-York Tribune, May 6, 1900.

5. For criticism of the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibitions, see “Culture and Progress at Home,” Scribner’s 2, no. 3 (July 1871): 331; “The Academy of Design,” New York Times, April 20, 1873; “Fine Arts,” The Nation 16, no. 412 (May 22, 1873): 358; “The Academy of Design,” New York Times January 11, 1874; “Art,” Atlantic Monthly 34, no. 204 (October 1874): 508. For praise of the National Academy’s school, see “The National Academy of Design: Fourth Winter Exhibition.” The Nation, January 19, 1871, 47–48; Our Art Schools,” New York Times, December 1, 1872; “The National Academy of Design,” Appleton’s Journal 8 (September 21, 1872), 325.

6. For the year 1874–75 the NAD’s antique class enrolled 246 students. See “Enrollment, 1826–2002,” National Academy of Design records, 1817–2012. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

7. “Typescript of James Edward Kelly’s memoirs with descriptions of New York City from the Civil War period to the 1930s,” Reel 1876; Frames 404–05. James Edward Kelly papers, 1880–1957. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

8. See “Typescript of James Edward Kelly’s memoirs,” Frames 404–05.

9. “Art Students’ League,” New York Evening Post, July 26, 1875; and G. W. Sheldon, American Painters: With One Hundred and Four Examples of Their Work Engraved (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), 110.

10. Lloyd Warren, “The Atelier System,” The American Magazine of Art 7, no. 3 (1916): 112–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20559293.

11. Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 280.

12. Art Students’ League,” New York Evening Post July 26, 1875. Allen Tucker, “The Art Students League: An Experiment in Democracy,” Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Art Students League of New York, January 22nd–February 2nd (New York: The Art Students League of New York, 1925), 15.

13. The equality mentioned in this article refers to that between men and women. See “Women Who Paint,” The Art Union 2, no. 4 (October 1885): 68.

14. The practice of list-keeping began with a members list in Frank Waller, First Report of the Art Students League of New York (New York: The Art Students League of New York, 1886), 53–55, and an instructors list in the Catalogue of the Works by Members, Students, and Instructors of the Art Students’ League of New York in the Retrospective Exhibition, 1875–1900 ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1900), [42] and 47. See also 1901–01 catalogue and 1904–05 catalogue, Archives of the Art Students League of New York. In earlier eras, the list was also called “the registry.” See “Notes on John Sloan’s Speech at Art Students League, 1950,” John Sloan Manuscript Collection, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum.

15. “From Soup Cans to Flying Saucers” in the exhibition Collection 1940s–1970s, Fall 2019–Fall 2020. https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5123.

17. Ann Temkin, “Re-Thinking Modern Art: A Preview of the MoMA’s New Collection Galleries with Ann Temkin,” Pollock Krasner House Lecture recorded in the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall on July 28, 2019, posted March 29, 2020, by Guild Hall, YouTube, 1 hr., 1 min., 7 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXX m ZZDfgvU. Discussions about museum rehangs predated MoMA’s 2019 reopening and have continued after it. See Rachel Wetzler, “Autocorrect: The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs,” ART news, September 19, 2016, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/autocorrectthe-politics-of-museum-collection-re-hangs-6971/; Holland Cotter, “ MoMA Reboots With ‘Modernism Plus’,” New York Times, October 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/10/10/arts/design/moma-rehang-review-art.html; Jo Lawson-Tancred, “Major Museums Are Mixing Old With New as They Reconsider Historical Collections,” March 5, 2024. Artnet, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/museums-reconsider-historicalcollections-2445040; Alex Greenberger, “In Collection Hangs, Major Museums Remix the Classics,” Art in America May 2, 2024, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/ features/museum-collection-hangs-remix-classics-1234704248/.

18. My thanks to Caroline Ongpin and Jessica Angamarca for their research assistance on the Art Students League’s lists.

19 Catalogue of the Works by Members, Students, and Instructors of the Art Students’ League of New York in the Retrospective Exhibition, 1875–1900 ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1900); Fiftieth Anniversary of the Art Students’ League of New York ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1925). The Dudensing Galleries independently presented a group of selections from the League’s Fiftieth Jubilee exhibition. See “Art: Exhibitions of the Week,” New York Times, March 15, 1925. For its seventy-fifth anniversary, the League organized an inclusive exhibition of 388 works at the National Academy of Design, followed by a curated exhibition of 75 works at the Metropolitan Museum. See On the occasion of the Seventy-fifth Year of the Art Students League of New York, The Art Students League presents a Diamond Jubilee Exhibition of Fine Art by Members and Associates in the Gallery of the National Academy of Design (New York: The Art Students League, 1950); The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the 75th anniversary exhibition of painting & sculpture by 75 artists associated with the Art Students League of New York ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1951); American Masters from Eakins to Pollock (New York: The Art Students League, 1964); American Masters: Art Students League (New York: The Art Students League, 1967); New York by Artists of the Art Students League of New York in Celebration of the Centennial Year of the Art Students League of New York: at the Museum of the City of New York, November 3rd to January 4th, 1975–76 ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1975); One hundred prints by 100 artists of the Art Students League of New York, 1875–1975 : [exhibition], April 22–May 17, 1975, at Associated American Artists, New York City ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1975); The Kennedy Galleries are host to the hundredth anniversary exhibition of paintings and sculptures by 100 artists associated with the Art Students League of New York, March 6–29, 1975. ([New York]: The Art Students League, 1975); The Masters: Art Students League Teachers and Their Students (New York: Art Students League, 2018). Two other exhibitions noted the League’s 60th and 50th anniversary in the American Fine Arts Society building. See The 60th-anniversary exhibition of members and associates of the Art Students’  League of New York : June 3rd to June 30th inclusive 1936 [foreword by Gifford Beal] (New York: Fine Arts Gallery, [1936] and On the occasion of the fiftieth year of the Art Students League of New York and of The American Fine Arts Society in their present quarters, the Art Students League presents an exhibition of distinguished artists, who, as students, or instructors, have been associated with it during sixty-eight years, in the Galleries of the American Fine Arts Society, Feb. 7–28, 1943. [New York: Art Students League, 1943].

20. Catalogue of the Works by Members, Students, and Instructors of the Art Students’ League of New York, 32.

21. For a checklist of this exhibition, see “Index of Exhibits, Golden Jubilee Exhibition, January 22–February 1, Inclusive 1925,” in Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Art Students League of New York

22. Two excellent books with substantial discussions of the Art Students League and its artists are New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and Ellen Wiley Todd, The ‘New Woman’ Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

23 . The subtitle of Marchal Landgren’s commissioned history of the Art Students League refers to one story. See Years of Art: The Story of the Art Students League of New

16. Télémaque received two scholarships. See “Hervé Télémaque student registration record,” Archives of the Art Students League of New York. The few references to Télémaque in the ASL’s records include: “The Exhibition Synastria,” Art Students League News 14, no. 4 (April–May 1961); “News of Telemaque,” Art Students League News 19, no. 1 (January 1966); “News of Life Members,” Art Students League News 25 no. 2 (February 1972); A photograph of Télémaque and Levi from 1961 by Carol Lazar appears in Art Students League Centennial Decade, 1966–1967, p. 8. For Julian E. Levi’s impressions of a young Hervé Télémaque, see “Oral history interview with Julian E. Levi, 1968 Oct.–Dec.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. For audio of Télémaque’s commentary on No Title (The Ugly American), see https://www.moma. org/audio/playlist/297/3752. On Télémaque’s reaction to his painting No Title (The Ugly American) at the M oMA reopening, see Katie White, “Artist Hervé Télémaque, 81, Is One of the Previously Overlooked Stars of M oMA’s Rehang. Here’s What He Thinks About It,” artnet, October 19, 2019. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hervetelemaque-museum-of-modern-art-1685749.

Helena de Kay Gilder

Artist, muse, patron, tastemaker, rebel, and cofounder of the Art Students League of New York. Helena de Kay Gilder (1846–1916) fit all these descriptions, though her place in American art would have been secure as a muse alone. Late in life she was painted by her friend Cecilia Beaux, and had previously been the subject, along with her husband and son, of a low-relief sculpture by another friend, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Most tantalizing for art historians was her youthful relationship with Winslow Homer, for whom she posed for multiple paintings, including a portrait; based on these works and written correspondence, it’s believed that Homer fell in love with her and unsuccessfully proposed marriage.

Helena de Kay was born in 1846. She attended classes at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design and studied privately with John La Farge, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Homer, some of the most progressive artists of the era. An able painter, de Kay’s real contributions came as what we’d now call an “influencer.” Frustrated by the

conservative nature of the National Academy, de Kay cofounded the Art Students League of New York in 1875 and the Society of American Artists two years later. The League was modeled after Parisian ateliers, in which each class was supervised by an autonomous instructor, with the further goal of treating men and women as equals. In 1878 de Kay served as the League’s Women’s Vice President, and continued as a board member in 1879. D e Kay married Richard Watson Gilder, a poet and the editor of both

“The Gilders played a uniquely progressive role in the late 19th century, participating in the meteoric rise of print media; helping to establish and promote a new American art world; supporting female artists, illustrators, and critics, and acting as the cultural tastemakers of their time.” —Page Knox

Scribner’s Monthly and The Century magazines, and the couple presided over informal salons at their Union Square home that included a who’s who of American artists and intellectuals. “The Gilders,” writes historian Page Knox, “played a uniquely progressive role in the late 19th century, participating in the meteoric rise of print media; helping to establish and promote a new American art world; supporting female artists, illustrators, and critics, and acting as the cultural tastemakers of their time.” 1

S upporting female artists wasn’t easy. Male artists viewed women as amateurs and barred them from joining art associations. Much to her frustration, this was true even of the Society of American Artists, which Gilder had cofounded. By 1900,

the society had 200 members, of whom nine were women. Yet even Gilder’s progressive vision had its limits. She campaigned against granting women political power and served on the executive board of New York State Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

Gi lder’s daughter Rosamond described her thus:

“ She accomplished an astonishing number of things with an apparent ease and calmness…. Besides five growing children her household usually included at least one visiting guest or relative. During these busy years, she belonged to several clubs, the Fortnightly, the Music Club, and others…she read widely in French, German, and English, and all the while comforted, encouraged, and kept alive that firebrand of energy and emotion, my father, who without her support, could never have survived the struggle on this ‘metropolitan battlefront’.” 2

JERRY WEISS

1 “The Original American Power Couple,” Intelligent Collector, intelligentcollector.

William Merritt Chase

“My god, I’d rather go to Europe than go to heaven!” 1 exclaimed twenty-two-yearold William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) to a group of St. Louis businessmen gathered to meet the promising young painter. They found more than enough potential in his abilities to propose a subsidy for his study abroad. In exchange, the members of the consortium would receive first choice from his paintings. Chase’s resolve in 1872 to attend Munich’s Royal Academy (fearing he would become too distracted by what he called the “frippery” of Gallic life) was a critical decision that would determine not only his own path but the pedagogy in art schools where he later taught.

Upon his return to the United States in 1877, Chase found his Munich compatriot Walter Shirlaw on the teaching staff at the recently opened Art Students League. In 1875 a group of students at the venerable National Academy of Design had grown dissatisfied with the lack of academic freedom. They formed their own school, describing it as “…a voluntary association of art-students for the purpose of educating themselves.” 2 The group sought a more responsive and less hidebound teaching approach than the Academy’s endless required drawing from classical models. Fresh from his years training in the “revolutionary” Munich style, noted for direct drawing on canvas and expressive gesture, Chase was attracted to the egalitarian spirit of the new venture and soon joined the League. C hase and Shirlaw retained their prominent positions on the faculty in

two succeeding decades, the period in which Chase’s fame as an artist also grew. In 1879, he took over the premier space in the Tenth Street Studio Building, the reception studio that had belonged to leading Hudson River School artist Albert Bierstadt; Chase began to create an aesthetic environment like the ones he had seen in European ateliers. Filled with brocades, Persian carpets, and Venetian hanging lamps, these spacious rooms would function as exhibition spaces as well as salesrooms. Copies made in his Munich student days of Old Master paintings by Hals and Velázquez were hung high on the walls.

Despite the democratic founding of the League as a group of artists where “some are teachers and some are students,” the charismatic Chase became a legendary figure whose popularity was unrivaled in his years at the League. Ella Condie Lamb gave an account from her student days in the 1880s of her teacher’s

ABOVE: WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, 1849–1916, SELF-PORTRAIT, 1913. OIL ON CANVAS, 24 1/4 × 20 1/8 IN. PARRISH ART MUSEUM, WATER MILL, NY, GIFT OF LOUIS BACON. 2014.2, PHOTO: © GARY MAMAY

“There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exciting about [William Merritt Chase]....” 5 —Georgia O’Keeffe

“freedom and enthusiasm” and remarked on “his appearance with “spats and blackribboned eyeglasses.” She noted the thrill of his class demonstrations when he would seize a student’s largest brush and attack the canvas with “great globs of paint.” Most exciting were Saturday afternoons when students were invited to the Tenth Street studio.3 “Be vital in a big, art way.”4

C hase left the League in 1895 to found his own school, but he briefly returned in 1907. Among his students was a young artist named Georgia O’Keeffe. Although her mature style would diverge radically from his, she never forgot her

early teacher: “There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exciting about him....” 5 It is these qualities that set the tone for the Art Students League in its foundational years and have imprinted the legacy upheld to this day.

ALICIA G. LONGWELL

1. Katharine Metcalf Roof, The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase (1917, repr. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975), v.

2. Marchal E. Landgren, Years of Art: The Story of the Art Students League of New York (New York: Art Students League of New York, 1940), 44.

3. Ibid., 37.

4. As quoted in Alicia G. Longwell, William Merritt Chase: A Life in Art (Water Mill, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 2014), 12.

5. As quoted in Jerry Weiss, “I’ve Been a Person Other People Always Wanted to Paint or Photograph,” LINEA February 1, 2021, asllinea.org/georgia-okeeffe-portrait/

Dora Wheeler

A pioneering woman artist who established a successful career during the Aesthetic Movement, painter and designer Lucy Dora Wheeler Keith (1856–1940) was a prominent student of acclaimed Art Students League instructor William Merritt Chase. Wheeler studied with Chase privately and joined his class at the Art Students League from 1879 to 1880. She described him as a kind, unselfish, but rigorous teacher, nothing that “I started in one morning and he would not let me stop until the light was gone.” As her career progressed, she and Chase became colleagues and Wheeler served as a member of the board of Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on Long Island.

T he daughter of renowned designer Candance Wheeler, Dora was exposed to art from an early age and throughout her life worked alongside her mother. In 1877, Candace founded the Society of Decorative Art and over the next five years established the interior decorating firm Tiffany & Wheeler, with Louis Comfort Tiffany, as well as her own agency Associated Artists. A feminist, Candace campaigned for women’s engagement in the workforce and employed many young women artists in her companies. In 1885, while studying at the Académie Julian in Paris, Dora created a pastel drawing that became the preliminary design for her needlewoven tapestry Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night (Metropolitan Museum of Art),

which was produced the following year by Associated Artists. The work was part of a series of tapestries designed by Dora featuring heroines of American art and literature. These compositions brought great acclaim to Associated Artists, although no other examples survive. Wheeler was also well known for her mural on the ceiling of the library of the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and for her portraits of leading writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

T hroughout her career she maintained a studio at Associated Artists on East 23rd Street that became a gathering place for artists and intellectuals including John Singer Sargent, Oscar Wilde, and Anders Zorn. The studio was the setting for Chase’s famous 1883 portrait Portrait of Dora Wheeler (Cleveland Museum of Art), although in the painting the background

is concealed by an elaborate gold tapestry. A subtle reference to Wheeler’s professional work, the tapestry also serves as a dramatic backdrop, lending the composition a modernist flatness. Seated in an ornately carved wooden chair, chin resting in her hand, Wheeler gazes at the viewer with thoughtfulness and determinization, conveying a sense of professionalism associated with the “New Woman.” One of Chase’s most

accomplished pupils, Wheeler’s career served as a model for the many women artists who studied at the League during the late nineteenth century.

JILLIAN RUSSO

1. DeWitt Lockman, “Interview with Dora Wheeler Keith,” January 24, 1927. Interviews of artists and architects associated with the National Academy of Design, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Amelia Peck, Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 147.

One of [William Merritt] Chase’s most accomplished pupils, Wheeler’s career served as a model for the many women artists who studied at the League during the late nineteenth century.

Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley

As great-granddaughter of the artist Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley (1860–1958), and an art historian and museum curator, I have always been fascinated by the wonderful life of my American greatgrandmother. Wilhelmina was a twentyyear-old art student when she joined the Art Students League in 1880. Over twelve years, from 1880 through 1892, she served as the ASL’s librarian, costume designer,1 corresponding secretary, 2 female vice president,3 and member of the League’s Board of Control. 4 Short notes in her diary, which she kept since she was twelve, have allowed me to reconstruct her time at the Art Students League.5

I nitially, Wilhelmina spent her first academic season of 1879–80 at the Cooper Union under Julian Alden Weir.6 After joining the ASL in 1880, she attended Antique classes under James Carroll Beckwith when the League was

still housed at its first location, on the top floor of a building on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and West 16th Street.7 In 1881, Wilhelmina attended Portrait classes under William Merritt Chase, and in 1882, life classes under Charles Yardley Turner. From 1882 through 1887, the ASL had its second location at 38 West 14th Street. 8 In 1883, most likely via Beckwith, Wilhelmina met the Irish poet, writer, and “professor of aesthetics” Oscar Wilde in New York City during his famous American lecture tour. According to her diary, Wilhelmina enjoyed “several long talks with Wilde about books, art, etc.” and also met him at a reception in Beckwith’s studio.9

We can also read in her diary that Wilhelmina posed as a model at the ASL . Artist Kenyon Cox, an early instructor at the ASL , painted her life-size portrait in 1887.10 In 1888, one year after the ASL

Over twelve years, from 1880 through 1892, [Hawley] served as the ASL’s librarian, costume designer, corresponding secretary, first female vice president, and member of the League’s Board of Control.

moved to its third location at 143–147 East 23rd Street, Wilhelmina attended Kenyon Cox’s Antique classes and Sketch classes. From 1889 to 1891, Wilhelmina maintained her Manhattan studio at West 14th Street, where, according to her diary, she made many children’s portraits in watercolor. Her member ticket of the ASL for the 1891–92 season confirms her final year of service on the League’s board.11 In the summer of 1892, Wilhelmina decided to move to Paris, “[for] two years, or perhaps forever,” as she wrote in her diary.12 Since that first summer in Paris, Wilhelmina also traveled to Rijsoord, a Dutch artist colony, where she met my great-grandfather Bastiaan de Koning, whom she married in 1901. In 1904, when Wilhelmina was 44 years old, she gave birth to her only child, my grandmother Georgina Florence de Koning, who was named after

Wilhelmina’s two aunts, Georgina and Florence Merritt, who had supported and sponsored her artistic career from the beginning. After the birth of her daughter, Wilhelmina continued to teach art classes during the summer months in Rijsoord, traveling to Paris to meet her friends and visit art exhibitions.

ALEXANDRA VAN DONGEN

1. Wilhelmina designed costumes for the ASL , which were used during the costume classes, as was recorded in a reminiscence of the student years of Ella Condie Lamb, recalling that ‘Wilhelmina Hawley made the first costume owned by the League—it was of green velvet “Ella Condie Lamb, 1881 to 1884,” in Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Art Students League of New York, exh. cat., January 22 to February 2, 1925 (New York: Art Students League of New York, 1925), 39. Email correspondence with Stephanie Cassidy, February 10, 2003.

2. From 1886 to 1887 Wilhelmina worked as the corresponding secretary of the League. Family Archive Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, Alexandra van Dongen.

3. In 1886 Wilhelmina was elected Women’s Vice President of the ASL , serving two consecutive terms (1886–88). Newspaper item on the Art Students League in the New York Times of April 21, 1886: “At the annual meeting of the Art Students League of New York, held last evening, at their pleasant rooms at No. 38 West Fourteenth-street, officers were elected for the ensuring year as follows: President Mr. C. R. Lamb, VicePresidents Miss. W. D. Hawley and Mr. H. B. Snell.”

4. Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Art Students League of New York, 69.

5. Alexandra van Dongen, “‘For Two Years, or Perhaps Forever’; Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley and the artists’ colony in Rijsoord,” 400 Years Dutch-American Stories, National Archives, The Hague, Netherlands, 2004, nationaalarchief.nl/ en/research/400-years-dutch-american-stories/for-two-years-or-perhaps-foreverwilhelmina-douglas.

6. Weir was one of the early instructors of the Art Students League in New York.

7. Ira Goldburg, “Founded by and for artists, the Art Students League thrives after 129 years,” in The Art Students League of New York, 2004–05 (New York: The Art Students of New York, 2004), 2.

8. According to the wq archives, Wilhelmina’s home address at the time was 135 West 55th Street. Close to her studio was a block of artists’ studios, such as the Holbein, a studio building at 146–152 West 55th Street.

9. Oscar Wilde, Impressions of America (London: A. S. Mallett, 1883).

10. According to Wilhelmina’s diary, Cox’s portrait of her was exhibited in 1888 as part of an academic exhibition in Ohio, where it was awarded a gold medal.

11. Correspondence, April 26, 1896, Family Archive: Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, collection Alexandra van Dongen.

12. Diary, Family Archive: Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, collection Alexandra van Dongen.

Kenyon Cox

Living in New York City in 1883 at the start of his career, having just returned to the United States from studying in Paris, Kenyon Cox (1856–1919) looked for ways to boost his income. He could not make a living exclusively by selling paintings, so he was receptive when the Art Students League invited him to teach in 1884.1 Although he began teaching fortuitously, his role as an instructor quickly became a source of pride and satisfaction, and he taught life drawing and painting, drawing from the antique, and later lectured on artistic anatomy continually until the spring of 1909.2

Cox’s rigorous method for mastering the depiction of the human form’s mass and posture was based on a centuriesold tradition promulgated by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he had inherited from Jean-Léon Gérôme while a student in his atelier. He emphasized the representation of the figure’s form using a combination of contour lines and strong modeling, paying only secondary attention to surface texture and idiosyncratic lighting effects. Some

students were in awe of his exacting standards and his French pedigree.3 Responses to Cox’s classroom demeanor were mixed. As his wife and former student, Louise Howland King Cox, recalled, “He was so conscientious in judging a canvas that sometimes he hurt when he meant to encourage and was amazed when a student burst into tears.”4 Lucia Fairchild Fuller valued his anatomy lectures, as reported in a review of her work: “she describes Kenyon Cox’s anatomy lectures at that time as having been a great help and delight to her, so they probably played their part in enabling her to produce the well-drawn nudes which she has sometimes exhibited.” 5 One of her male figure studies in the League’s collection, executed for H. Siddons Mowbray’s women’s life class circa 1891, captures details of the studio,

“My life-class work is undoubtedly the best in the whole school…”

—Kenyon Cox

OPPOSITE: KENYON COX, UNTITLED, 1883. CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 16 × 22 IN. PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, 100614 ABOVE: KENYON COX, STUDY FOR EVENING , 1883. OIL ON BOARD, 30 × 18 IN. PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, 100214

which include “RAH RAH KENYON COX!” scrawled on an overhead beam.6 Yet, antipathy toward Cox probably prompted a vandal in 1910 to slash holes in his painting The Girl with the Red Hair (c. 1890), and jam it “behind a radiator in the room of the woman’s life class.” 7 Cox had donated the painting to the League around 1908 to provide inspiration.8 Cox may have donated another seated female nude to the League for similar reasons, here identified as a Study for “Evening,” painted in 1883.9 Cox’s pride in his students and competitiveness with his fellow antique and life instructors is evident from a letter he wrote to his wife on May 15, 1906, after scholarships and honorable mentions were announced for work from the academic year. His students collected three scholarships and three mentions, which surpassed those won individually by George B. Bridgman’s and Frank Vincent DuMond’s students. He noted with restrained glee that for women’s life, “DuMond got nothing.” He further laid into DuMond: “My life-class work is undoubtedly the best in the whole school… and the DuMond classes are awful. His policy of admitting pupils who haven’t any previous training is bearing fruit, and his class gets weaker and weaker, while all the serious workers come to me.” 10

JEFFREY M. FONTANA

1. Cox also took work teaching life classes at the Gotham Club of Art Students in 1884; H. Wayne Morgan, Kenyon Cox, 1856–1919: A Life in American Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), 84, note 27.

2. In May of 1885 he sanguinely wrote his mother, Helen Finney Cox, “My teaching has been very successful this winter and my pupils say they have learned more than they ever did before in their lives, and were unanimous in asking the League to engage me for next winter;” Morgan, Kenyon Cox, 1856–1919 , 84, note 26.

3. Christian Buchheit and Lawrence Campbell, Reminiscences (New York: Art Students’ League of New York, 1956), 19.

4. Louise Howland King Cox and Richard Murray, “Louise Cox at the Art Students League: A Memoir,” Archives of American Art 27, no. 1 (1987): 20.

5. “Honors of Women Painters,” New York Sun , April 17, 1910, 8.

6. Lucia Fairchild, Untitled, vine & compressed charcoal, 24 1/2 × 18 1/2 in., number 101468; James Lancel McElhinney, Classical Life Drawing Studio: Lessons & Teachings in the Art of Figure Drawing (New York: Sterling, 2010), 160.

7. “Cut Up Girl Painting,” Burlington Free Press, January 8, 1910, 10, newspapers.com/ article/the-burlington-free-press/35634988/; “Cox Picture Slashed,” American Art News 8 no. 14 (January 15, 1910): 1.

8. A former student recalled The Girl with the Red Hair enthusiastically: “In our life classroom at the old Art Students League, there was a study by Kenyon Cox of a nude girl with red hair, a magnificent example, in oils, of vital life in the raw, an unforgettable canvas. It had a hole in it when I last saw it, and I do not know what became of it;” Jerome Myers, Artist in Manhattan (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1940), 98.

9. Kenyon Cox, presently catalogued as Untitled , 1900, oil on board, 30 × 18 in., number 100214. See Ronald G. Pisano and Beverly Rood, The Art Students League: Selections from the Permanent Collection (Hamilton, New York: Gallery Association, 1987), 18–19. Compare the painting to the black ink and graphite Sketch for “Evening” at the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, number 1919.10, hvrd.art/o/305961, and the oil on canvas Study for “Evening” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, number 1983.114.6, https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/study-evening-5854.

10. H. Wayne Morgan, ed., An Artist of the American Renaissance: The Letters of Kenyon Cox, 1883–1919 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), 145.

Kate Cory

After honing her skills at the Art Students League, the intrepid and enterprising artist Kate Cory (1861–1958) forged an unconventional career that flouted the era’s gender norms. Scholars have studied Cory’s work documenting the cultural traditions of the Hopi with her paintbrush and lens, but her endeavors in the industrial arts have received scant attention.

Born into privilege in Waukegan, Illinois, Kate arrived in New York City with her family in 1880. She began her training at the Woman’s Art School of the Cooper Union (1884–87), winning prizes in every class she enrolled in.1 She also undertook an intensive course of study at the Art Students League (1886–90), including Costume (drawing and painting from the model in costume), Drawing from the Antique with Kenyon Cox, and Modelling in Clay with Augustus Saint-Gaudens.2

A photo of the celebrated sculptor’s class captures students, including a determined Cory, posed with their clay models of seminude archers. Kate had clearly proven her artistic bona fides by this time: the Cooper Union hired her to teach Cast Drawing from 1888 to 1890.3

Cory took advantage of expanding opportunities in the industrial arts, applying her talents to wallpaper design

and pottery, among other pursuits. In 1887, a journalist admired Cory’s wallpapers at a Manhattan showroom, displayed alongside examples by eminent designers: “It is needless to say, words of praise respecting Warren, Lange & Co.’s designs, other than to repeat the names of such artists as Lockwood De Forest, Miss Kate Cory, Dora Wheeler, Mrs. C. Wheeler, Rosina Emmett, Louis C. Tiffany, Samuel Colman, and others, whose talents are shown in the artistic purity and excellence of the patterns and colorings.”4 Cory joined forces with art potter Charles Volkmar in 1895 to produce a series of wares with historical subjects transfer-printed and painted in blue and white. As Volkmar’s son later recounted, Cory’s financing enabled them to rent a vacant pottery in Corona, Queens, to produce the Delftware-inspired pottery.5

Their wares, retailed exclusively at Joseph McHugh’s The Popular Shop, garnered a gold medal at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition that year. Cory gave a tour of the pottery to a writer for the Clay Record, who praised her as “a woman pioneer in the business.” 6

I n 1905, the artist Louis Akin urged Cory to venture to the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, where he hoped to establish

an artist colony. Though the colony never materialized, Cory remained there for seven years, living a hardscrabble life among the Hopi and documenting their daily lives and sacred ceremonies.7 Though she remained based in Arizona for the rest of her life, Cory maintained ties to the East Coast art world and exhibited a work in the landmark Armory Show in 1913. 8 During World War I, she returned to New York City briefly to deploy her art in service of the war effort, designing aircraft wings and painting bombers with camouflage patterns.9 She also recharged at the ASL , attending classes and lectures by luminaries including George Bellows, John Sloan, and Robert Henri.

MARGI HOFER

1. Cooper Union annual reports, 1884–87, Cooper Union Archives. Cory studied Normal Drawing in 1884, Elementary Drawing in 1886, and Drawing from Life in 1887.

2. According to ASL student records, Cory was elected a member in 1890 and became a life member in 1901. She took additional classes in 1901–02 and 1917–18.

3. Cooper Union annual reports, 1888–90, Cooper Union Archives.

4. Richard Spenlow, “Decorating and Furnishing,” New York Times, August 28, 1887. It is noteworthy that Kate’s brother, J. Stewart Cory, was in the wallpaper business and established a major factory in Newark, New Jersey. See [Merit H. Cash Vail], Essex County N.J. Illustrated (Newark: L. J. Hardham, 1897), 192.

5. Leon Volkmar typescript, August 6, 1939. New-York Historical Society, museum object file 1939.280–287. The wares are marked “Volkmar & Cory.” For more information on the partnership, see forthcoming essay: Margi Hofer, “History in Blue and White: The Commemorative Wares of Charles Volkmar and Kate Cory,” Ceramics in America 2025 , edited by Ronald Fuchs (Milwaukee, WI : The Chipstone Foundation, 2025).

6. “American Delft Ware: The Secret of Its Blue at Last Mastered by American Potteries,” The Clay Record 8, no. 1 (January 14, 1896): 22. The partnership ended later that year.

7. For more information about Cory’s time among the Hopi and her later career, see Tricia Loscher, “Kate Thomson Cory: Artist in Hopiland,” The Journal of Arizona History 43, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–40 and Melody Graulich, “I Became the ‘Colony’”: Kate Cory’s Hopi Photographs,” in Susan Bernardin et al, Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2003), 73–108. Papers, photographs, and artwork are in the collections of Sharlot Hall Museum and the Smoki Museum in Prescott, AZ , the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, and the Waukegan Historical Society in Waukegan, Illinois, among other repositories.

8. Cory exhibited—and sold—her painting Arizona Desert . See Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, 2nd ed. (1963; repr., New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 213.

9. Loscher, “Artist in Hopiland,” 24 and Sandy L. Moss, “Kate Cory: Hopi Historian, Artist and Photographer,” Territorial Times 3, no. 1 (November 2009): 6.

Cory remained [on the Hopi Reservation] for seven years, living a hardscrabble life among the Hopi and documenting their daily lives and sacred ceremonies.

Frank Vincent DuMond

In 1892 the young artist Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951) returned to New York after four years of study in Paris at the Académie Julian in the ateliers of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Jules Joseph Lefebvre, and Gustave Boulanger. His early masterpiece Christ and the Fisherman had received a prize at the Salon of 1890, and he returned home ready to embark on a career as a professional artist. His time in Paris was steeped in rigorous classical training, but he also would have been immersed in the contemporary art scene of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. Also, he had the good fortune to join James McNeill Whistler’s circle of expatriate artists and students. These seemingly disparate experiences would eventually converge to inform DuMond’s unique sensibility as an artist and educator.

T he year 1892 also marked the opening of the American Fine Arts Society building on West 57th Street, with the still nascent Art Students League as one of its inaugural tenants. The League had begun modestly seventeen years earlier, becoming a more progressive alternative to the established, conservative National Academy of Design. DuMond had studied at the League with William Sartain before departing for Paris. Upon his return, DuMond began teaching classes at the League in the studios of the grand beauxarts structure, and there would begin a most serendipitous confluence of the right person in the right place at the right time. In the new century, the United States would go on to fulfill its ambition to be a global leader, and New York City would become the center of commerce and arts in what came to be known as the American

“Every day I learn more, with the help of my students. They have taught me that passing on one’s own accumulated knowledge and experience to others is the most noble profession in the world.”

—Frank Vincent DuMond

Century. The Art Students League, with its pluralistic ideals and fortuitous geographical placement at the center of burgeoning Manhattan, would become one of the premier art schools in the world. And DuMond, along with his old Parisian flatmate George B. Bridgman, would play a vital role in mentoring the artists who would define a distinctly American artistic voice in the figurative tradition.

D uMond maintained a busy schedule as a portraitist, illustrator, and noted muralist while teaching at the League. His first classes were in cast drawing

where Charles Hawthorne was an early student. He also taught life drawing and was the first instructor at the League to allow his students to draw from life without first spending time in the cast room, much to the chagrin of the classicist Kenyon Cox. His influence as an instructor would be best remembered as an incredible sixty-year tenure teaching painting from life in what he would describe as “the silvery light” of Studio 7. DuMond taught thousands of students the principles of painting from life. Many luminaries of American art studied here

with DuMond: Eugene Speicher, Norman Rockwell, James Montgomery Flagg, Ogden Pleissner, John Marin, and the portraitist Everett Raymond Kinstler, just to name a few. But equally significant are the many distinguished artists who continued his legacy as instructors, especially in the realm of landscape painting. John F. Carlson, the author of a seminal book on landscape painting, was taught by DuMond. So was Frank J. Reilly, an influential teacher who developed a system of instruction for illustrators that became known as the Reilly Method. Arthur Maynard, a distinguished painter and founder of the Ridgewood Art Institute, studied with DuMond. My teacher, Frank Mason, a legendary painter and instructor, continued teaching the principles he learned from DuMond at the League.

By all accounts, DuMond was an extraordinary instructor. I have met many former students over the years beyond my own instructor, Frank Mason, and they all spoke reverently about his influence. His teaching style was based as much on philosophy as on technique, perhaps more so. He believed in principles over methods and the importance of learning to see. He didn’t write his teachings down, and he discouraged his students from taking notes. He believed in learning by osmosis over time. It is one of the reasons that he is not as well-known as other luminaries of art education. Instead, he spoke about

painting and art in spiritual and poetic terms so that the students could immerse themselves in the metaphysical nature of light. With that understanding, painting could follow.

A lasting legacy of DuMond’s instruction is his development of the famed Prismatic Palette. It represents a physical manifestation, in strings of color values, of the rainbow he described as always glowing over the landscape. As an avid plein-air painter, he was a founder of the artists’ summer community in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where American Impressionism flourished. The palette is the culmination of his explorations in painting outdoors in all kinds of light and atmospheric conditions. He especially pushed boundaries when it came to expressing the variety and intensity of sunlit greens. He taught his students this palette in his landscape classes in Old Lyme and Vermont. Often misunderstood as a method or formula, the palette is more of a conceptual tool to help students see the light spectrum of nature in terms

of color-value progressions. This approach has continued to be taught after DuMond’s passing in 1951. Its influence on generations of artists cannot be overstated. The concepts of the landscape were brought into the studio as well, where students were compelled to see the model bathed in the light and atmosphere of the space. Again, as per his temperament, none of this was written down or codified in a book, and consequently, DuMond has not received his due credit for his role in preserving the practice of landscape painting throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Too wise to believe his way was the only way, DuMond imparted an open-endedness in the teaching of the palette, which continues to this day and has evolved into a variety of approaches. That is how DuMond would have wanted it. His philosophy of painting and teaching and possibly of life, could be summed up in the quote: “Every day I learn more, with the help of my students. They have taught me that passing on one’s own accumulated knowledge and experience to others is the most noble profession in the world.”

JOHN A. VARRIANO

Bryson Burroughs & Edith Woodman

For over twenty-five years, Bryson Burroughs (1869–1934) spent his mornings painting in his studio on East 85th Street in Manhattan, and in the afternoons walked to his part-time job nearby. From 1909 to 1934, Burroughs was Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

B urroughs arrived in New York City by way of Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and Cincinnati. He first registered at the Art Students League of New York in 1889, and studied with Kenyon Cox and Harry Siddons Mowbray until 1891. His student work was good enough to win a prize that paid for a five-year stay in Europe, two years of which were devoted to studying in Paris. In Paris, Burroughs met Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose pale palette and classical themes exerted a lasting influence. The observational realism of his early studies evolved to a more eclectic production of biblical and mythological narratives. Art historian Lloyd Goodrich—himself a former League student—wrote that “Burroughs’s classicism was free from the kitsch of French salon art and the solemnity of American mural painting with its

idealized Greco-American females symbolizing civic virtues.”

After he returned to New York, Burroughs served briefly as both League president and an instructor, teaching from 1899 to 1902. During the first years of the twentieth century, his paintings won prizes at several international expositions, but earning money through sales proved difficult. Financial assistance came in 1906, when he was hired as Assistant Curator of Paintings fat the Met and assumed the role of Curator

“As a painter [Burroughs] developed a personal style based on traditional figure drawing and a predilection for historical, biblical, and mythological subjects. As a curator his criteria for the acquisition of paintings reflected a breadth of vision unequaled at the time.” —Douglas Dreishpoon

in 1909. Other League instructors had served as trustees and had helped shape the museum’s policies, but none for so long or at such a decisive level. According to art scholar Douglas Dreishpoon:

“As a painter he developed a personal style based on traditional figure drawing and a predilection for historical, biblical, and mythological subjects. As a curator his criteria for the acquisition of paintings reflected a breadth of vision unequaled at the time.” 1

During his tenure at the museum, Burroughs oversaw the acquisition of old master works such as Crucifixion and Last Judgment by Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Brueghel’s The Harvesters, Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates, and Michelangelo’s drawing of the Libyan Sibyl. His championing of modern artists initially met with resistance from the museum’s trustees— Burroughs was nearly fired for approving the purchase of Renoir’s Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, and he later engineered the purchase of the first painting by Cézanne to enter a public collection in the United States. Eager to add late watercolors by Winslow Homer to the Met’s collection, he corresponded directly with the artist and organized a memorial exhibition of Thomas Eakins’s paintings while acquiring some for the museum. Burroughs also enlarged the Metropolitan’s collection of contemporary realism, adding works by League instructors Reginald Marsh, Arnold Blanch, Allen Tucker, and Hayley Lever (Marsh married Burroughs’s daughter Betty in 1923, and lived in their family home in Flushing).

Burroughs married a fellow League student, the sculptor Edith Woodman (1871–1916), while

traveling together through Europe in 1893. Woodman began her studies at the League at the age of fifteen, and was registered there from 1886 to 1892, studying with Kenyon Cox and Augustus Saint-Gaudens—her daughter recalled other teachers, including Frederick MacMonnies and Alexander Stirling Calder.2 Later, in Paris, Woodman studied with Jean-Antoine Injalbert and Luc-Olivier Merson. The medieval cathedrals at Chartres and Amiens inspired her to adopt a Neo-Baroque style.

W hile still a student in New York, Woodman was doing decorative work for Tiffany and taking commissions. After seeing the work of Aristide Maillol on a second trip to Paris in 1909, she refined the forms in her figure work while retaining a more naturalistic approach in her portraits. She was, according to her daughter, a more successful artist than her husband. Woodman continued exhibiting and winning prizes throughout her life, including recognition for the best artwork by an American woman at the National Academy of Design in 1907, and a silver medal at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, where she was also commissioned to create two outdoor works.

T he Burroughs’ daughter, Betty Burroughs Woodhouse, was a sculptor, teacher, and editor. Their son, Alan Burroughs, was an art historian, lecturer, museum curator, and author.

JERRY WEISS

2. Oral history interview with Betty Burroughs Woodhouse, May 24, 1977. aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-burroughs-woodhouse-13140.

1. Douglas Dreishpoon, The Paintings of Bryson Burroughs (1869–1934) (New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., 1984).

Sophia Louise Crownfield

Sophia Louise Crownfield (1862–1929) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. There she worked as a china painter before moving to New York in 1889. 1 While Crownfield’s educational experiences in Baltimore are unknown, in January 1889, she enrolled at the Art Students League. She skipped the preparatory course work, attending antique classes with instructor George de Forest Brush. Brush, who had trained in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, had his students draw from plaster casts of classical sculpture to further refine their drawing skills.

Crownfield continued her studies at the Art Students League while actively pursuing a freelance career in design. An important milestone was achieved in 1893 when her floral design for a wallpaper was displayed at the Women’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition. 2 Crownfield, along with her sister Eleanor and friend Emma W. Doughty, later listed themselves as “Designers & Draughtsmen” in Trow’s Business Directory of New York City of 1898.3 By the early 1900s, American silk producers had made significant

advancements in their manufacturing capabilities but still looked to France for design inspiration. Paying handsome sums for French textile samples, manufacturers had their designers copy patterns directly or use them as inspiration for their silk fabrics.

Crownfield worked within this system, creating floral patterns and other designs that signaled her awareness of trends like Japonisme and the Arts and Crafts movement. While Crownfield seemed to favor more lifelike floral patterns, her 1906 Japanese-inspired

An important milestone was achieved in 1893 when her floral design for a wallpaper was displayed at the Women’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

design of folding fans and pine branches shows her skill in producing these other styles. 4

I n the 1890s, Sophia Crownfield befriended the artist and illustrator Katharine Pyle, who began her studies at the Art Students League in 1892. Pyle likely recommended Crownfield’s services to the publisher of Florence Bone’s 1910 book The Other Side of the Rainbow, Being the Adventures of OldFashioned Jane. Crownfield produced the frontispiece and illustrations that appear throughout Bone’s book. Other published designs include an uncredited Cheney Brother’s chrysanthemum silk used for a coverlet appearing in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1911.5

Until the early 1920s, Crownfield exhibited her design work and

participated in several textile design contests where she received cash awards for her submissions. Fifty-seven of Crownfield’s drawings and four silk textiles for Cheney Brothers were gifted to the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 1937. A larger selection of her drawings and textiles are located at the Decker Library at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Textile samples are also at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

KIMBERLY RANDALL

1. Baltimore City Directory (Baltimore, MD : R. L. Polk & Company, 1888), 274.

2. “Women’s Work in the Applied Arts,” The Art Amateur: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Art in the Household (April 1893): 146.

3. Trow’s (formerly Wilson’s) Business Directory of the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, City of New York (New York: Trow Directory, Printing & Bookbinding Company, 1898), 348.

4. See Google Patents for twenty-one textile designs by Sophia L. Crownfield. patents.google.com

5. Marion Wise, “The Light Bed Coverlet,” The Ladies Home Journal (February 15,

OPPOSITE: SOPHIA LOUISE CROWNFIELD, UNTITLED, UNDATED, SILK, 21 1/4 × 15 1/4 IN. GIFT OF STARLING W. CHILDS AND WARD CHENEY, 1937-59-35, COOPER HEWITT, SMITHSONIAN DESIGN MUSEUM ABOVE: SOPHIA LOUISE CROWNFIELD, STUDY OF SQUASH OR PUMPKIN PLANTS , UNDATED. WATERCOLOR AND GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 10 11/16 × 22 1/16 IN. GIFT OF STARLING W. CHILDS AND WARD CHENEY, 1937-59-33, COOPER HEWITT, SMITHSONIAN DESIGN MUSEUM

Lucia Fairchild Fuller

Lucia Fairchild Fuller (1870–1924) led the American revival of miniature painting both as a practitioner and as a cofounder in 1899 of the American Society of Miniature Painters. She exhibited miniatures regularly to positive reviews, and won bronze, silver, and gold medals at international expositions. She was esteemed by her peers, as reflected in her induction into the American Society of Painters in 1899 and her recognition as an Associate by the National Academy of Design in 1906. Her accomplishments were due to a remarkably sustained dedication to improving her skills over a roughly ten-year period, mostly at the Art Students League, as well as her “characteristic independence of spirit and adventurousness.” 1

Lucia Fairchild—she took the surname of painter Henry Brown Fuller upon their marriage in 1893—began her artistic training in Boston by 1888, under Dennis Miller Bunker at the Cowles Art School. 2 In 1889 she came to the Art Students League and over the next three to four years took classes with William Merritt Chase and Harry Siddons Mowbray.3 Oddly, her registration card for the 1889–90 year lists no classes, but she must have begun with Chase’s painting class. 4 During this and the subsequent year Mowbray taught a Life Drawing and Painting class for men, but not yet for women. The requirement to enter the painting class was a drawing of a head,

which she may have brought with her from Boston. If she had not yet made an acceptable full-length nude drawing for admission to a life class, it is likely she also took antique classes during these early years at the League.5

T hree of Lucia’s four nude figure drawings in the League’s collection bear printed labels on their mounts, indicating they were executed in Mowbray’s life class for women, which he began teaching during the 1891–92 season and continued the following year. 6 The drawings display her command of the figures’ proportions, anatomy, weight distribution, and individualized faces, and were executed with a sensitive and controlled use of line and modeling. Her years of study paid off, and in 1893 she was given the high-profile commission to paint the Women of Plymouth mural for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.7

T hough her life became increasingly busy, she maintained her ties to the League. She intended to embark on a career as a muralist, but income in this specialization was too unreliable, so she educated herself in the technique of watercolor on ivory and began painting portrait miniatures. 8 At the same time she became pregnant, and in March of 1895 she gave birth to her first child, Clara.9 Her registration card for the 1895–96 season documents

It is a testament to her drive for self-improvement that even as she found professional success and earned an income to support her family, Fuller continued to turn to the League’s instructors for guidance in further honing her abilities.

her enrollment in George de Forest Brush’s Women’s Evening Life class from October to December, and she may have continued taking other classes at the League for which the records no longer exist.10 She enjoyed increasing success painting miniatures in the late 1890s, but she was still not satisfied with her knowledge of the human body, and attended Kenyon Cox’s artistic anatomy lectures from January to February of 1899.11 It is a testament to her drive for self-improvement that even as she found professional success and earned an income to support her family, Fuller continued to turn to the League’s instructors for guidance in further honing her abilities.

1. For biographical information I have relied on William M. Jewell, “Fuller, Lucia Fairchild,” in Notable American Women, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971), 677–8. Fuller won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, a silver medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904. She was one of the earliest woman members of the American Society of Painters. On Fuller’s place within the miniature painting revival, see Jeffrey M. Fontana, “Big Things Come in Small Packages: The Women Artists Who Led a Twentieth-Century Revival in Miniature Painting, Part 1,” LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of NY, June 8, 2023, asllinea.org/miniaturepainting-revival/, and Jeffrey M. Fontana, “Making Their Mark with Watercolor on Ivory: The Women Artists Who Led a Twentieth-Century Revival in Miniature Painting, Part 2,” LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of NY, August 21, 2023, asllinea.org/ making-their-mark-with-watercolor-on-ivory/.

2. Margo Miller, “Henry B. Fuller and Lucia Fairchild,” TLS . Times Literary Supplement no. 6127 (2020): 6.

3. Jewell, 677.

4. Archives of the Art Students League, New York.

5. Art Students’ League of New York Class Bulletin, Season of 1889–90, and Art Students’ League of New York Class Bulletin, Season of 1890–91, Archives of the Art Students League, New York. The nude drawing submitted for admission to a life class could be from either a live model or a cast.

6. Art Students League Permanent Collection, numbers 101406, 101460, and 101468. See reproductions in Jerry Weiss, “Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s Life of Privilege and Hardship,” LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of NY January 4, 2021, asllinea.org/ lucia-fairchild-fuller/. Though the drawings’ labels read “Morning Life,” Mowbray was scheduled to teach Afternoon Life for women during these two seasons; Art Students’ League of New York Class Bulletin, Season of 1891–92, and Art Students’ League of New York List of Classes, Season of 1892–93, Archives of the Art Students League, New York.

7. Charlene G. Garfinkle, “Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s ‘Lost’ Woman’s Building Mural,” American Art 7, no. 1 (1993): 2–7.

8. “Madison Artist Doubly Famous,” Wisconsin State Journal, May 25, 1924, 6, newspapers.com/article/wisconsin-state-journal-lucia-fairchild/29458632/.

9. “United States Census, 1900,” FamilySearch, familysearch.org/ ark:/61903/1:1:M3YV-9N1.

10. Archives of the Art Students League, New York.

JEFFREY M. FONTANA

11. Archives of the Art Students League, New York.

LUCIA FAIRCHILD FULLER, CLARA B. FULLER , 1898. WATERCOLOR ON IVORY, 4 1/2 × 2 13/16 IN. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, ROGERS FUND, 1914 (14.57.3) © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, IMAGE SOURCE: ART RESOURCE, NY

RIGHT: LUCIA FAIRCHILD FULLER, UNTITLED, C. 1900. CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 25 × 18 1/2 IN. PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, 101406

LEFT:

Edward Penfield

Edward Penfield (1866–1925) is widely considered to be the most important early American poster artist, almost single-handedly creating a style that would influence the entire literary poster genre in the United States. Had he not chosen to study at the Art Students League, however, this pivotal moment in poster design history may never have happened.

B orn in Brooklyn in 1866, Penfield decided to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and pursue a career in art. At 23, he enrolled in the Art Students League, taking a full roster of classes ranging from life sketching with George de Forest Brush to a self-guided costume drawing course. After two years of full-time study, however, he left school for a brief stint in Europe, during which time it is likely that he encountered largescale, illustrational posters like those by Jules Chéret and Henri de ToulouseLautrec. Strikingly different from anything being produced in the United States, these European advertisements presented jubilant characters selling everything from cigarettes to cabarets, turning city streets into art galleries.

W hile the precise date remains unclear, Penfield was hired by Harper & Brothers as a part-time staff illustrator some time in 1891, presumably before he left for Europe. His work had appeared in a student exhibition at the Art Students League, and an associate art editor at the publishing

house thought he would be a solid addition to the department. At this time, Penfield’s signature style had not yet been developed—he was merely an expressive draftsman who fit well within the magazine’s preestablished look, which relied on idealized realism with a penchant for the romantic. His first published illustration (a lovely image of the new ASL building) accompanied an October 1891 article in Harper’s Weekly by John Charles Van Dyke on the Art Students League.

Upon his return to New York, Penfield became the art director of Harper & Brothers, heading up not only its book

Clearly inspired by the lithographic, illustrational posters of Europe, but with a restraint and subtle humor very indicative of the American educated class, Penfield’s 1893 design acted as a watershed moment for poster illustration in the United States.

illustration division but also its four major magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Young People, Harper’s Weekly, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Adding to this demanding position, he also reenrolled at the ASL part-time starting in 1892. His choice of classes focused entirely on life drawing, developing a simplified naturalism that would stay with him throughout his career. His work also began to reflect some of the modern trends he encountered abroad, soberly blending them with the classical elements of his earlier training. That same year, Harper’s commissioned the famed French poster designer Eugène Grasset to produce a cover for its Christmas issue. It seems a bit too coincidental that within a few months of this unorthodox illustration being produced by the magazine that Penfield would create his first poster for Harper’s. Clearly inspired by the lithographic, illustrational posters of Europe, but with a restraint and subtle humor very indicative of the American educated class, Penfield’s 1893 design acted as a watershed moment for poster illustration in the United States. Penfield would go on to create monthly posters for Harper’s, all

of which stood apart from other advertisements of the period because they did not directly sell the magazine, but rather celebrated its ideal reader— those who understood the humor in the compositions or even saw themselves in them were the publication’s selfselected audience, and they responded enthusiastically. When he left Harper’s in 1901, he continued to create memorable images for its competitors, including Collier’s and Scribner’s. Throughout this success, Penfield’s ties to the Art Students League remained constant up through his death in 1925. He served on the school’s Board of Control from 1892 to 1893, and taught classes sporadically over the next decade, including a collaborative course with Frederic Goudy in 1920. That steady relationship with his alma mater allowed him to influence an entire new generation of illustrators, indelibly impacting the history of American graphic design.

ANGELINA LIPPERT

and one man, some holding sculpting tools, pose amidst modeling stands.

On five turntables appear the fruits of student labor—loin-clothed male figures in clay, steadied with armatures. The background features essential elements for modeling classes: a live

model, his head and torso visible, and plaster casts, including one after a block from the Parthenon’s west frieze. This photograph, rich with detail, distills not only the status of modeling classes at the League during the 1880s, but also SaintGaudens’s commitment to teaching there. By this time, he was an established figure in New York’s progressive art circles, bringing the imprimatur of training at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to his new role.

Modeling classes began at the League in 1878–79 with Jonathan Scott Hartley, and grew in stature and number of students during the 1880s, as did the school’s overall prestige and size. Brewster and his successor, Frank Edwin Elwell, like Saint-Gaudens, also had École pedigree. For a second year, 1888–89, Saint-Gaudens served as a critic, then with Elwell, in morning life classes for men and afternoon ones for women. By May 1889, the modeling students had petitioned to secure SaintGaudens as instructor for the following season; whether out of discontent with Elwell, preference for Saint-Gaudens, or otherwise is not recorded. 1 When SaintGaudens began teaching in fall 1889, the modeling program featured daily morning life classes, not distinguished by gender, as well as ones from the antique. He moved quickly to improve the standard of antique study, requesting on three separate occasions that the Board of Control authorize the purchase of additional plaster casts. 2

S aint-Gaudens served as the League’s modeling instructor, generally teaching twice a week, for seven seasons, from 1889–90 to 1896–97, with the notable exception of 1890–91. By then, his reputation as the leading sculptor of a new generation had taken on national proportions, and he paid it forward by mentoring students and studio assistants. In his Reminiscences, he wrote of his tenure at the League: “It was of the greatest interest to me to watch the growth and development of talent among my pupils, the majority of whom were women.” 3 Among these women were Mary Lawrence (later Tonetti), Annetta Johnson (St. Gaudens), Caroline Peddle (Ball), and Edith Woodman (Burroughs), who also worked for Saint-Gaudens as studio assistants and/or later had independent careers. Male students who went on to achieve significant acclaim included Bela Pratt and Adolph Alexander Weinman. Indeed, Saint-Gaudens’s interest in the League as a teacher, member, exhibitor, and supporter was sustained, for nearly thirty years, until his death in 1907.

L ittle is recorded about SaintGaudens’s life classes until April 1890, when in his remarks at the annual meeting, President Edwin D. French called out not only increased attendance, but also that “the quality of work done in the life classes and sculpture class compares favorably with the work of students in the best Parisian schools.”4

Comparisons to French training, viewed

as embodying the most sophisticated current practices, would have been considered high praise. However, just two weeks later controversy erupted about the impropriety of students working from a fully unclothed model in Saint-Gaudens’s mixed-gender, majority female class. The actions that precipitated this upheaval and the resulting events that unfolded during the spring were tersely recorded in Board of Control minutes while colorfully covered by the national press over several ensuing months. It is not possible to fully reconstruct the exact circumstances of this defining flashpoint in League history, including the exact identity and number of students, and therefore informed conjecture must suffice.

G enerally, women modeled unclothed, while men wore loincloths or bathing tights in the presence of female students. Presumably, Saint-Gaudens had followed this protocol until early spring 1890, when a precipitating event, likely the appearance of a fully nude male model,5 led a woman in the class, name not known today, to object and resign. April and May Board of Control minutes offer the following chronology: the matter was brought to the Board of Control’s attention (April 8). SaintGaudens was questioned and stated his preference for the current mixed-gender arrangement but would not oppose the Board if it was changed (April 14). The Board then established that men

“It was of the greatest interest to me to watch the growth and development of talent among my pupils, the majority of whom were women.” —Augustus Saint-Gaudens

and women would not work from the same model at the same time (April 24).

Modeling class members requested that the current mixed-gender practice under Saint-Gaudens’s tutelage continue through the spring; the motion was defeated (May 9). Saint-Gaudens resigned his position as instructor of modeling class, to be dated retroactively to May 10, while the board unanimously agreed to hire him for the 1890–91 season (May 20); Saint-Gaudens declined that invitation (May 28), and the season ended on May 31. By some accounts, Saint-Gaudens completed it, teaching as “a member of the league and a friend, not as an instructor.” 6

I n fact, Saint-Gaudens was not the first instructor to engage in this practice at the League; as the Art Amateur reported,“he had not introduced it, but he had not discountenanced it.” 7 This matter had come to the fore during his predecessor Elwell’s tenure, leading to student Edith Mitchill’s motion in the January 31, 1889, Board of Control meeting that “Eve. Modelling class be devoted to men, the afternoon class to women. Carried.” 8 In a contemporaneous letter to the Board, Elwell pointedly observed in turn that Kenyon Cox had already engaged in the same practice in an evening lecture and had escaped censure.9 Saint-Gaudens was also

operating on precedent elsewhere— mixed-gender classes with live models had been held, albeit without consistency, in Paris and other European capitals. Closer to home, in Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins resigned from teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in February 1886, following an incident in which he removed the loincloth from a male model in an anatomy class with women present. 10 The well-publicized aftermath would have been front of mind in the League community, not the least because Eakins was a lecturer in Perspective at the time of the incident (February–April 1886); he would later lecture in Artistic Anatomy (November 1886–January 1887; January–March 1888).

S aint-Gaudens was the first instructor at the League to experience the scandal-laced repercussions of mixed-gender classes as a cause célèbre, as Eakins had in Philadelphia. As the League’s clippings notebook attests, the controversy was sensationally circulated in the popular press, mostly in New York, and further afield from Baltimore to Cincinnati, Chicago to New Orleans. Carefully clipped, pasted, and annotated, the articles describe the predicament with conflicting details and sympathies. The majority foreground the issue of

Ultimately what to Saint-Gaudens may have been a matter of principled freedom of expression, the prevailing majority, both in the press and among the corps of instructors and students, saw as idealistic, impractical, and immoral.

individual propriety versus indecency, specifically the indecorum of women viewing nude figures in the company of men. Many pitted stalwart League instructors publicly for or against nude models in coed classes—with James Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase speaking out in opposition to joint study. 11 By contrast, Kenyon Cox supported Saint-Gaudens’s teaching methods: “The tendency of the times is toward similar treatment of men and women. Artists might look upon nude figures in the same way that you might look upon an undraped horse.” 12

S aint-Gaudens’s own reaction, if ever documented, does not survive; that he declined to comment was a leitmotif of the articles. However, the League episode was the first of several in which he was ensnared in the early 1890s surrounding the morality of public presentation of the nude.13 His response to the subsequent ones—a rejected design featuring a male nude youth for the reverse for the World’s Columbian Exposition Commemorative Presentation Medal (1892–94) and the display of his gilded goddess Diana (1892–93) atop the tower of Madison Square Garden—suggests that in the League incident, Saint-Gaudens was emboldened to act with conviction, following established, if irregular, precedent, and

secure in his own artistic stature and in his dedication to egalitarian teaching circumstances. Some journalists posited that for the busy sculptor the expediency of critiquing women and men at the same time had been a factor, as was the claim that the work of stronger—male—artists was a beneficial stimulus for the women in life classes and encouraged competition between the students.14 Saint-Gaudens himself alluded to this conjecture in his Reminiscences: “Men always seem to compose better than women, and are more creative. Women can more easily copy what is before them.” 15

U ltimately what to Saint-Gaudens may have been a matter of principled freedom of expression, the prevailing majority, both in the press and among the corps of instructors and students, saw as idealistic, impractical, and immoral. Against the specter of Anthony Comstock’s ongoing crusade against vice in visual culture (see pp. 82–85), the League, founded with progressive, modernist intent, took a cautious stance. In 1890–91, modeling classes were again divided by gender and taught by Daniel Chester French, another leading sculptor of the younger generation. His tenure lasted just one year, as he traveled to Europe in fall 1891. Saint-Gaudens

returned to teaching for an additional six seasons—under far less contentious circumstances, with separate classes for men and women. By summer 1893, art critic Charles de Kay offered an anodyne progress report: “the budding sculptors at the League number thirty; Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens visits the sculpture classes at least once a week, and generally oftener…. The sculpture classes…are indeed in a flourishing condition at the present time.” 16

A lthough League catalogues record Saint-Gaudens as an instructor for 1897–98, he departed for Paris in fall 1897, remaining there until 1900. Mary Lawrence, his former student and studio assistant, and the League’s first woman instructor, took over for the year. 17 While Saint-Gaudens did not teach again after he returned from Paris (and turned down a request to do so in fall 1902), 18 his connection lasted. In 1906, he funded two Saint-Gaudens Prizes: cash awards for the best work ($75) and best composition ($25) in the Day and Evening Sculpture Classes, 19 testament to his ongoing commitment to cultivate younger sculptors through advocacy, encouragement, and example. At the time of Saint-Gaudens’s death in 1907, life sculpture classes were still separated by gender, a practice that would only disband in coming years through the preference of individual instructors.

THAYER TOLLES

1. Board of Control minutes, Art Students League [hereafter BOC minutes], May 3, 1889, p. 249; May 8, 1889, p. 253; May 21, 1889, p. 258.

2. BOC minutes, May 21, 1889, p. 259; October 21, 1889, p. 261; December 9, 1889, p. 268.

3. Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York: The Century Co., 1913), vol. 2, p. 4.

4. “The Art Students’ League of New York,” New York Sun , April 17, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, 1889–92, Art Students League [hereafter clippings scrapbook, ASL].

5. See, for instance, “Prudes and Nudes. The Male Model Divides a Model Art Class,” New York Journal , May 11, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, ASL . A few articles, however, state that the unclothed model was a women.

6. Mr. St. Gaudens Resigns. But He Will Instruct the Students as a Member of the League,” New York Press , May 13, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, ASL

7. “School and Studio. Mixed Classes in the Life School,” Art Amateur 23, no. 6 (November 1890): 130.

8. BOC minutes, January 31, 1889, p. 237.

9. F[rank] Edwin Elwell to Board of Control, ASL , undated (January 1889), Art Students League Records, 1875–1955, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, microfilm reel NY59–26. Elwell reversed course during the spring 1890 debacle, noting the “stumbling block...of working from the nude in the presence of the other sex” in “Mr. St. Gaudens Didn’t Start It. But It Was the Suggestion to Use a Female Model that Made All the Trouble,” New York Sun , May 12, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, ASL

10. See Kathleen A. Foster, “Eakins and the Academy,” in Darrel Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), esp. 101–5.

11. The divide between instructors is played out in “A Question of Nude Models. How Do They Affect the Study of Art When Used by Mixed Classes?” New York Sun , May 9, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, ASL

12. “At Odds Over Models. Strong Opposition to the Use of Nude Ones in Mixed Classes,” New York Tribune , May 9, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, ASL

13. On the rejected design for the reverse of the World’s Columbian Exposition Commemorative Presentation Medal (1892–94), see Thayer Tolles, “‘A Bit of Artistic Idealism’: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s World’s Columbian Exposition Commemorative Presentation Medal ,” in Alan M. Stahl, ed. The Medal in America, Volume 2 , Coinage of the Americans Conference Proceedings, 1997 (New York: American Numismatic Society), 136–56. For Diana , see Suzanne Hinman, The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019). For the broad issue of censorship, including discussion of Saint-Gaudens and the Art Students League, see Amy Werbel, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), esp. Chapter 5.

14. See, for instance, “A Question of Ethics in Art,” New York Star, May 10, 1890, in clippings scrapbook, ASL

15. The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens , vol. 2, p. 4.

16. Charles de Kay, “The Art Students’ League, of New York,” The Quarterly Illustrator 1, no. 3 (July, August, and September 1893):164–65.

17. Lawrence began as the evening instructor for the men’s modeling class in 1895–96, and continued teaching through 1899–1900. She stopped teaching after she married François M. L. Tonetti in 1900.

18. BOC minutes, September 26, and October 3, 1902. Saint-Gaudens was asked to substitute for George Grey Barnard, who had gone abroad.

19. “League Prizes,” American Student of Art 1, no. 6 (June 1906): 171. On the controversy surrounding the content and distribution of this issue of the League’s publication, see Werbel, Lust on Trial , pp. 268–79.

In 1891, a group of students of the Art Students League of New York started an organization dedicated to parodying the work of those whom they were expected to revere and emulate, the artists of the established American art world.1 Their mission was to produce fakes—burlesque approximations of important works by others. They were, admittedly, artistic “fakers”, but viewed their efforts as evoking the exotic world of the Middle Eastern bazaar and festival, and saw themselves as magicians—fakirs—who brilliantly transformed their subjects. 2

At first the Fakirs parodied works featured in the annual spring showings of the Society of American Artists. After the organization merged with the National Academy of Design in 1906, the Fakirs caricatured works in the Academy’s spring exhibition until 1914. The first two exhibitions were held in the League’s quarters in the Sohmer Building on West 23rd Street. With the school’s move to the new American Fine Arts Society Building on West 57th Street in the autumn of 1892, the Fakir showings were installed in the third-floor Members Room. The Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design held their annual shows in the Vanderbilt Gallery on the building’s first floor, and the Fakirs’ freely exploited this proximity to gain notoriety and press coverage.

T he participants in the society consisted of League students and members. According to League historian Marchal E. Landgren, participants were

“selected annually; no open membership was ever established.” 3 Among the most active Fakirs were Bryson Burroughs, James Montgomery Flagg, A. Frederick Bradley, Jr., Lionel Straus, Amie Baxter Titus, Allen Dean Cochran, George Dannenberg, and Harry L. Hoffman. During its early years, the Fakirs encouraged artists with works in the Society of American Artists exhibitions to contribute parodies of their own efforts. The Fakirs produced catalogues for many of their exhibitions, and the archives of the Art Students League contains them for every year except 1891, 1892, 1894, and 1896.

T he Fakir exhibitions generally were held following Easter, and lasted from two to five days, averaging about 100 works. There was also an accompanying parade, sideshow, auction, and ball. The practical aim of the Fakirs’ exhibitions and related festivities was to raise money for scholarships. The proceeds from catalogues, admission to the show, tickets to the ball, and the auction of works themselves were distributed among deserving students who would otherwise have been unable to continue their studies at the League. 4

T he American art collector Samuel T. Shaw was the Fakirs’ benefactor, and President of the Art Students League from 1902 to 1903. From around 1895, he gave purchase prizes of $25, $15, and $10 for the three best works in the annual show, and acquired additional pictures and sculptures at the Fakir auction.5 Shortly

after the close of each exhibition came the Fakir Dinner, regularly held at the Grand Union Hotel or the Salmagundi Club. Invitations went to present and former members, jurors, and special guests. Shaw requested that the reply be illustrated with a self-caricature. At the dinner, prizes were awarded for best reply, best recitation, best musical number, and best story or stunt. Fakir promotional posters for the exhibition and ball were also recognized with prizes funded by Shaw, merchant Clarkson Cowl, and philanthropist J. Sanford Saltus. From at least 1897, the artist Zella de Milhau gave a mince pie and the sum of $5.04 for the worst fake.

T he stairway and halls leading to the exhibition in the League’s Members Room were decorated with wild and imaginative abandon. They were also the venue for the side show, which was offered in the

course of the first two or three days of the exhibition. In its early years, the group’s side show consisted primarily of plays written about League instructors and their methods of teaching. The Fakirs drummed up attention for their festivities by mounting a parade in the neighborhood of the League. The procession was headed by the Fakir Band, celebrated for its “weird costumes” and its “equally weird music.” 6

T he Fakir Band played during recesses at the Fakir Auction, which was held on the final afternoon or evening

LEFT: IRVING RAMSAY WILES, THE YELLOW ROSE , C. 1900. OIL ON CANVAS, CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN

RIGHT: DESERVING WILES, PAINTING A YELL AROSE , C. 1900. RONALD G. PISANO PAPERS, C. 1972–2008, ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

of the exhibition, with the auctioneer and his attendants dressed in comic costumes. Artists of note sometimes were invited to auction off a few works. The Fakir Ball generally took place the night following the auction. Attendees were asked to dress in costumes mimicking works in the Society of American Artists and later the National Academy of Design exhibition.

T he Society of American Fairs evolved into an ambitious and complex organization. By 1914, more than sixty individuals were involved in the planning and production of the annual exhibitions, decorations, sideshow, band, auction, ball, and catalogue. By 1915, the Fakir enterprise had become too much. That year the student body vetoed the annual exhibition and all related activities save the ball, which continued under the banner of the Fakirs until 1917. The publication of the longtime building superintendent Christian Buchheit’s reminiscences of the Fakirs in the winter 1931–32 issue of the school magazine The League inspired a brief revival of the fabulous group.7 With the

assistance of George D. Danenberg and other surviving Fakirs, an exhibition was mounted at the school in late April 1932 and featured pieces from Shaw’s collection as well as parodies of works in the National Academy’s 1932 show.

BRUCE WEBER

The proceeds from catalogues, admission to the [Fakir exhibition], tickets to the ball, and the auction of works themselves were distributed among deserving students who would otherwise have been unable to continue their studies at the League.

1. This essay is drawn from the author’s “The Who, What, Where, When and Why of the Fakirs,” Parodies of the American Masters: Rediscovering the Society of American Fakirs, 1891–1924 (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries and the Museums at Stony Brook, 1993), 4–11. The publication includes Ronald C. Pisano’s essay “The Art of the Fakirs,” 12–19. Nothing is presently known about the events surrounding the founding of the society. Students Bryon Burroughs and Walter Florian were among the founders.

2. In the late nineteenth century, students in America and Europe developed a keen interest in caricaturing the work of their elders. The vogue for such caricature developed originally in Paris, as a critic for the New York Times observed, the “annual sprees of the art students of the League…had its origin, as most things done by New York art students, in the Quatier Latin.” The Society of American Fakirs likely

inspired the caricature exhibitions held by students of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which began in 1893 and continued into the early twentieth century, and spoofed the annual showings there.

3. Marchal E. Landgren, Years of Art: The History of the Art Students League (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1940), 70.

4. Among the students who received Fakir scholarships were John F. Carlson, Eugene Speicher, Carl J. Nordell, and Andrew Dasburg.

5. Shaw’s collection was donated to the Art Students League.

6. Gustav Kobbe, “In Lighter Vein. Fakes and Fakirs,” The Century Magazine 59 (December 18, 1899): 321.

7. Christian Buchheit, “The Fakirs,” The League (Winter 1932): 4, 15, 17, 18.

Florine Stettheimer

In October of 1892, the year when twenty-one-year-old Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) enrolled in a four-year drawing and painting program, the Art Students League had just moved to its present location at 215 West FiftySeventh Street. Her decision to enroll in the Art Students League reflected her long-standing feminism and deep commitment to becoming a professional artist. Her selection of the League was undoubtedly based on both the school’s liberal policies toward women and its teaching methods, which were considered innovative and somewhat radical for the time. One-third of the institution’s founders and a percentage of the students who governed the Board of Control were women. In fact, in 1895, Stettheimer was elected Corresponding Secretary of the Art Students League’s governing board.

Stettheimer clearly enjoyed her years at the school as she noted fondly in a later poem:

A rt Student days in New York

S treets of stoop houses all alike

People dressed sedately

B right colors considered loud

Je wels shoddy

I affected empire gowns

Had an afternoon at home

Attended balls and parties

At Sherry’s and Delmonico’s

S at through operas and the Philharmonic

I h ad a friend who looked Byronic

W ith whom I discussed books

Emer son and Ruskin

Mill s and Ruskin

W hen we felt mild

W hen we felt ironic

It was Whistler and Wilde 1

W hen announcing the founding of its new art school, the Art Students League declared that it would offer the first life drawing class for women in New York—and only the second in the United States.2 Although by the 1890s women in Europe and America regularly attended art classes, they were unable to attend the major European art academies such as Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts until the end of the century. At the same time, although it was considered essential for true artistic training, women wishing to paint male bodies generally had to work from plaster replicas of antique statuary. As a result, in most art schools, women aspiring to be artists were restricted to working in the less regarded fields of landscape, genre, or still-life painting. At the Art Students League, by contrast, women were allowed to work directly from nude male and female models. Stettheimer took advantage of this practice at the League, as is evident from an observation she made in her 1909 diary after seeing the premiere of a highly controversial production of Fedra in Rome in May twenty-five years later. As she noted, the “first night was very interesting…Ippolito, reason of his lack of clothing…He reminded me of my Life Class days—not that he was quite without clothes, but his build is such that students love to draw.”

T he Art Students League prided itself on teaching all the contemporary methods and styles of art. Courses were treated as a combination of idealized nineteenth-century ateliers and medieval apprenticeships, where students learned from professionals through demonstrations and criticism. From the outset, the League hired artists who had studied in Paris as well as Munich to teach the contrasting academic styles. To balance her extensive youthful training in German art techniques and philosophies during the first twenty years of her life, while at the Art Students League Stettheimer therefore chose teachers well versed in the French tradition.3

Stettheimer began her tenure at the League with James Carroll Beckwith, who studied under Carolus-Duran in Paris and developed a reputation for portraiture. Under his tutelage and based on his style of painting, she probably painted her full-length portrait of her sister Carrie in a White Dress with its muted colors and bravura brushstrokes. In 1893 she took life drawing and painting with Harry Siddons Mowbray, who had studied in the atelier of Léon Bonnat. He shared with her his love of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints which she began to collect and used elements of the ukiyo-e compositions in her later paintings.

Stettheimer also attended life painting class with Kenyon Cox, who had

LEFT: FLORINE STETTHEIMER, NUDE STUDY, STANDING WITH HAND TO SHOULDER , 1895. OIL ON CANVAS 30 1/8 × 18 1/8 IN.

RIGHT: FLORINE STETTHEIMER,

Soon after she left Europe for the final time, Stettheimer painted a nude self-portrait that seems an ironic “bridge” between the academic painting styles she mastered at the Art Students League and her later idiosyncratic mature painting.

studied with Jean-Léon Gérome at École des Beaux-Arts. Cox, while not denying individuality, believed modern art should “add link by link to the chain of tradition but it does not wish to break the chain.”4

He urged his students to study the work of Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, and Titian, all of whom were well known to Stettheimer from her formative years in Europe, and he particularly emphasized

technique. Stettheimer’s nudes from these years, both the paintings and the drawings, reveal her proficient handling of paint, form, and composition, and her mastery of perspective and foreshortening. She did not idealize the nudes but rather noted every dimpled thigh and reddened hand—and the resulting realism of these works is masterful. Cox also admire Italian

Renaissance murals for their rich color and site specificity and several early, unfinished mural studies by Stettheimer exist from these years.

A fter graduating in 1896, Stettheimer returned to Europe, where she was to live part of each year with her sisters Ettie and Carrie and her mother until they were forced to return full time to New York in 1914. As Ettie noted, after Florine “left school, she attended art classes continually for many years… also traveled as extensively as possible to see European art.” In May 1900, the Art Students League organized a twenty-fifth-anniversary exhibition of its alumni at the New York Fine Arts Society Building. The exhibition ran May 10–19 and because Stettheimer was still in Europe, she recorded in her diary that she arranged to have a painting sent.5

A lthough by 1917 Stettheimer had radically changed her painting style, creating a subversively theatrical, feminine manner of painting and unique subject matter, they contain many elements based on the techniques and lessons that she learned at the Art Students League. For example, a century later, although the facial features of the figures in her paintings are miniaturized and rendered by few brushstrokes, most can be identified. Many of her highly stylized compositions detailing architectural elements and events in Manhattan between the World Wars are based on compositions by Raphael, Millet, Manet, and Giotto.

S oon after she left Europe for the final time, Stettheimer painted a nude self-portrait that seems an ironic “bridge” between the academic painting styles she mastered at the Art Students League and her later idiosyncratic mature painting.

A lthough Florine Stettheimer’s mature style would bear little visual resemblance to the academic skills she mastered at the Art Students League, on close viewing the lessons of its various teachers can be found seeded throughout her work, From 1920 through mid-1940s the paintings she exhibited throughout the major art galleries and museums along the East Coast and Paris demonstrate her understanding of perspective, portraiture, and numerous homages to compositions from renowned Old Masters.

BARBARA J. BLOEMINK

1. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, editors, Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto; Florine Stettheimer (Toronto: BookThug, 2010), 25–6.

2. The first was offered at the Pennsylvania of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which had a life drawing class with female nudes since the 1860s but fired Professor Thomas Eakins when he revealed a nude male model before his women students.

3. For discussion of the formation and difference between the German and French “classical” and “romantic” notions of modernism see Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991): 3–5, 8–101.

4. Kenyon Cox, The Classic Point of View (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911): 3–5.

5. Although Stettheimer mentions sending the painting to the exhibition at the Art Students League in her 1900 diary and the twenty-fifth anniversary alumni exhibition catalogue lists her as a non-resident member, her work is not listed in the exhibition checklist. This indicates that either the painting did not arrive in time for the printing of the catalogue or that it was somehow left out of the exhibition. Unfortunately, we don’t know the title or subject of the work she wrote that she submitted.

James Montgomery Flagg

It is hard to imagine that James Montgomery Flagg (1877–1960) looked back fondly on his time at the Art Students League of New York. Or perhaps it would be better to say that Flagg never really imagined himself as a student.

A fter all, he alleged any number of times throughout his career that art school is a waste of time. Sure, one can learn the mechanics of drawing, but that is not the same as learning to draw from life—in both senses. For Flagg, then, there was no such thing as education in art. Some are born to be artists. Others are not.

T hese sentiments are, on one hand, in keeping with Flagg’s brand as a precocious illustrator and vaunted egotist. He was already a prolific artist by 1894, the year he enrolled at the League, selling pictures to Life and Judge. On the other hand, they are ironic given his sense that artists can learn ways of seeing and can reveal for others the ways of the world.

F lagg was nothing if not earnest in his opinion of artists, never mind his own art. Yet there was a sense of humor in his wit and wisdom. As with so many humorists, Flagg made fun of what he saw as mechanical in what should otherwise be vivacious, animated, alive. This is evident in his oeuvre of comic strips and his numerous contributions to humor magazines. So much of Flagg’s work appears to capture the fervors and follies of “real life.” That is, the lived experiences and what-you-

see-is-what-you-get representations of culture, politics, and society. This makes sense. He came of age as an artist at the dawn of U.S. imperialism. He was a wartime illustrator who worked for the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Indeed, it was as a contributor to the Division of Pictorial Publicity that Flagg created that infamous “I Want YOU ” poster. He was also a reputed man about town—a sophisticate, a worldling.

Here’s the thing: this facility for not only engaging with the world but also examining it with a creative vision, an artistic eye, was probably not simply innate in him; it was learned.

W hen renowned painter and illustrator Everett Raymond Kinstler met Flagg, it was the mid-1940s and Flagg’s illustrations were all the rage. Kinstler made drawings for comics and comic books. He did magazine covers. He also painted some of the most iconic presidential portraits. Crucially, though, before Flagg became a mentor to Kinstler, both in their times studied with Frank Vincent DuMond, a celebrated Impressionist and esteemed teacher at the Art Students League of New York. Flagg regarded him as an “old bastard.” Kinstler considered him a grandfatherly confidant. After inspecting some of Kinstler’s illustrations, Flagg complimented him by proclaiming, “Young fellow, you’re doomed to be an artist.” It is impossible to be sure, but one can imagine that Flagg said so because of what he, like Kinstler, learned from

“Young fellow, you’re doomed to be an artist.” —James Montgomery Flagg

ABOVE: JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG, “THE CARTOONIST MAKES PEOPLE SEE THINGS!” BULLETIN FOR CARTOONISTS , OCTOBER 26, 1918, COVER OPPOSITE: EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER, JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG , 1952. OIL ON CANVAS, 31 × 25 1/2 IN. NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, GIFT OF EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER © EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER

DuMond. Not to draw or illustrate or paint, but rather to observe 1

I n October 1918, a comic illustration appeared on the cover of the Bulletin for Cartoonists, which was put out by the CPI. It was drawn by Flagg and depicted a man clutching artmaking supplies under one arm and using the other to lean on the shoulder of a Kaiser, who is seated before a looking glass. What the German emperor sees is not a reflection of himself. What he sees is a skeleton. A slogan accompanying the illustration reads “The Cartoonist Makes People SEE THINGS .”

To see this image is to see an encapsulation of Flagg’s legacy. Flagg looked outward at the stuff of social, political, and cultural life. He made art to look at, to examine, to judge. All the same, to see this image is also to see the influences on Kinstler in a portrait he painted of Flagg in the early 1950s. There is Flagg, looking stern, looking regal, looking a bit like Uncle Sam. Yet, somewhat comically, he is sporting a monocle over his right eye—and what might be deemed a wry smile.

F lagg might not have seen himself as an art student, and it is doubtful

that he would have dubbed himself a comic artist or a humorist. But his art was most certainly, in part, a product of his time at the League. If nothing else, he learned there the importance of figuring out the fixtures of society and then fixing them in still images. Sometimes it was personages as representatives of cultural elitism or civic ideals. Sometimes it was utter tomfoolery. Whatever the case, the League might not have provided him with an education in art technique. It did, however, educate him in what an artist can do with art.

CHRISTOPHER J. GILBERT

1. Ira Goldberg, “On the Shoulders of Giants: An Interview with Everett Raymond Kinstler,” LINEA : Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York , April 1, 2009, asllinea.org/everett-raymond-kinstler-interview/.

Kenneth Hayes Miller

The life and career of League instructor, Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876–1952), was a web of contradictions. His training meshed traditional academic discipline with modern techniques. His paintings of Fourteenth Street bargain shoppers combined the urban scene with Old Master sources. While embracing contemporary subjects, he preferred formalist theories of composition and regarded significant form as the only aim of a work of art. He loved the intellectual life of literature, philosophy, art criticism, and Freudian theory; he also became a diehard New York Giants fan who rarely missed a game. A political conservative, he was unenthusiastic about the leftward turn in 1930s art circles. His personal life reflected the bohemian sexual practices of his upbringing in a utopian free love community who lived among Greenwich Village radicals, but his second marriage tilted toward traditional patriarchy.1

with muralist Harry Siddons Mowbray; Impressionist painting from the dynamic, modern William Merritt Chase. With these choices Miller tested a range of approaches from instructors who seemed artistic opposites.

M iller found his art world in a lifelong association with the Art Students League. He enrolled for three years at age seventeen. Like most beginners, he sought professors his fellow students liked and tried out various courses: Drawing from antique casts with doctrinaire academic Kenyon Cox; more open academic life classes in drawing, painting, and design

I n his final year, Miller studied only with Mowbray in life classes. The shift from sampling to focus reflected the League’s democratic and studentcentered policy permitting monthly course changes and no prescribed program of study. The sampler method revealed teachers whose techniques, pedagogy, and philosophy spoke to students clearly and prepared them for eventual careers. This pattern persisted in Miller’s own teaching when scores of students either made him their primary mentor (Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop) or left after a single session (Louise Nevelson found him “austere and introspective”). 2

A fter a failed flirtation with

“…talented young artists came to learn their profession, not only as artists, but also as human beings. Miller had the capacity to develop the best qualities of individuals….” —Stewart Klonis

illustration at the Chase School in the late 1890s, Miller joined the New York School of Art as an instructor. In 1911 the League invited him back as a fully qualified teacher. Miller’s professional career paralleled his student years, with a primary focus on separate life classes for men and women, until gender separation ended in 1927. He resuscitated his Mowbray training with a secondary emphasis on Mural Painting and Composition (1912–17 and 1927–33). Miller took a seven-year hiatus from teaching between 1936 and 1944, his best painting years, returning when the GI Bill contributed to soaring League enrollments, and doubled his teaching load until the end of his life.3

I n classes and in his paintings of fashionable women in old master guise, Miller preached form and composition, while de-emphasizing emotion and individualization: “emotion in art is suspect because it tends to displace

some of the form,” he wrote. 4 He cared nothing about personalizing his mannequin-like subjects. “Miller never used a model” Isabel Bishop claimed in a 1982 interview—an irony given his lifelong teaching of life classes from live models.5 The “Miller method,” with its hybrid of modern subject, old master academic approach, and contemporary formalist theory nonetheless earned him a devoted following.

T he many students who praised his erudition also commended his generosity. For years, Miller invited students to visit museums and to his studio for afternoon teas and discussions of art. At Miller’s death, Stewart Klonis, Executive Director of the League noted that “talented young artists came to learn their profession, not only as artists, but also as human beings. Miller had the capacity to develop the best qualities of individuals….” 6 Whatever his modest fortunes as an artist, teaching at the League became his lasting contribution.

ELLEN WILEY TODD

1. For biographical and interpretive work see: Ellen Wiley Todd, The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Lincoln Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive: The Effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American Painter (1876–1952) (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1974).

2. Information on Miller’s classes at the Art Students League can be found on League enrollment cards. Louise Nevelson is quoted in Raymond Steiner, The Art Students League of New York: A History (New York: CSS Publications, 1999), 98.

3. Information on when and what Miller taught can be found in the Art Students League’s annual course catalogs.

4. Miller as quoted in “Kenneth Hayes Miller: Creator, Teacher and Man,” Art Students League News, Special Memorial Issue for Kenneth Hayes Miller, March 1, 1952, 5.

5. “Isabel Bishop,” Interview by Ellen Wiley Todd, December 16, 1982.

6. Stewart Klonis as quoted in “Kenneth Hayes Miller: Creator, Teacher and Man,” 3.

Lionel Barrymore

When, in 1944, the American Artists Professional League asked Lionel Barrymore (1878–1954) to serve on its executive board, the announcement stressed that Barrymore was not an actor who dabbled in visual art. Instead, it explained, correctly, that however esteemed he was as a character actor, acting was never his passion but only his livelihood. Instead, like many others, Barrymore worked at uncongenial employment in order to finance his steady investment in composing music and creating visual art. The AAPL chose him “because he has achieved outstanding skill in the profession of art—his first great love and ambition that he had to relegate to a second place in order to make a living.” Nonetheless, while acting on the stage and in vaudeville, in silent and sound movies, and on radio, “he kept industriously busy in his spare moments with his pencils, brushes and etching tools until he gained a superb mastery over them.” More than his acting honors, he prized being elected to the American Society of Etchers. 1

S elf-described as “some ham that wants to eat,” who “never liked acting. Never, never liked it... My dislike of it has grown through the ages,” Barrymore could not support himself, his wives, and his daughters as a visual artist and, therefore, turned to his detested alternative career. His path to acting, however, included several detours. Among these were his years at the Art Students League in New York

City, followed a decade later by his time at the Académie Julian in Paris. For twenty years between the end of his formal education and the start of his serious involvement in film acting and direction, from 1893 to 1912, he was always trying to abandon acting to focus on painting. Sailing for Paris, Barrymore wrote almost fifty years later, meant “I had broken loose from the stage... I considered it a complete, logical, and irrevocable break.” 2

Ba rrymore attended classes at the Art Students League from 1893 to 1895. In his first school year, his classes were Preparatory Antique with either John Henry Twachtman or James Carroll Beckwith, as well as Morning Painting with William Merritt Chase. In 1894–95, he resumed Morning Painting with Chase and Preparatory Antique with Twachtman. When he got into a fight with Ferdinand Pinney Earle during Preparatory Antique, they trashed the classroom, and Twachtman threw them out. Reconciled with Earle over drinks in a bar, Barrymore assumed that his expulsion from the class doomed him to a life on the stage, but a fellow student instead helped him to gain admission to Kenyon Cox’s class, an undeserved reprieve.3

A fter Barrymore married Doris Rankin, two women selflessly supported his ambition to paint: Doris, with her willingness to be an artist’s wife; and his sister, Ethel, with her willingness to supply the necessary funds from her own theatre

His path to acting [...] included several detours. Among these were his years at the Art Students League in New York...

income. After they embarked for France in the spring of 1906, Barrymore studied painting at the Académie Julian. His friend Ernest Leonard Blumenschein, creator of a 1909 portrait of the Barrymores, their baby Ethel, and a nursemaid in Paris, admired Doris as “very beautiful, young and exquisite” and found Lionel “jolly good company, very entertaining.”4

KATHLEEN SPALTRO

1. “Lionel Barrymore Did Not Want to Be an Actor. His Ambition Was to Be an Artist,” Art Digest (March 1, 1944): 28.

2. James Poe Papers, 1940–, “Lionel Barrymore” Folder, Box 9, Collection 878. University of California at Los Angeles Library, Special Collections, 16, 22, 31, 32, 36. Lionel Barrymore and Cameron Shipp, We Barrymores (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1951), 116.

3. Stephanie Cassidy, Head of Research & Archives, Art Students League of New York, Email, July 26, 2021; Barrymore and Shipp, 43–46, 63, 66–69.

4. Robert W. Larson and Carole B. Larson, Ernest L. Blumenschein: The Life of an American Artist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 30, 35, 41–44, 49, 73, 175–176.

Olive Rush

In 1914 Rush visited the American Southwest, including Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she was awarded the state’s first solo exhibition by a woman artist…

Olive Rush (1873–1966) was born into a Quaker family of seven siblings in Indiana and was the first in her family to attend college. Fairmount Academy, on the family farm, provided her early education. In 1892 she enrolled at Earlham College, where art teacher John Elwood Bundy recognized her talent and urged her to attend an eastern art school. She moved to Washington, DC , studying at the Corcoran Museum School with Eliphalet Frazer Andrews. She visited the Women’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was influenced by women’s advancements, motivating her to become a professional artist. Moving on to New York, Rush studied at the Art Students League from the fall of 1894 through April 1899, studying with William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox, and Clifford Carleton. In 1896, through a fellow ASL student, she secured a job at Harper’s Weekly working for art director Edward Penfield, ASL alumnus and well-known illustrator, and later for the New York Tribune. Rush lived in New York off and on from 1898 until 1902 and returned to the city in 1914 to 1920. She often shared living arrangements with fellow ASL students including Alice Schille, Blanche Grant, and Tony Nell. As with many art students, she visited summer art colonies including Gloucester, Massachusetts, studying with Hayley Lever, an ASL teacher; Ogunquit, Maine; and in New Hampshire.

Rush was accepted as a student by Howard Pyle, a noted illustration teacher in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1904. Rush’s closest friends from her student days were Ethel Pennewill Brown and Alice Schille, both ASL alumnae, with whom she traveled to Belgium, Cornwall’s St. Ives, and Paris. She boarded at Reid Hall in Paris, a club for American women art students, and met more ASL alumnae, including Blanche Lazzell, Ethel Mars, Maud Squire, and Anne Goldthwaite, who returned to New York to teach at the ASL for 23 years.

I n 1914 Rush visited the American Southwest, including Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she was awarded the state’s first solo exhibition by a woman artist, then returned to New York. Finally leaving the illustration profession, she moved permanently to Santa Fe in July 1920 and purchased a 200-year-old straw/adobe Canyon Road farmhouse, where she said she wanted to paint “on pink adobe walls.” She became the dean of Santa Fe women artists as the first unmarried woman artist to settle in the colony. Rush became the “gatekeeper” for notables like First Lady Lou Hoover and Helen Keller, along with a cadre of fellow artists visiting Santa Fe. Marius Bewley and Leon Smith, two young conscientious objectors, separately rented her garden casita and urged her to explore modernism in her sixth decade. Rush had also known O’Keeffe in New York

and after O’Keeffe moved, a decade later than Rush, to New Mexico the two artists seasonally shared a cat between Abiquiu and Canyon Road.

I n New Mexico, Rush became a nationally known easel artist and a true fresco mural painter for the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. She was one of the first to teach Indian art students to paint their own Native culture at the Federal Santa Fe Indian School, showcasing their work at the 1932 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. She cofounded the Friends Meeting in her home, which she bequeathed to the Quakers. As an early environmentalist, she objected to paving roads in her historic neighborhood, helped save parks and downtown trees, and hosted her community in her popular garden. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Earlham College in 1947. She hailed the 1957 visit of Igor Stravinsky to the Santa Fe Opera in the same year that she was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of New Mexico. Olive Rush remained grateful to ASL for her lifelong friendships with artists and teachers who encouraged her independent creativity throughout her life and art.

JANN HAYNES GILMORE

Hugo Ballin

In 1949, Hugo Ballin (1879–1956) published a manifesto called the “Insanity in Modern Art” in Design magazine in which he boldly declared that “much that is classified as ‘modern art’ isn’t art at all.” Ballin was himself classically trained: he took private classes with L’École des Beaux-Arts trained portraitist Wyatt Eaton as a child and then studied with Robert Blum at the Art Students League of New York, where he was awarded a scholarship. After graduating, he traveled to Rome where he spent thirteen months studying the rich figure painting of the Renaissance and traveled with Blum through Tuscany, Sicily, Calabria, and Naples exploring classical Italian frescos. While other essays in the magazine issue hailed the turn towards abstract, primitive, and surrealist styles among American artists as progress “toward a new renaissance,” Ballin argued younger artists were on an “aesthetic binge of resentment.” These inferior talents, he claimed, had set out to: …set the art world on fire. They cared nothing for heritage, skill, or refinement. They could not be logical.... They could not do anything as well as it had been done. They were going to shout that realism had had its day and was over. Modern art, he argued, had become a “contemptible racket” which, he hoped, would lead to the “complete downfall of those demented unrealities of

Picasso and his cohorts.” 1

T hirty years earlier, it had been Ballin who broke away from the world of fine art to embrace a more experimental, modern medium: in 1917, after winning several prestigious awards and major mural commissions, including at the Wisconsin State Capitol, he took a job as an art director at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood’s blossoming film industry. Cameras

were fixed in those days, offering viewers static shots in a single frame, and required creative and elaborate set designs to add depth and texture to the scenes. Ballin saw tremendous potential in the power of film to reach the “great masses of people,” but was critical of fellow filmmakers who were too preoccupied with “the mere novelty of motion,” leaving their audiences

thirsting for “more subtle and refined” films with a “more spiritual kind of acting…more innuendo and intimation.” Filmmakers, he argued, should strive for a “higher class amusement” that would elevate the public taste. After making a dozen films with Goldwyn, he formed his own production company, his films—which retold ancient myths and folktales featuring beautiful female

HUGO BALLIN, WARNER MURALS (DETAIL), WILSHIRE BOULEVARD TEMPLE, LOS ANGELES, C. 1929.

PHOTO: DAVID WU

leads played by his wife, Mabel— designed to create “pure decorative beauty” that would “fall upon the hearts [of the audience] like ‘a gentle rain from heaven.’” 2 He was so confident in his storytelling abilities that he eschewed the interstitial text and subtitles used by other filmmakers of the silent era, relying only on his vivid visuals to advance the plot.

U nfortunately, Ballin’s painterly approach to filmmaking was not so well received: by 1925, his production company folded. Out of a job, he returned to painting, drawing on his

connections within the social milieu of other Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood to earn his first commissions. He was hired to decorate the home of Milton Getz, president of Union Bank and Trust, and, in 1929, the Warner brothers commissioned him to design murals in the sanctuary of the new Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The Temple was erected by the city’s oldest Jewish congregation, Congregation B’nai B’rith, to house their ever-growing membership, which included the Warner family and dozens of other prominent Hollywood players. As its

HUGO BALLIN, WARNER MURALS (DETAIL), WILSHIRE BOULEVARD TEMPLE, LOS ANGELES, C. 1929.

PHOTO: DAVID WU

Like his films, his paintings featured what one reviewer described as “idealized types of an idealized age, permanent, elemental, removed from passion, unconscious of their surroundings.”

young Rabbi, Edgar Magnin, described, he wanted the interior to feel as grand and luxurious as the movie palaces being erected downtown “so I can talk with people, not at them.” Breaking from the medieval custom of banning imagery, especially of the human form, from synagogues, Magnin worked with Ballin to bring “warmth and mysticism” back into the surroundings, assigning him three massive lunettes that encapsulated key events, people, and customs of Judaism along with a mural around the base of the sanctuary that told the history of Jews “from Abraham to the discovery of America.” Ballin used numerous filmmaking techniques in the paintings, the murals themselves “[unrolling] before [worshippers] like a great scroll of Jewish history,” echoing a strip of celluloid film.3 The murals, which were beautifully restored in 2014, secured Ballin a reputation as one of the leading artists in Los Angeles, earning him dozens of private and public commissions in the years that followed.

I t is surprising then that Ballin, who had broken with traditions both artistic and religious, would have been such a vocal critic of younger artists

experimenting with new styles and mediums of their own. I can only think his criticism was borne of his faithful commitment to classicism, his devotion to art as a form of refinement and “pure decorative beauty.” Like his films, his paintings featured what one reviewer described as “idealized types of an idealized age, permanent, elemental, removed from passion, unconscious of their surroundings.”4 Perhaps Ballin’s comments on his contemporaries reflect as much frustration with modern age in which he lived as with the artists themselves.

CAROLINE LUCE

1. Hugo Ballin, “Insanity in Modern Art,” and Eduard Buk-Ulrecih, “Abreast of the Times,” appeared as part of a Special Section in Design 50, no.9 (June, 1949): 7–11, 25.

2. “Motion is Over-Emphasized: Ballin–Producer Declares That he has Sought a More Subtle Appeal in His Picturization of ‘East Lynne’,” Exhibitors Herald, Feb. 26, 1921, clipping in Ballin Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 21, Folder 3; and “Hollywood Artist Famous,” by Harriet Clay Penman, clipping (no publication or date given) appears in a scrapbook in the Ballin Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 29, Folder 2.

3. MacKenzie Stevens, “Visualizing Jewish History for a Modern Audience,” lecture presented to the Los Angeles Metro Studies Group in May 2013. Magnin quotations from The Warner Murals in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles, California written by Edgar F. Magnin and Hugo Ballin, originally published in 1955. See also, Tom Teicholz, Wilshire Boulevard Temple: Our History as Part of the Fabric of Los Angeles (San Raphael, CA: Oro Editions, 2014).

4. Quotation appears in “Hugo Ballin” by H. St. G. unknown date, scrapbook, Hugo Ballin Papers, UCLA, Box 29, Folder 2. For more on Ballin, see the online exhibition “Hugo Ballin’s Los Angeles” at scalar.usc.edu/hc/hugo-ballins-los-angeles/index.

Marie Zimmermann

Marie Zimmermann (1879–1972) was an independent metalsmith, jeweler, and designer working in New York during the opening decades of the twentieth century. She was a keen observer—a deeply curious and decidedly modern woman who built a fulfilling personal and professional life in Manhattan but found equal joy and inspiration in more rugged, natural settings.

M arie was raised in Brooklyn by a close-knit family of Swiss descent. The family’s financial success and progressive attitude toward their daughter’s interests allowed her to flourish, whether on horseback at the Brooklyn Riding and Driving Club or while camping, fishing, and shooting at their country house and farm in Pennsylvania.

Zimmermann began her professional artistic training at the Art Students League in 1897, enrolling in a drawing class, followed by costume drawing, modeling

in clay, and several life drawing courses.1 She participated in the annual exhibition of paintings by the League’s members and students in May 1899.2 When asked about her artistic process in later years, Zimmermann credited her initial training in drawing and modeling, stating simply: “Pictures and sculptures are lines…. If you like lines you can create them in ornaments as well as in pictures.” 3

Her studies at the League likely ended around the 1901 winter term, when she decided to pursue art metalwork instruction at another institution.

Zimmermann began her career as a jeweler but rapidly expanded her oeuvre to include a wide variety of ornamental objects. She worked with metals, gemstones, ivory, and wood, experimenting with confidence in each material. Her ability to design to any scale caused a friend to remark that she made everything from tiaras to tombstones. Her

[Zimmermann’s] ability to design to any scale caused a friend to remark that she made everything from tiaras to tombstones. Her eclectic designs acknowledged historical precedent, but her interpretations were entirely unique.

eclectic designs acknowledged historical precedent, but her interpretations were entirely unique. A recognizable shape or motif was transformed with additions of color, texture, or an unexpected ornament; a Japanese netsuke or antique slices of jade became finials or pendants, and a jeweled box might enclose painted miniatures. In a 1926 interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, she explained, “I have tried to bring back the old idea of the artist that flourished in the days of such men as Michelangelo and Cellini. They were masters of a dozen crafts and they used all of them in producing perhaps one object.”4 Creatively layering materials and techniques elevated her designs and

in Zimmermann’s opinion, distinguished her as a craftsman.5

Zimmermann closed the chapter on her forty-year career in 1941. From that point forward, she continued to live with her partner Ruth at her family farm in Pennsylvania and at her second home in Florida, where she died on her ninetythird birthday.

T he Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired their first example of Zimmermann’s work in 1922 and presently holds the largest public collection of her jewelry and objects.6

KIMBERLEY AHARA

1. Zimmermann initially drew from antique casts under the instruction of painter Douglas Volk. She enrolled in a costume drawing course, life drawing with George B. Bridgman, modeling in clay with sculptor Charles Y. Harvey, and life drawing instruction with painters Harry Siddons Mowbray and Joseph Rodefer DeCamp. Marie Zimmermann course registration records, Art Students League Archives, provided by League Archivist Stephanie Cassidy in a letter to Deborah Waters, of June 19, 2009.

2. “Art Students’ League,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (May 7, 1899), 11. Her submission remains unidentified.

3. Martha Coman, “Success Talks for Business Girls,” unidentified clipping

4. Harriet Ashbrook, “Woman Master of a Dozen Crafts,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (June 6, 1926), 11. Zimmermann regularly emphasized her reputation as a craftsperson, distinguishing herself through associations with great artisans of the past. Although many of Zimmermann’s contemporaries espoused a return to traditional craft practices, she did not align herself with the resulting Arts and Crafts movement.

5. In her final exhibition, the press in Santa Barbara, California, touted Miss Marie Zimmermann of New York as “the finest craftsman in the country,” and “America’s outstanding designer in precious metals.”

“Artists to Hold Excellent Show at Faulkner,” The Santa Barbara News Press (March 4, 1939). “Three Distinguished Artists To Open Exhibition Today At Faulkner Gallery,” Santa Barbara News Press (March 5, 1939).

6. Pyxis , by 1922. Silver, gold, jade, rock crystal, and rubies. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Edward C Moore Jr. Gift (22.186a. b) Marie Zimmermann’s jewelry and metalwork designs are also in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Carnegie Museum of Art, Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, Art Institute of Chicago, Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Two Red Roses Foundation, and Columbus Museum of Art. For more about Zimmermann, see The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann , (New Haven: American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation and Yale University Press, 2011).

George B. Bridgman

The author of a one-page article on George B. Bridgman (1864–1943) in Time magazine in 1942 recognized his longevity “as the art world’s big bone & muscle man.”

The article’s tone was mildly incredulous, referring to the seventy-seven-year-old Bridgman as “conservative,” “prim and meticulous,” and “a spry, round-faced oldster,” but its undeniable point was that his teaching of artistic anatomy for decades at the Art Students League testified to his ongoing relevance to art students. The story of his long career charts the innovations and popularity of his methods and explains why students were not “able to dispense with ‘Old Man’ Bridgman.” 1

T hough best known for his instruction at the Art Students League of New York, Bridgman commenced his teaching career in Buffalo in 1891. He started with life drawing and antique classes, and in October 1893 he initiated a series of six anatomy lectures at the Art Students League of Buffalo. Bridgman had studied in Paris from 1883 to 1889, and his approach to the subject responded to the anatomy lectures he had attended at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like his teacher, Mathias Duval, he began with osteology—the skeletal system—and proceeded to myology—musculature and

its appearance on the body’s surface. The scientific bent of Duval’s presentations, however, which included the dissection of cadavers, was applauded by some, but led others to call his lectures “the monotony class,” and Bridgman found him longwinded.2 Though Bridgman primarily addressed art students in Buffalo, his lectures were advertised in the newspaper and were free and open to the public. He made his presentations lively and engaging to a varied audience, executing charcoal drawings of the body’s inner forms before his listeners’ eyes.3 As reported following his fourth lecture, “When Mr. Bridgman

“W hen Mr. Bridgman entered the room he was greeted with an ovation that would make the prominent orators of the day feel envious. The room was uncomfortably crowded. Among his hearers were prominent doctors and other professional men who have become charmed with the interesting way in which Mr. Bridgman handles his subject.”

—Buffalo Courier, 1893

entered the room he was greeted with an ovation that would make the prominent orators of the day feel envious. The room was uncomfortably crowded. Among his hearers were prominent doctors and

other professional men who have become charmed with the interesting way in which Mr. Bridgman handles his subject.”4

W hen Bridgman began teaching at the Art Students League of New York in

GEORGE B. BRIDGMAN, UNTITLED DRAWING PANELS , 1935. CHARCOAL AND PASTEL, 5 × 9 FT. PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, 102031-C, GIFT OF DEANE G. KELLER

the fall of 1898, the artistic anatomy lecture series fell within the domain of Kenyon Cox. Though Bridgman had to wait to lecture systematically on anatomy until Cox retired, he integrated lessons on the subject into his antique and life drawing classes, as the corrective detail sketches he added to students’ finished drawing sheets attest.5 When first presented the chance to give anatomy lectures during the 1909–10 winter season, Bridgman appears to have embraced the opportunity enthusiastically; whereas Cox had traditionally given six lectures, Bridgman initiated the custom of offering twelve. He demonstrated his points using a living model, as had Duval and Cox, but supplemented the instruction with copious illustrations drawn during the lecture, resuming his practice from Buffalo.6 Bridgman presumably recognized the popular appeal of these drawing performances, in addition to their didactic value; by the early twentieth century, some artists entertained audiences by making rapid sketches on stage, such as the cartoonist Winsor McCay, who regularly performed in New York City vaudeville theaters starting in the early 1900s.7

Bridgman’s approach to “constructive anatomy,” in which he treated bones and muscles together and focused on the masses they formed, succeeded brilliantly. To satisfy demand, the Board of Control prevailed upon him to offer a second course of lectures concurrently starting in the fall of 1916.8 He repeated his presentations into the early 1920s

and published a précis of his lectures with hundreds of specially prepared illustrations in the book Constructive Anatomy in 1920.9 His reputation had so grown that he was invited to give constructive anatomy lectures at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1920 and 1921, respectively.10

Not one to rest on his laurels, in 1923 Bridgman changed the title of his lecture course to “Constructive Figure Drawing” to correspond to his shift in emphasis to a more holistic integration of anatomical study with figure drawing. He added lectures on the figure in action and the composition of figures to his customary topics, with the aim being, as described in the League’s course catalogue, “to create new theories of action and rhythm.”11 To stimulate students’ attention and interaction, he also included criticism of their work. He captured this modified pedagogical approach in his 1924 book Bridgman’s Life Drawing.12 Bridgman continued to offer his Constructive Figure Drawing lectures for around ten years, although in the early 1930s he reduced the number from twelve to ten by trimming the figure drawing topics and eliminated the student critiques;13 this may have been motivated by changes to his life drawing classes, which were renamed “Life Drawing and Anatomy” beginning in the 1935–36 season. During the same winter season, he reoriented the approach of his lectures, and his presentations dealt

with“the relationship of mechanical devices to the human form.” 14 Bridgman made his points about the action of muscles through analogies to hinges, levers, and pulleys. He may have intensified his approach to constructive anatomy as a way to distinguish himself from the diversified anatomy instruction at the League at this time: he had virtually monopolized artistic anatomy since 1909, but Homer Boss had begun regularly offering a series of anatomy lectures in 1923,15 and Rico Lebrun and Kimon Nicolaïdes were incorporating anatomy into their life and antique classes, respectively.16 In 1939, Bridgman published this latest iteration of his anatomical instruction in the book The Human Machine. 17

T he cumulative impact of Bridgman’s integration of anatomy with general drawing instruction may be gauged by temporary changes at the League near the end of his career. During his final years at the League, artistic anatomy was decreasingly treated as a field of specialized instruction and was integrated into a range of classes. Bridgman gave his last anatomy lecture series during the 1936–37 winter season, and though Boss gave lectures the subsequent two seasons,18 from the fall of 1939 to the spring of 1943, the League offered no anatomy lectures. At the time of Bridgman’s death, however, courses that included anatomy instruction were offered by William Charles McNulty, Reginald Marsh, Robert Beverly Hale, and Jon Corbino, and Bridgman’s own Life

Drawing and Anatomy classes were taken over by Frank J. Reilly and Robert Ward Johnson, both formerly his students.19

JEFFREY M. FONTANA

1. “Bone & Muscle Man,” Time 40, no. 11 (September 14, 1942): 75.

2. Sara Dodge Kimbrough, Drawn from Life: The Story of Four American Artists Whose Friendships & Work Began in Paris During the 1880s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976), 24. For an overview of Duval’s career and teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts, see Philippe Comar, Figures du Corps: Une Leçon d’Anatomie à l’École des Beaux-Arts (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2008), 51–56, 475–76. For Duval’s instruction itself, see Mathias Duval, Précis d’Anatomie à l’Usage des Artistes (Paris: A. Quantin, 1881).

3. “Art Students,” Buffalo Courier, October 15, 1893, 6, and “Mr. Bridgman’s Lecture on Anatomy,” Buffalo Courier, December 17, 1893, 2.

4. “Art Matters,” Buffalo Courier, December 18, 1893, 6. The school awarded prizes for anatomical drawing in the spring of 1894, suggesting that Bridgman gave exercises in his classes that built upon the lectures (“The Art Students’ League,” Buffalo Evening News, June 5, 1894, 2).

5. See drawings in the Art Students League Permanent Collection by William H. D. Koerner from 1905–6 (number 100617) and by Edwin G. Cassedy from 1908 (number 101556) in James Lancel McElhinney, Classical Life Drawing Studio: Lessons & Teachings in the Art of Figure Drawing (New York: Sterling, 2010), 26, 27.

6. George Brant Bridgman, Untitled, charcoal, Art Students League Permanent Collection, number 102031c. For a course description, see The Art Students’ League of New York Season 1914–15 , course catalogue, p. 12.

7. John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art , revised and expanded edition (New York: Abrams, 2005), 131–9.

8. Board of Control Meeting Minutes, May 2, 1916, Archives of the Art Students League of New York.

9. George B. Bridgman, Constructive Anatomy (Pelham, New York: Edward C. Bridgman, 1920).

10. Theodore C. Knauff, An Experiment in Training for the Useful and the Beautiful: A History (Philadelphia: Philadelphia School of Design for Women, 1922), 92. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, School Circular, 1921–22, p. 31.

11. The Art Students’ League of New York Season of 1923–24 , course catalogue, p. 11.

12. George B. Bridgman, Bridgman’s Life Drawing (Pelham, New York: Edward C. Bridgman, 1924).

13. For the reduction to ten lectures and list of topics, see The Art Students’ League of New York Winter Catalogue 1931–32 , course catalogue, p. 9, and for the elimination of the critiques, The Art Students’ League of New York Winter Season October 3, 1932 to May 27, 1933 , course catalogue, p. 13.

14. The Art Students’ League of New York Winter Season September 16, 1935 to May 29, 1936, course catalogue, p. 8–9, 16.

15. The Art Students’ League of New York Season of 1923–24 , course catalogue, p. 12. Besides Boss’s lectures there were two one-time offerings: Charles R. Knight’s lecture series on comparative anatomy (The Art Students’ League of New York Season, October 2, 1922 to May 26, 1923 , course catalogue, p. 13–14), and Dr. Charles R. Stockard’s series of lectures and dissections held at Cornell University Medical College (The Art Students’ League of New York Winter Season, October 2nd 1933 to May 26th 1934, course catalogue, p. 13).

16. Lebrun’s course was titled “Life Drawing and Anatomy,” as listed in The Art Students’ League of New York Winter Season October 1, 1934 to May 29, 1935 , course catalogue, p. 11, and a student drawing of the skeleton and musculature from Nicolaïdes’s antique course was reproduced in The Art Students’ League of New York Winter Catalogue, Season October 1, 1928, to May 25, 1929 , course catalogue, p. 30.

17. George B. Bridgman, The Human Machine: The Anatomical Structure & Mechanism of the Human Body (Pelham, New York: Bridgman Publishers, 1939).

18. The Art Students League of New York Winter Season September 15, 1937–May 27, 1938 , course catalogue, p. 9.

19. Art Students League of New York Sixty-Eighth Regular Session September 14, 1943–May 26, 1944 , course catalogue, p. 12–13, 17. The League changed course in the fall of 1945 and once more offered anatomy lectures, given by Robert Beverly Hale, a former Bridgman student (The Art Students League 70th Regular Session September 17, 1945 to May 31, 1946, course catalogue, p. 11–12, 29).

St. Leger Eberle

By 1906, Eberle, shifting away from mythology and allegory, created genre statuettes of the Lower East Side populace. Aware of Robert Henri’s aesthetics, she saw the inhabitants of the ghetto positively as recent immigrants with strong family bonds.

Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (1878–1942), born in Iowa, grew up in Canton, Ohio, and attended the Art Students League from 1899 to 1902. In her first year, she studied modeling with Charles Y. Harvey and George Grey Barnard. Her second-year classes in life drawing with painter Kenyon Cox and sculpture with Barnard were segregated by gender. In her third year, she won First Honorable Mention for the best six-week study from life in the women’s sculpture class. From 1904 to 1906, Eberle and Anna Hyatt [Huntington], whom she had met at the ASL , shared an apartment and received criticism from Barnard and Gutzon Borglum. On their collaborative sculptures, Hyatt created the animals and Eberle the figures. Their Men and Bull won a bronze medal at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

By 1906, Eberle, shifting away from mythology and allegory, created genre statuettes of the Lower East Side populace. Aware of Robert Henri’s aesthetics, she saw the inhabitants of the ghetto positively as recent immigrants with strong family bonds. In 1907, inspired by Jane Addams’s advocacy for social work, Eberle resided in and helped at the Third Street Settlement Music School. Roller Skating, her first realist sculpture, depicts the gleeful abandon of a child propelled by her own momentum on a single skate. Such celebrations

of spontaneous play reflect Maria Montessori’s progressive theories of children. Eberle also sculpted neighbors from her homes/studios in Greenwich Village, the artists’ colony in Woodstock, New York, and Westport, Connecticut.

E berle marched with suffragettes in 1911 and helped organize an exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in 1915 to benefit women’s suffrage. Her most blatant plea for political change, White Slave, exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913, depicted the social injustice of sex trafficking. Eberle described the diabolical auctioneer with sharp angles in contrast to the soft figure of the nude, powerless girl being sold.

E berle was a member of the National Sculpture Society, the National Association of Women Artists, and the National Academy of Design, and exhibited regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in

2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Girl Skating in 1909. See Alexis L. Boylan. “The Spectacle of a Merely Charming Girl” Perspectives on American Sculpture before 1925 , Thayer Tolles, ed. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 116–128 and Joan M. Marter, “Eberle,” American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2 , Thayer Tolles, ed. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 628–29.

ROBERTA K. TARBELL

1. Bertha H. Smith, “Two Women Who Collaborate in Sculpture,” Craftsman 8 (August 1905): 623–33 and essays on Eberle and Huntington in Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture: Studio Works, 1893–1939 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 28–34 and 71–78.

3. Beginning in 1907, Eberle exhibited annually at Macbeth Gallery, culminating in a 1921 solo show. See Louise R. Noun, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Sculptor (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1980) for references to enthusiastic critical response to her numerous exhibitions.

4. Christina Merriman, “New Bottles for New Wine: The Work of Abastenia St. Leger Eberle,” The Survey 30 (3 May 1913): 198–99, illustrated on cover, and Susan P. Casteras, “Abastenia St. Leger Eberle’s White Slave,” Woman’s Art Journal 7 (Spring/ Summer 1986): 32–36.

ABOVE: ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE, GIRL SKATING, 1906. BRONZE, 13 1/8 × 11 × 6 1/2 IN. ROGERS FUND, 1909 (09.57) THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, IMAGE © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, IMAGE SOURCE: ART RESOURCE, NY OPPOSITE: ABASTENIA ST.

LEGER EBERLE, WHITE SLAVE , 1913. PHOTO: HAGELSTEIN BROTHERS, GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 11 × 14 IN. WORKS OF ART EXHIBITED AT THE ARMORY SHOW OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS, NEW YORK, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, DC, LOC.GOV/PICTURES/COLLECTION/COLL/ITEM/2005690739/ international expositions. Serious health problems reduced her ability to work after 1920.

Agnes Richmond

Agnes Richmond (1874–1964) was born in Alton, Illinois. After considering a career as a fairy tale illustrator, she decided to prepare teens to be impervious to patriarchal ownership. She was radicalized by Charles Allan Winter and Alice Beach Winter at the St. Louis Academy of Art. Richmond attended the Art Students League starting in 1888, becoming an accomplished painter and a life member by 1905. She found her best friends among the leading artists of the radical magazine, The Masses . She exhibited with John Sloan’s cohort at the Carnegie International in both 1920 and 1921. In 1929 she held her first solo show at the Fifteen Gallery in Manhattan, which in ten years became a majority-female collective and a significant LGBTQ hub for exhibitors. She constructed a feminist iconography in her paintings, and pressed her female ASL students to construct their own.

O ne of her students, Katherine Schmidt, laughed at Richmond’s attempt to restrain young women’s libidos around Stuart Davis and John Sloan. Richmond’s The Young Tennis Player (1918) is just one of her paintings about female libido. Here, the sitter presses the shaft of a racket between her legs, with its racket head turned into a perfect yonic form.1 Richmond exhibited empowered portraits of Black women in 1925 in Beulah, Beulah B, and Rosie, as Schmidt did in Almeda’s Daughter of 1937. 2

R ichmond’s portraits of white, female subjects were exhibited with generic titles like Fourteen, Fifteen, or Another Young Woman. Some are in profile, recalling Renaissance portrayals of princes, and others are frontal, recalling Sofonisba Anguissola. Richmond’s single figures of women possess the space around them, but are not to be possessed; they command landscapes and interiors with their unmovable presence. Natalie Van Vleck, one of her ASL students, became a radical gender-bending trail blazer, confident and inspired to be herself directly by Richmond.

R ichmond’s mature work came just after the passage of the 19th Amendment as her socialist beliefs drove her to paint in a style for the masses generally, and for women specifically. At the apex of her career she painted the muscular sculptor

Richmond’s single figures of women possess the space around them, but are not to be possessed; they command landscapes and interiors with their unmovable presence.

Cornelia Chapin (1940, National Academy of Design). After World War II, her art takes a sharp turn. She does not abandon her iconic, powerful women but now sets them set against artistic prints of worldwide violence in East and West of 1947 and self-harm in Lilias of 1950. She painted in an effort to create autonomy, not servitude, for women. The United States retreated

from women’s rights as Rosie the Riveter devolved into Father Knows Best . Richmond died in 1964, but her art of self-possessed women still demands that women stand up for themselves.

DAVID STEWART

1. Jonathon Stuhlman, Art Among Friends: Four Collections of American Art, exh. cat. (Hickory, NC : Goosepen Studio & Press, 2013), reproduction, 68.

Raid

Comstock’s

ANTHONY COMSTOCK’S

1906 RAID ON THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

In 1906, Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) was far better known than he is today. He gained his notoriety as an inspector for the U.S. Post Office Department, aiming to keep the mail free of “impurities,” and as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a private crimefighting organization founded by Christian evangelicals in 1873. Comstock’s involvement with the Art Students League began when the outraged mother of a League student sent him a copy of a student publication she had received in the mail titled The American Student of Art. Comstock decided that the illustrations on pages 161 and 168 met the legal standard for criminal obscenity, and so he traveled to the League with a police officer and arrested Anna Riebley, a young woman clerk who handed him a copy of the journal upon request.1

T he League community, largely scattered to cooler haunts on the day of the August raid, was shocked by the arrest. The American Student of Art

seemed an outrageous target for an obscenity prosecution. In 1905, a group of students began to organize the journal to demonstrate the sophisticated art education now offered in the United States. The journal included essays by and about League faculty, and practical advice. Although the first five issues of The American Student of Art were published, sold, and circulated both within and outside the League with no discernible controversy, the June edition offered two twists that led to the drama of Comstock’s raid.

OPPOSITE: COVER OF THE AMERICAN STUDENT OF ART, VOL. 1, NO. 6 (JUNE 1906). ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK ABOVE: “ANTHONY COMSTOCK.” NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS, THE MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH DIVISION OF ART, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS, PRINT COLLECTION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BELOW: “ANTHONY AT WORK,” LIFE 49 (FEBRUARY 14, 1907), 237

From January through May, the magazine was distributed only to those who purchased it. In June, however, the issue was merged with the course catalogue and sent to everyone on the League’s mailing list. The second, more important development was that the June issue included reproductions of student life

drawings showing full frontal male nudity and pubic hair. In Comstock’s world view, nothing could encourage libidinousness more than a picture of the organ of libidinousness itself. Indeed, it was quite unusual to see images of a penis—or pubic hair—during the Progressive era, outside of outright pornography.

“Boys, you know what to do with [Comstock]. Cartoon him until the cows come home…. Get at him! Get at him!” —Everett Shinn

Even if The American Student of Art had been an obvious source of obscenity, however, Comstock’s sympathetic and blameless young defendant was disastrous to the prosecution. Anna Riebley’s brief incarceration helped ensure that over the ensuing months, debate about the case raged in magazines and newspapers across the city and nation. The most powerful weapon wielded by League members against their nemesis was caricature. Everett Shinn reportedly called on his colleagues to keep drawing: “Boys, you know what to do with him. Cartoon him until the cows come home…. Get at him! Get at him!” 2 During 1906 and 1907, while the League case was debated and adjudicated, cartoons and jokes featuring Comstock abounded in newspapers and magazines.

W hen the case was finally heard in October of 1906, Comstock arrived to find the seats packed with female and male art students, with pencils ready to lampoon their archenemy once again. Comstock voiced his shock and dismay at seeing young people look at pictures of “unclothed beings” on the wall at the League. “Were they studying those pictures from motives of art? No, Sir; they were not. They were actually enjoying them.” 3 In response, the League’s attorney was blunt and personal: “Comstock during the most of his life has followed the single profession of looking for the worst…. He is a degenerate so far as the consideration of certain subjects is

concerned. He is blind to the beauties of life.”4 Finally, on December 31, 1906, the magistrate issued his verdict: the case was dismissed. Thus, 1907 rang in as the first year in which a publication with depictions of pubic hair and a penis had prevailed in a highly publicized American obscenity case.

A lthough Comstock had already managed to seize and destroy almost all copies of the June 1906 issue of The American Student of Art before the trial, his victory in this accomplishment, however, was fleeting. The images he managed to remove from the public sphere were more than matched by an outpouring of work featuring fully realized and anatomically complete nudes in following years made by artists who stood in opposition to his efforts, including League denizens George Bellows, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. Comstock’s actions at the Art Students League had made nudity a cause célèbre and great inspiration thanks to the plucky resistance of League members.5

AMY WERBEL

1. “Art Students’ League Raided by Comstock,” New York Times, August 3, 1906, 1. The clerk’s name was originally listed as “Jane Doe” at the time of arrest, and then as Anna Robinson for a time, in both cases to protect her identity. However, during the trial, the presumably real name Anna Riebley was used in court and entered the newspapers against Comstock’s wishes. In court and board of trustee documents, the last name appears alternately as Reibling or Riebley.

2. “Art Students Jeer at Comstock’s Raid,” New York Times, August 4, 1906, 7.

3. “Art League Raid Case Heard in Police Court,” New York Times , October 16, 1906, 5.

4. “Comstock Again Has a Brisk Day in Court,” New York Times, October 31, 1906, 7.

5. This story is told in greater detail in Amy Werbel, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

Woodstock School

THE ART STUDENT LEAGUE OF NEW YORK’S WOODSTOCK SCHOOL OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING, 1906–22

Woodstock, New York became a haven for landscape painters in the early decades of the twentieth century. Major interest in depicting the scenery of this area located in the Catskill Mountains was fomented by the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, which was in operation from 1906 to 1922 under the auspices of the Art Students League of New York. Birge Harrison and John F. Carlson were the most influential leaders of the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting.

I n 1905 the Art Students League of New York decided to move its summer school from Old Lyme, Connecticut, where it had been in operation for four years under the leadership of Frank Vincent DuMond. John F. Carlson, who was Harrison’s student at the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony in Woodstock in 1904, suggested moving the summer school to Woodstock and helped secure Harrison’s services as its leader and teacher. Under Harrison’s influence, Woodstock’s landscape painters favored working in a soft, ethereal Tonalist style, and picturing fragmentary or spare bits of nature (such as the corner of a field, a glimpse of a waterway or forest interior, a simple line of trees, or an empty or nearempty parcel of land). They were sensitive to abstract design, and often indicated the presence of human life and settlement by including a clearing, fence, path, vehicle,

barn, or house. Other concerns revolved around the evocation of mood, fluid brushwork, and a palette dominated by a single hue.

In May 1912, about a year after retiring from teaching at the League’s school, Harrison authored the article “Painting at Woodstock: The Work of a Group of American Landscape Painters” in the periodical Arts & Decoration, in which he praised the ambitions and accomplishments of the school. In addition to Harrison the group would include Carlson, Andrew Dasburg, Alfred Hutty, Frank Swift Chase, Paul Rohland, Caroline Speare (later the wife of Rohand), John Fulton Folinsbee, Florence Ballin (later the wife of artist Konrad Cramer), Harry Leith-Ross, Marion Bullard, Cecil Chichester, Allen Dean Cochran, Walter

The school had approximately twenty students in 1906, and well over two hundred students by 1912.

Goltz, George Macum, Anita M. Smith, Edna Thurber, John William Bentley, Neil McDowell Ives, Jean Paul Slusser, and Henry Mattson, among others.

C arlson’s appointment in 1911 as head of the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting led to a surge of growth and interest in the institution. The school had approximately twenty students in 1906, and well over two hundred students by 1912. Carlson gave critiques and lectures on Saturday morning, and developed a rigorous summer concours, where prizes were awarded to the most deserving students. In the winter an exhibition of the students’ summer work was held

at the League’s building in New York. Carlson’s early paintings are reminiscent of the soft, poetic Tonalist landscapes of his mentor Harrison. By about 1910 the artist began to paint with broad, thick strokes and to favor a brighter palette. By 1915 Carlson aimed to represent nature in an ideal state of beauty, regardless of its imperfections. He applied pure tones in juxtaposed color masses, and consistently sought to ground his paintings in a solid pictorial structure.

C arlson’s assistants were Frank Swift Chase and Walter Goltz, who in 1912 also oversaw construction of a permanent studio and dormitory

for students, and commonly served as the welcoming committee to students arriving in town. At the studio on Tinker Street students came to receive critiques, attend lectures, work on rainy days, hang their art, view exhibitions, and attend dances or social events.

No previous study or examination was needed to attend the school, and students could enter at any time in the season. Special attention was given to beginners. Class members were directed to a red or blue flag stuck in a map to indicate which spot they were to take. Students worked out in the fields, meadows, pasturelands, and rocky hillsides. Laden with sketch boxes, easels, canvases, umbrellas, and stools, they worked under the supervision of Carlson’s assistant, who enforced the ideas and suggestions made by Carlson in his weekly studio lectures in front of the class. Art students lodged in the various boarding houses around town, as well as in barns and various other farm buildings.

T he Woodstock School of Landscape

Painting suffered a period of decline from about 1917–1922. The United States’ entrance into World War I drew a flock of potential male students into the armed services, and a decrease in attendance would plague the school even after the war ended in late 1918. In an apparent attempt to attract a larger crop of students the League initiated an outdoor figure painting class in summer of 1918. John F. Carlson resigned his leadership of the school after League did not agree

to his demand that students have prior schooling in painting the human form before entering the class.

T he League’s hiring in the late teens of Charles Rosen and Andrew Dasburg led to the school becoming more modern and up to date. Rising conflicts between artists of different aesthetic persuasions in Woodstock may have played a role in the League’s decision to further alter the school in the face of modernism’s rise to favor at the association.

T he school was injected with a new look in 1921 with the hiring of George Bellows, Robert Henri, Eugene Speicher, and Leon Kroll to provide individual criticism at intervals in the course of the summer season in an outdoors figure class. The joint class failed to light a spark. The League made another go of it 1922 when it hired Hayley Lever to teach a summer class in landscape and modelling from the figure.

L ever’s class failed to generate great interest, and the League closed the school in the autumn. In December of 1922 the League sold its teaching studio to Marion Gowan Eames, who eventually sold the property to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which continue to be located there. The school’s closing was probably also due in major part to the lessened appeal to young painters of the school’s emphasis on open-air landscape painting and competition from other local art classes.

D uring the early 1940s the League school’s enrollment declined due to

students going off to fight in World War II, and it was on the brink of insolvency. The school came back to life with the passing of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the GI Bill, which provided servicemen with stipends to receive tuition for $500 a year plus books and supplies, and led to an influx of students coming to study. The school conducted summer classes from 1947 to 1979. The school obtained a lease on the property of the former National Youth Administration Center on Route 212 outside the village. It is home today to the Woodstock School of Art, which carries

on the traditions established in the town in the last century by the Art Students League of New York.

BRUCE WEBER

Various aspects of landscape painting and the growth and development of the historic Woodstock art colony are discussed and highlighted on the author’s website Learning Woodstock Art Colony: learningwoodstockartcolony.com

JOHN FABIAN CARLSON, AUTUMN BEECHES , C. 1908–15. OIL ON CANVAS, 40 × 52 IN. DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART, DALLAS ART ASSOCIATION PURCHASE. IMAGE COURTESY DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART

Georgia O’Keeffe

In a 1948 Life magazine photograph, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) stands beside a youthful portrait of herself that was painted forty years earlier by Eugene Speicher, an Art Students League classmate, who won a $50 Spencer Trask Portrait Painting Prize for the likeness. 1 The young O’Keeffe, who attended the League from 1907 to 1908, looks unflinchingly at the viewer, her heartshaped face framed by lush, dark, chinlength hair. 2 Dressed in a black smock, white blouse, and a rakishly angled bow tie, the young O’Keeffe projects alluring confidence, her unsmiling face fearless and purposeful. Twinned through time, the older O’Keeffe stands so close to the portrait that it appears as if the figures touch. The heads and torsos are the same height, one inside the painter’s frame, the other inside the photographer’s. Their outfits and stances are similar: they wear loose black coverings over contrasting white blouses and their facial expressions are virtually identical. Like her younger, painted self, the mature O’Keeffe is unsmiling, intense, and guardedly dignified. Arresting in its intimate doubled image of an “aging dignitary” publicly communing with her fresh-faced, open-eyed former self, the photograph invites viewers to contemplate what O’Keeffe was experiencing as she looked at herself rendered by Speicher, a powerful male peer who was an elected member of the Board of Control, the League’s selfgoverning management group, and a

monitor for William Merritt Chase’s portrait painting class.3

O’Keeffe had a lot to say about Speicher and her “year of painting” at the League when she created her own selfportrait in her 1976 memoir O’Keeffe. 4 She tells a riveting story about Speicher, which is illustrative of one of the book’s major themes: triumph in competitions with men. Speicher, she writes, “was one of the older students at the League and a very handsome young man” who “often stopped me” because he wanted “me to pose for him,” “but I wanted to work myself.” He was so persistent, she continues, that one day he literally would not let her pass “blocking the whole stairway.” When she continued to resist, he retorts, “It doesn’t matter what you do. I’m going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching painting

“Then there was a year of painting at the Art Students League in New York.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

in some girls’ school.” This anecdote underscores O’Keeffe’s self-portrayal as an artist who overcomes challenges, is fueled by ambition, and who refuses to allow men to block her advancement. But this story does something more: it conveys that the youthful freedom of learning how to create art and self in the heady, competitive atmosphere of the League remained with O’Keeffe for a lifetime.5

Imagine O’Keeffe unformed, as Speicher’s portrait helps us to do, in the early process of becoming. Although O’Keeffe reports that she did not “like school,” she had had many academic experiences studying and practicing artmaking before enrolling at the League.6 Beginning with private lessons from a local watercolorist, Sarah Mann, in her childhood town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and continuing in high school art classes,

she then advanced to a year of study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, living with family and taking classes in drawing, painting, lettering, and the history of painting and sculpture.

I llness, aptitude, and dwindling family finances may have been why O’Keeffe went to the League a year later.

“After the long fever sickness [typhoid] that I had in the summer,” O’Keeffe writes in an unpublished, autobiographical narrative, “my brother suggested that [my parents] send me to New York for the Winter. I was to study art at the Art Students League.” Whether the League had been recommended by her boarding school mentor, Elizabeth May Willis, a New York state native who may have attended the League in the 1890s and who, O’Keeffe says, knew of a “home for girls which cost very little money” where she could board, or because her brother, who was then in New York studying architecture, would be close by, when O’Keeffe arrived in the fall of 1907, she was twenty years old, expectant and impressionable, an artist in the making.7 Living independently for the first time in a teeming northeastern metropolis offering countless “frolics” and delights, O’Keeffe participated in an artistic culture and community unlike any other she had previously experienced. “We all worked hard,” League classmate Lila Wheelock Howard recalled, “and then we played hard. We had lots of fun.” 8 In private letters, public interviews, and her memoir, O’Keeffe implicitly suggests that it was during her “year of painting” at the

League that she discovered her magnetic sexual power and unquenchable drive. In her joyful descriptions of still-life painting instructor, William Merritt Chase, she also suggests that the League was where she learned that an artist could enact a “lively” professional identity, an artistry she went on to perfect. Chase, O’Keeffe recalled, “wore a high silk hat, rather tight fine brown suit, light-colored spats and gloves, a carnation in his lapel… There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exacting about him… His love of style—color—paint as paint—was lively.”

O’Keeffe went on to infuse her own “love of style” in modernist aesthetics, dress, decor, friendships, and daily choices.9

T he significance of the League in O’Keeffe’s seven-decade-long career is more about self-discovery than the skills she gained as a professional in training.

While at the League, she discovered her talent to attract other artists who helped propel her forward. She established friendships with educated, avant-garde New Women her own age who became epistolary companions and confidants; she forged ties with accomplished, exhibiting male artist teachers, who later supplied her with letters of recommendation for teaching positions; she experienced romantic relationships with fellow young male art students, which introduced her to the erotic thrill of sharing artistic passion; and she began to hone what one scholar calls her “vanguard modernist eye.” 10 Most important, perhaps, is that

O’Keeffe’s experience at the League, both in the way she perceived others and in the way they perceived her, enabled her to christen herself with a new identity: her League friends nicknamed her Patsy,

sometimes shortened to Pat, a name she adopted and occasionally used in her correspondence with fellow League students such as Florence Cooney and, later, Anita Pollitzer. In one long, revealing letter O’Keeffe wrote to Cooney two years after she had attended the League and was living in “regular girlstyle” with her family, she signs it “Pat,” and then remarks, “It seems so funny to say Pat any more— here I’m Georgia—Miss Georgia, Miss O’Keeffe and often Mrs. O’Keeffe—and I feel centuries older than Pat. I’ll be 23 next month—think of it!” In a postscript, she asks, “Tell me Floss—what happened to that picture Speicher painted of me?” 11 As early as 1910, the Speicher portrait was clearly connected to O’Keeffe’s memories of herself as a young artist on the cusp of maturity at the League.

Patsy, O’Keeffe’s Irish nickname, reminds us that while the League was a beloved and irreverent institution that nurtured the talent of innumerable artists, it was also a place that reflected the larger racial and gender power structures and attitudes of the outside world. “Everyone called her Patsy...because her name was O’Keeffe,” Lila Wheelock Howard recalled.12 Although perceptions of the Irish as unskilled laborers, servants, and alien, threatening hordes were changing by the first decade of the twentieth century, Howard’s comment suggests that “Irish” still meant “other.” O’Keeffe’s League peers, in effect, ethnicized her, imposing an identity on her that by the time she was photographed looking at Speicher’s 1908 painting, she had shed entirely. To my

knowledge, claiming Irish ancestry was never part of O’Keeffe’s carefully crafted artistic persona. Thus, while O’Keeffe’s “year of painting” at the League was an educational and cultural training ground that replicated gender, ethnic, and racial hierarchies in turn-of-the-twentiethcentury New York City, it also provided opportunities to advance her skills, win prizes and scholarships, find inspiring models of artistic self-fashioning, test out new identities, and realize that there “was definitely something [she] had to say.” 13

LINDA M. GRASSO

1. “People,” Life (December 6, 1948): 63. The Art Students’ League of New York Course Catalogue, 1907–08, 13.

2. O’Keeffe took classes at the League in October, November, and December 1907 and then in January, February, and April 1908. As a 1907–08 Still Life scholarship winner, she was selected to attend the League’s Outdoor Summer School in June.

3. “Displaying more courage than many another aging dignitary... Miss O’Keeffe boldly stood beside a romantic picture of herself done in 1908 by Eugene Speicher when she and he were both apprentices at the Art Students’ League.” “People,” Life (December 6, 1948): 63. “A letter from Mr. Eugene Speicher was read, tendering his resignation from the Board of Control. [handwritten addition] As he wished to be the monitor of Chase portrait class.” Art Students’ League Minutes, November 8, 1907.

4. Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Viking Press, 1976), unpaginated.

5. Georgia O’Keeffe. For a discussion of O’Keeffe’s memoir, see Linda M. Grasso, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Self-Portrait,” in Equal Under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and Twentieth-Century Feminism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 165–195.

6. Georgia O’Keeffe, unpaginated.

7. Georgia O’Keeffe, “My First Trip to New York” unpublished manuscript, 1983. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. archive.okeeffemuseum.org//repositories/2/resources/113. Anita Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 87.

8. “It is good to hear so much League news but Floss—I don’t think I would enjoy those old frolics now like I did.” Georgia O’Keeffe to Florence Cooney, November 3, 1908.

Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MSS 85, Box 187, folder 3145. “Interview with Lila Howard,” Laurie Lisle Research Material on Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Nevelson, 1902–90. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Box 1, Folder 9.

9. Georgia O’Keeffe, unpaginated. Wanda Corn, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum in association with DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2017). 10. Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years (New York: Abbeville Press, 2001), 40.

11. Georgia O’Keeffe to Florence Cooney, November 3, 1908; Georgia O’Keeffe to Florence Cooney, October 25, 1910, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive.

12. Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Washington Square Books, 1986), 43. “Interview with Lila Howard,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

13. Georgia O’Keeffe, unpaginated.

I am indebted to the archivists and librarians who aided my research: Stephanie Cassidy at the Art Students League; Elizabeth Ehrnst and Bonnie Steward at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; and John Drobnicki at York College, CUNY. I am always grateful to Nina Bannett, Nancy Berke, Carol Quirke, and Phyllis E. van Slyck for their incisive criticism and generative questions.

George Bellows

[Bellows] encouraged students to explore their potential, accept anything as a subject, and know that an artist is anyone “who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or,…in the best sense, more wonderful.”

In 1910, the Brooklyn Standard announced that the Art Students League had appointed a new teacher: “George Bellows, independent artist, …and a firm believer in individuality, and broad, free, unrestrained art.” 1 This appointment formalized the relationship between the League and Bellows (1882–1925).

Informally, League students had regularly lampooned Bellows’s work via its Society of Fakirs. In return, Bellows had enjoyed defeating the League’s baseball team while playing for a rival art school.

B ellows taught a morning class on Life Drawing and Painting and a Thursday Composition class. Energetic and seemingly able to succeed at anything he put his hand to, he encouraged students to explore their potential, accept anything as a subject, and know that an artist is anyone “who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or, …in the best sense, more wonderful.” 2

B ellows left teaching after his first year to focus on building a studio in his house, working on his paintings, enjoying time with his new wife, and getting ready to welcome their first child. He returned to the League in 1915 as a jurist and occasional lecturer. Bellows embraced a few overriding themes when speaking of his teaching theory. He felt it was vital that the young artist study

“all good art” and be aware of world art, but that, in the end, the artist must work alone. “What should interest us,” he said, “is exploration, not adaptation.” 3

W hen Bellows accepted a League post again in 1917–19, it was to take over his former mentor Robert Henri’s morning Portraiture class. His classes were crowded. Art came from a profoundly personal place for Bellows, and he had animated feelings about the art and politics of his time. A student described his class as “more exciting and more in tune with the things that were going on.”4

He loved debate on any art topic and had close friends among the faculty. He invited promising students to sit with him and his faculty friends at lunch in the League cafeteria. There, the students could listen to or participate in the talk on the current topic. Artist Katherine Schmidt, who sat in, remembered, “Bellows was a very warm person to young people; he loved them.” 5 Peggy Bacon described Bellows as popular (although not with her). “[He] was forceful, and he did sort of jolt a lot of people into doing a little bit better than they might have done.” 6

B ellows did the same for the League. Deeply invested in the institution, he cared about the school’s trajectory. He turned his innate dynamism toward encouraging it to foster and nurture

the new American Scene and modernism, cheering it for having George Luks and Rockwell Kent on the program.7 A favored theme in his lectures was that a student could accomplish a complete art education right there. There was no need to study in Europe: New York and the Art Students League had it all. After all, he would say, look at me. 8

ELIZABETH B. HOPKIN

1. “Independents’ Victory,” Brooklyn Standard Union , July 14, 1910, p. 6.

2. Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 462.

3. Estelle H. Ries, “The Relation of Art to Every-day Things,” Arts and Decoration (July 1921): 159. The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania. archive.org/ details/artsdecoration1516newy.

4. Paul Cummings, “The Art Students League, Part I,” Archives of American Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1973): 19. jstor.org/stable/1557021.

5. Cummings, 19.

6. Oral history interview with Peggy Bacon, May 8, 1973. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

7. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Robert Henri Papers (YCAL MSS 100) Series 1: Correspondence, Henri, Robert>Bellows, George 1917—Sept–Nov., November 21, 1917.

8. Oral history interview with Peggy Bacon, May 8, 1973.

ABOVE: GEORGE BELLOWS, FOUR FRIENDS (SECOND STATE), 1921. LITHOGRAPH, 13 × 10 5/8 IN. COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO, MUSEUM PURCHASE, DERBY AND HOWALD FUNDS, 2021.025.004 BELOW: PEGGY BACON, THE GEORGE BELLOWS CLASS , 1918. DRYPOINT, 8 × 10 IN. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, HARRIS BRISBANE DICK FUND, 1926 (26.10.11) © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, IMAGE SOURCE: ART RESOURCE, NY

Theresa Bernstein

In 1911, Theresa Bernstein (1890–2002), a young, aspiring painter from Philadelphia, moved to New York City, where she sought to establish herself as a professional artist. At the time, she had already received most of her formal art education, having studied at the Philadelphia School of Design (now Moore College of Art & Design) and briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In her memoir, The Journal, she recalls arriving in the city knowing “no one in art” and having no friends to give her guidance. She writes, “My greatest resource was to find a way to be painting, which did open doors.” 1 As one of her first steps to opening doors for herself, she enrolled in the Art Students League. In August, she signed up for a month’s study at the League’s summer

school in Woodstock, New York; and in the fall, she registered in William Merritt Chase’s painting classes to study figure and portrait painting.

C hase, then in his final year of teaching, cut an impressive figure for a young Bernstein. She remembered being invited to his studio on Fifth Avenue, where he demonstrated the techniques

“My greatest resource was to find a way to be painting, which did open doors.” —Theresa Bernstein

of the Old Masters, and she recalled him comparing her technique to that of Frans Hals. A keen and passionate observer of people throughout her life, Bernstein, at the age of ninety-four, could still vividly recall Chase’s appearance and character. She describes, “He was a very dapper individual, of average height in a pinstriped suit with a white carnation in his lapel, a grey moustache and goatee, and the pince-nez with a black silk ribbon.”

She remembered him as “an individual with great courtesy and charm” and as still having “that international art flavor,” which he acquired while studying in Europe. 2

B ernstein may have connected with Chase’s appreciation for still life and his maxim, “Paint a still life before breakfast,” which he was fond of saying in his classes.3 Even before meeting Chase, she recalled working on “a still life of a fish à la William Chase” while going to art school in Philadelphia. 4 Still life remained a recurring genre throughout Bernstein’s long career, from some of her early canvases that appear to be directly inspired by Chase’s still-life paintings, to the deeply personal and meaningful “Symbolic Documentaries” that she began painting around 1919, and finally to the dynamic renderings of flowers that she frequently made for friends and visitors when she was already over a hundred years old.5

T hough her time at the League was brief, Bernstein soon went on to become—for a time—a successful artist known especially for her paintings of urban life that held greater affinity with the gritty realism of the Ashcan School than with the genteel impressionism favored by Chase. She finally found “a way to be painting,” but with a little help from the Art Students League, which provided a small stepping stone into the New York art world.

ELSIE HEUNG

1.

2.

3.

4. Ibid., 23.

Theresa Bernstein Meyerowitz, The Journal (New York: Cornwall Books, 1991), 39.

Theresa Bernstein, “William Merritt Chase (1849–1916),” in pamphlet “Etchings and Paintings: William Meyerowitz/Theresa Bernstein,” (Paterson, NJ: Paterson Public Library, 1984), n.p.

Meyerowitz, The Journal, 39.

Norman Rockwell

The celebrated creator of magazine covers and illustrations for stories, books, and advertisements, American illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) was an astute visual storyteller and a masterful painter with a distinct personal message. Appreciated by millions, his fictional realities painted for the pages of popular publications were ubiquitous during the mid-twentieth century, a compelling picture of the life to which many aspired. “I love to tell stories in pictures. For me, the story is the first thing and the last thing,” said the artist, whose carefully narrated compositions were sparked by a lifelong passion for art and his foundational studies at the Art Students League.

R ockwell’s choice to pursue art as a career had influences from both sides of his family. His father, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, made copies of drawings by famous artists in his spare time, and Rockwell often joined him in sketching. Howard Hill, Rockwell’s maternal grandfather, earned his living painting meticulous portraits of hunting dogs, family pets, homes, and wild game in lush landscapes. Hill had an impact on young Rockwell, who reflected that his grandfather’s approach to art was “one of the reasons I paint in such great detail.” 1 Even more permanently etched in his memory were images evoking the works of Charles Dickens that were read aloud at home in the evenings. Inspired to draw as he listened, Rockwell continued to read Dickens throughout his life, absorbing

the author’s worldview and his rich and varied narratives.

In 1907, when Rockwell was thirteen years old, he and his family moved to Mamaroneck, a suburban village ten miles north of New York City. With the realization that his drawings impressed people, he became determined to attend art school. “During my first year in [Mamaroneck High School] I went every Saturday to study art at the Chase School,” Rockwell wrote.2 In 1910, during his sophomore year, Rockwell began fulltime studies at the National Academy of Design, where students in the antique class learned the fundamentals by drawing from classical sculptures and prints before being promoted to life class.

A fter “tedious and dull” 3 sessions drawing from plaster casts eight hours a day for several months, Rockwell finally had the opportunity to draw from life. Each day, students worked from the model, who took the same pose for two weeks. Though classes were free, Rockwell found them to be too “stiff and scholarly” for his taste, so in October 1911 at the age of seventeen, he made the decision to enroll instead at the Art Students League on West 57th Street, where he found relationships between students and teachers to be vital and inspiring.

T he League was unique in that it offered classes in both fine and applied arts. Rockwell first signed up for courses in Illustration and Composition with Ernest L. Blumenschein, 4 but found his step-bystep approach to process less appealing

than he had imagined. He then registered for Life Drawing for Men taught by the League’s most prestigious drawing and anatomy teacher, George B. Bridgman. Tackling his drawing assignments with a dedication that earned him the nickname “the Deacon,” Rockwell became one of Bridgman’s most accomplished students.

B ridgman’s program was intensive, and his teaching method was to correct student assignments by drawing directly over their work to clarify his points. “Occasionally, Mr. Bridgman would sketch the head, a muscle, the pelvis on the side of my drawing to show me what he meant. I treasure those little sketches….” Rockwell wrote. Once when asked why he looked so deflated after a grading session, Rockwell replied, “I’m just no good, that’s all,” but Bridgman told him not to worry about being number one. “Be an individual,” 5 he emphasized.

In a humorous drawing, Rockwell

depicts himself as an art student being observed by a life drawing model smoking a cigar. Though exaggerated, this scene was also accurate—during breaks between long and short poses it would not have been unusual for models to scrutinize student work. As described in Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy, a seminal instructional reference first published in 1920, artists were advised to “think in masses, define them in line,” which Rockwell took to heart.

A rare Rockwell drawing believed to have been created in Bridgman’s class reveals his precocious skill, emphasizing anatomical structure through “line, tone, and directional lighting to create the illusion of mass and volume.” For student reference, a full human skeleton was a permanent fixture in Bridgman’s classroom. “How many muscles d’you think it takes to move your little finger?

Eleven…Eleven,” Bridgman would say. Then, according to Rockwell, he would

For Rockwell, illustration was a profession with “a great tradition, a profession I could be proud of. I guess my temperament and my abilities were the other part…. I wasn’t a rebel.”

rotate the chest of the skeleton and move the arms about, declaring it to be “a damned wonderful thing.” 6

At the League, Rockwell became friends with the gifted young draughtsman and illustrator, Edmund F. Ward, with whom he shared classes and studio space. The two spurred each other on, and when their first studio on the west side of Manhattan was discovered to be a brothel, they quickly vacated for a space under the Brooklyn Bridge. A fellow Saturday Evening Post illustrator, Ward launched his career before turning twenty, and went on to work for many prominent publications.

In addition to his studies with Bridgman, Rockwell registered for illustration classes with Thomas Fogarty, which met daily from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fogarty’s fine narrative pen-and-ink drawings appeared regularly in books and magazines, and he became an influential figure for Rockwell and a generation of American illustrators. A practiced and practical teacher, Fogarty encouraged students to move into the illustration marketplace as quickly as possible. His assignments mimicked those that might be received from a publication at that time, and he required students to develop original compositions using costumes and props. Fogarty would “sketch the outlines of a story and discuss how to illustrate it with us—what scene in the story should we select, the characters, how they

dressed…. He’d show us illustrations which Pyle or Abbey or Remington had made for the story, pointing out how they’d done a line drawing instead of a wash drawing.” 7

Insistent upon authenticity, Fogarty emphasized the importance of research and reliable visual reference. “If the author sat a character in a Windsor chair, the chair in the illustration had to be just that, even if it meant that we all had to go up to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art] to find out what a Windsor chair looked like,” Rockwell recalled.8

To obtain assignments for his students and help them build portfolios, Bridgman reached out to magazine and book publishers that were willing to feature sufficiently accomplished work by fledgling illustrators. “When you’re breaking into illustration your first concern is to convince art directors that you can be trusted to do an acceptable job and deliver it on time,” Rockwell said. “If your work has been published…the art director will…try you out with some unimportant bit of illustration. After that, if you’re good, you’ll get more jobs.” 9

At the end of his first year in the League’s illustration class, Rockwell received the Thomas Fogarty Award and scholarship for The Deserted Village, a work based on a poem by Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith, first published in 1770. The piece describes the decline of a rural village and the immigration of many of its residents to

America. Rockwell’s moody charcoal drawing reflects the young artist’s ability to set an emotional tone without adhering to literal interpretation. Lines from the poem describing a preacher’s calling are inscribed at the bottom of Rockwell’s illustration: “But in his duty prompt at every call / He watched, he wept, he prayed and felt for all.”

In 1912, during his second year at the League, Rockwell was a monitor in Bridgman’s class, an opportunity that he relished. In exchange for free tuition, he gave teaching demonstrations and assisted with classroom maintenance and administrative tasks. But much of Rockwell’s time that year was spent seeking professional illustration assignments, as he was anxious to launch his career and improve his finances.

He visited New York publishers with little success until an art director at the American Book Company finally conceded to give him some work. Rockwell’s first published illustrations were a series of drawings created for Founders of Our Country, a 1912 history book by Fanny Eliza Coe. Rockwell was assigned five scenes illustrating Samuel de Champlain’s expeditions to the new world, and two were ultimately chosen for the textbook. The art director’s initial review was critical, and Rockwell was asked to redraw an image featuring Champlain in Quebec—a lesson in persistence and the importance of satisfying client

ABOVE, LEFT: NORMAN ROCKWELL, “AN ENGLISH FLEET CAME SAILING UP

expectations. The experience had a formidable impact on Rockwell, as he resolved never to let a work leave his studio without careful review.

With Fogarty’s recommendation, Rockwell was introduced to the New York publisher McBride, Nast & Company, which hired him to create eight illustrations for an edition of C. H. Claudy’s Tell-Me-Why: Stories About

Mother Nature. Rockwell considered this to be his first substantial commission, and many assignments for children’s magazines followed. No Doubt She Told Him Her Opinion of It, When They Were So Very Confidential Together Behind the Curtain, also in the museum’s collection, is a 1912 student drawing inspired by a scene from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In Rockwell’s portrayal,

Scrooge’s nephew courts a young woman during a game of blind man’s bluff, a scene recounted by the Ghost of Christmas Present in Dickens’s story. Beyond the rigorous training that his teachers at the League provided, Rockwell was passionate about the school’s history and proud to be among its illustrious roster of artists and teachers. Legends of illustrator Howard Pyle’s time at the League as a drawing and composition student, from 1876 to 1878, were still fresh when Rockwell attended, widely shared among students and faculty. Longtime models who were said to have posed for Pyle were questioned about his painting methods and materials, and he was admired for his focus on historical and literary themes rather than advertising, which was viewed as too commercial.

Though Rockwell and his fellow students vowed not to go down that road, their idealism did not ultimately stand—in addition to his editorial illustrations, at least one quarter of Rockwell’s body of

four thousand works promoted the wares of American businesses and corporations. T he blend of historical prominence and contemporary relevance that the League provided was meaningful to Rockwell, whose experiences there were warmly and clearly recounted in My Adventures as an Illustrator, his 1960 autobiography. For Rockwell, illustration was a profession with “a great tradition, a profession I could be proud of. I guess my temperament and my abilities were the other part…. I wasn’t a rebel.” 10

STEPHANIE HABOUSH PLUNKETT

1. Norman Rockwell with Thomas Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator: The Definitive Edition (New York: Abbeville Press, 2019), 32.

2. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 55.

3. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 70.

4. Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 40.

5. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 83.

6. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 82.

7. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 89.

8. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 92.

9. Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 93.

10 Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, 76.

Hildreth Meière

“The League is my only contact with other artists—and of course I love the place for its own sake.” 1

—Hildreth Meière

The fondness that Hildreth Meière (1892–1961) held for the Art Students League of New York is evident in this excerpt from a letter written to her mother in November 1923. Meière first came to the League in 1912 after spending a year in Florence studying drawing and painting with an English artist.2

A s a League member she was following in the footsteps of her mother, the former Marie Hildreth, who had studied there from 1888 to 1891.3 Little is known about Hildreth Meière’s early days at the League, and her time there was cut short by the family’s move to California in 1913 for her father’s health. 4

I n early 1916, twenty-three-yearold Hildreth Meière returned to New York by herself to take advantage of an opportunity to design costumes and sets for the theater.5 Within days after her arrival, she visited the Art Students League to inquire about the availability of studios. 6 By early April, she was filling a vacancy on the Board of Control, a position her mother had held in 1891.7 Meière would go on to serve six more terms on the board.

M eière’s other activities at the League included the production of the catalogue from which works for the final exhibition were chosen. 8 “It’s a hard job—because the idea isn’t so much to pick out what you like as to pick

out what’s representative of the class and the instructors point of view,” she explained to her mother.9 After a fire seriously damaged the building housing the League, Meière was appointed to a committee to evaluate the safety of the facility. 10 She and another committee member “went down the fire escape and over the roofs and found that with some changes and one more fire escape, it could be made comparatively safe.” 11

I n 1921, Meière was invited to participate in a competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune to select an artist to paint murals for the city room of the newspaper’s new printing plant. Eligibility requirements included enrollment in the Art Institute of Chicago School of Art for the 1921–22 academic year. 12 Meière’s time in Chicago could not have been more

different than her experience at the Art Students League. She was “miserable and unhappy about everything” and described the school as “over-organized”

and “self-complacent.” As she told her mother, “Nobody seems to know that I’m alive or to care, and nobody says a word to me from morning till night. You can’t imagine anything more different from the friendly Old League.” 13

Upon her return to New York, Meière reestablished her connection with the League and the following year was elected Woman’s Vice President. “I’m really very much pleased at what I really consider an honor—and will do my best to make good in the position,” she wrote. 14 She was especially looking forward to the League’s upcoming 50th anniversary celebration and the publication being planned to commemorate the event. 15 Would she have imagined at that time that 100 years later she would be honored in another publication celebrating the League’s 150th anniversary?

KATHLEEN MURPHY SKOLNIK

1. Hildreth Meière, letter to mother, November 23, 1923, Hildreth Meière Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Genevieve Parkhurst, “An Artist Who Happens to Be a Woman: The Remarkable Career of Hildreth Meière,” Pictorial Review 27, no. 12 (September 1926): 2; Meière, “Dossier,” unpublished article, c. 1946, Hildreth Meière Papers.

3. Student Registration Records, Art Students League of New York; Parkhurst, “Artist Who Happens,” 106.

4. Parkhurst, “Artist Who Happens,” 106; Meière, “Dossier.”

5. Parkhurst, “Artist Who Happens,” 106.

6. Meière, letter to mother, February 5, 1916.

7. Meière, letters to mother, April 4, 1916 and November 23, 1923.

8. Meière, letters to mother, May 18, 1917 and March 1, 1920.

9. Meière, letter to mother, February 1, 1920.

10. Meière, letter to mother, February 3, 1920.

11. Meière, letter to mother, January 9, 1921.

12. Robert B. Harshe, associate director, Art Institute of Chicago, letter to Meière, August 24, 1921, Hildreth Meière Papers.

13. Meière, letter to mother, November 9, 1921.

14. Meière, letter to mother, November 23, 1923.

15. Meière, letter to mother, November 12, 1923.

Lou Rogers

Lou Rogers (1879–1952) was one of the most prolific and impactful cartoonists of the American women’s suffrage movement. Born Annie Lucasta “Lou” Rogers, she was raised in a family of seven siblings on a farm in the quiet lumber town of Patten, Maine. Rogers had a passion for drawing—and for stirring the pot—early on, frequently caricaturing her teachers in grade school. She came of age in the era of the New Woman and felt a patriotic drive to explore the uncharted potential of American women: carving out a role in art and politics at the service of human progress.

Rogers taught at a district school in Maine until she saved up enough money to leave home to enroll in the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston, an innovative school for teachers where the number of female students outnumbered the male. She eventually moved to New York City on her own around the turn of the century, as she viewed the teeming city as an epicenter of cartooning, her chosen trade for self-expression. A vivacious, hearty, and outspoken woman with a clear vision for her destiny, she approached editors at newspapers and humor magazines to try to find a place for herself in the male-

dominated world of publishing and found more success by disguising her feminine name to simply “Lou.” By 1908, she broke into humor magazines with published work at Judge and the New York Call. She enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in 1912, first studying antique drawing with George B. Bridgman and costume sketching with Eugene Speicher. Around this time, she

“It is not art as art that I am interested in; it’s art as a chance to help women see their own problems; help bring out the things that are true in the traditions that have bound them; help show up the things that are false.” —Lou Rogers 1

became involved with the newly minted Heterodoxy Club, a radical feminist group formed in Greenwich Village to debate and promote women’s suffrage. She continued to study life drawing with Bridgman for the next several years, through 1916. These classes served her well, especially in honing her skills at gesture drawing, as she would become known for her public political art performances.

H aving become a regular contributor of cartoons to the Woman’s Journal, The Suffragist, Woman Citizen, and Woman Voter, and now fully embedded in the women’s suffrage movement in Manhattan, her fearless and exuberant personality made her an ideal person for soapbox “chalk talks.” At the corner of Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway, 137th Street and Willis Avenue, among the bustle of Columbus Circle, and elsewhere, Rogers and her compatriots could be found in the evenings attracting attention

as she lectured atop a makeshift platform about women’s rights issues while illustrating her points through cartoons on large sheets of paper to captive crowds.

In 1917 when activist Margaret Sanger founded the Birth Control Review, she hired Lou Rogers as its art director. Rogers’s cartoons were among the most unapologetic of those produced during the movement, and she continued her work for Birth Control Review until 1922.

L ater in life, Rogers returned to her rural upbringing, settling down on a farm in Brookfield, Connecticut, with her husband, Howard Smith. She published a series of illustrated verses in the Ladies Home Journal called “The Gimmicks,” which Smith colored. She wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books about the adventures of animals and hosted a radio program for NBC called “Animal News Club” in the 1930s. In 1952, Rogers passed away from multiple sclerosis at the age of seventy-three. She is remembered as one of the female pioneers of political cartooning.

CAITLIN MCGURK

1. Cartoons Magazine, February 1913

Lloyd Goodrich

When I was a young painter, two of my favorite art books were a large-format monograph on Raphael Soyer and a double-volume biography on Thomas Eakins, both written by Lloyd Goodrich (1897–1987). According to the Dictionary of Art Historians, “Goodrich established American art as a significant genre worthy of its own scholarship and appreciation. He elevated the reputations of Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder as bellwethers of American nineteenth-century painting.” 1 I was particularly fond of the Eakins monograph, originally published in 1933 and updated in 1982. Goodrich had befriended Eakins’s widow and interviewed people who’d known him. The biography is beautifully written and breathes with a lively appreciation.

B efore he was a scholar, author, curator, and director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Goodrich was an art student. His initial inspiration was a childhood friend in Nutley, New Jersey: Reginald Marsh. “He was my best friend from the time that we were both born practically. He was a year younger than l, and we were very close alwaysright from childhood on until his death. I think he taught me more about art— well, learned more about art through my association with the Marsh family than anything up to the time when I actually went to art school.”

G oodrich attended classes at the Art Students League of New York from 1913 through 1918, studying the antique, life

drawing, painting, and illustration with Frank Vincent DuMond, Thomas Fogarty, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George B. Bridgman. Of the latter, he recalled responding to a critique by saying, “Well, Mr. Bridgman, I don’t see it that way!,” to which Bridgman replied, “Consult an oculist!” Goodrich got along better with Miller. “He was a remarkable personality, one of the most clear-headed speakers and thinkers on art that I have ever come in contact with.” 2

Unsure that he could make a living as an artist, Goodrich eventually turned to writing and, early on, authored a lengthy article that reappraised Winslow Homer. Books on Eakins, Homer, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, Marsh, and Soyer followed. He helped oversee the Public Works of Art Project in New York during the Depression and championed American artists in a multitude of ways, chief among them as the Whitney’s director from 1958 to 1968. In 1954, he chaired a committee that recommended government sponsorship of artists, which would see fruition the following decade with the formation of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I n 1965, Soyer painted a large canvas—a realist manifesto—titled  Homage to Thomas Eakins. The painting, now in the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, features a seated gathering of artists with a shared respect for Eakins, including Hopper, Jack Levine, Edwin Dickinson, Marsh,

OPPOSITE, LEFT: LLOYD GOODRICH, UNTITLED, C. 1913–14. CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 24 1/2 × 18 1/2 IN.

“Goodrich established American art as a significant genre worthy of its own scholarship and appreciation. He elevated the reputations of Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder as bellwethers of American nineteenth-century painting.” —Dictionary of Art Historians

and Soyer himself. Behind them hang several works by Eakins, most notably the  Gross Clinic. Presiding at the center of the composition, standing as if about to lecture, is Goodrich, his position comparable to that of Samuel Gross in Eakins’s painting. As a tribute to an art historian, it is exceptional in American painting.

JERRY WEISS

1. “Goodrich, Lloyd,” Dictionary of Art Historians , arthistorians.info/goodrichl/. 2. Oral history interview with Lloyd Goodrich, June 13, 1962–March 25, 1963. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/oral-history-interview-lloyd-goodrich-13038.

Marjorie Phillips

In her final memoirs, [Phillips] summed it up best when she proclaimed, “More important than all the pattern, design, solid form and everything else—is the spirit, the vitality, the life.”

Marjorie Phillips (1894–1985) discovered her passion for painting from a young age. The chance to study at the Art Students League beginning at age nineteen was one she fiercely pursued despite it being “against her father’s wishes.”1 Thanks to the support of her mother and her two artist uncles, Gifford and Reynolds Beal, who had trained at the League, she was able to convince her parents to enroll. Her older sister, Eleanor, shared an interest in studying art, and to ensure that one of them was always available to assist their unwell mother with the care of their younger siblings, Marjorie and Eleanor had to take turns attending classes, commuting into Manhattan from their family’s home in Ossining, New York. 2

A d isciplined and committed student, Marjorie continued her studies at the Art Students League intermittently over seven years, from 1913 through 1920, studying with several teachers, including Frank Vincent DuMond, George B. Bridgman, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Boardman Robinson.3 Years later, when reflecting on the significance of her training at the League, Marjorie acknowledged that the one teacher from whom she had “gained the most” was Robinson, the noted political cartoonist who joined the faculty in 1919. 4 In his class on Drawing and Pictorial Design, Marjorie found him “outstanding” and “encouraging.” She was particularly taken with his concept of “rhythmic continuity.” As she

later explained, “It means caught up and working together, not just scattered. It has to do with overall pattern, direction, eye travel. That’s what Boardman Robinson stressed. He had a gift for putting his ideas into words.” 5

M arjorie’s skillful application of Robinson’s idea of “rhythmic continuity” is particularly striking in her multifigural composition Emerging from an Air Raid Shelter. 6 Within her small canvas measuring only seventeen inches long, Marjorie built up a tightly knit triangulation of the figures in space; they stand shoulder to shoulder, bound together within the clutches of their outstretched arms.

T he poignancy of Emerging from an Air Raid Shelter left an indelible impression on Duncan Phillips, Marjorie’s husband and founder of The Phillips Collection, who described it in

notes for a lecture he gave not long after it was made: “Note the mixture of fright and fight in the little boy, the stoical watchfulness of the anxious mothers, the calm of the old blind man who is beyond fear, a symbol of patience and endurance…. The group builds up into a Unit—a compact stronghold of the spirit, showing how people in peril draw closer to each other for comfort and strength.” 7

T he painting shares the graphic immediacy and sensitivity for human suffering seen in Robinson’s wartime illustrations that accompanied John Reed’s book, The War in Eastern Europe (1916).

M arjorie carried Robinson’s lessons with her throughout her artistic career. She grew to understand that what made a picture successful was not simply its design, but more importantly, its authentic expression of the vitality of life. In her final memoirs, Marjorie summed it up best when she proclaimed, “More important than all the pattern, design, solid form and everything else—is the spirit, the vitality, the life.” 8

ELSA SMITHGALL

1. Marjorie Phillips, cited in Sylvia Partridge, unpublished notes from interview with Marjorie Phillips, cited in Partridge, letter to Erica Passantino, February 11, 1994, Marjorie Phillips Vertical File, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC . Partridge had interviewed her aunt for her book, Marjorie Phillips and Her Paintings , ed. Sylvia Partridge (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985). See also Marjorie Phillips, Duncan Phillips and His Collection (1970), 3. For more on the influence of her uncles Gifford and Reynolds Beal, see Paul Cummings, Oral history interview with Marjorie Phillips, June 27, 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Marjorie Phillips, Duncan Phillips and His Collection , 4.

3. Marjorie Phillips student registration record, Art Students League Registration Records, Archives of the Art Students League of New York.

4. Marjorie Phillips, Duncan Phillips and His Collection , 3.

5. Marjorie Phillips and Her Paintings , ed. Sylvia Partridge, 13.

6. While the painting represents a major departure from Marjorie’s typical impressionist landscapes and still lifes, it nevertheless held an important place in her oeuvre as demonstrated by her decision to have it included in her 1941 solo exhibition, “Paintings by Marjorie Phillips,” at the Bignou Gallery (March 31–April 18, 1941) that subsequently traveled to The Phillips Collection (May 11–June 1, 1941). She later painted a larger version of the subject, After an Air Raid (1944–45) that was similarly shown in numerous exhibitions, including “Exhibition of American Paintings,” Tate Gallery, London (1946).

7. See Duncan Phillips, unpublished notes for lecture, “Arts in War Time,” October 1942, The Phillips Collection Archives, Washington, DC . Phillips mentions the painting in his notes for SLIDE II “British War Relief Poster by Marjorie Phillips”: “This poster is an enlarged photograph from a distinguished painting by Marjorie Phillips which was exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago and other galleries. The painting was finished while Britain was fighting practically alone, and it celebrates the heroism of the poor people of London and other English cities two years ago when the bombing was at its worst.” More research needs to be done to determine if there was a newspaper documentary image related to the subject as well as the circumstances that led to its reproduction as a British World War II relief poster.

8. Marjorie Phillips and Her Paintings , 113.

Ruth Reeves

During World War I, Crawford hired Reeves to produce illustrations for Women’s Wear while trying to convince the fashion industry to mitigate its Eurocentrism by drawing upon the nation’s museum collections.

Multitalented and capacious, Ruth Reeves (1892–1966) pursued a career of more than fifty years as an illustrator, a textile designer, an educator, an arts administrator, a consultant, and a researcher. She is frequently celebrated for her 1930 W. & J. Sloane furnishing fabrics depicting modern American life, her traveling exhibitions displaying her designs alongside Guatemalan textiles which inspired her, and her efforts in founding and leading the New Deal’s influential Index of American Design. 1 Throughout her career, Reeves collected, documented, and reinterpreted ethnographic and historic materials to create innovative cultural products.

Reeves initiated this enduring practice and established her career between 1914 and 1920 while associated with the Art Students League. Morris De Camp Crawford, a textile scholar and design editor of Women’s Wear (later Women’s Wear Daily), and Stewart Culin, an ethnologist and curator at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (later the Brooklyn Museum) influenced her development in these generative years.2

B orn in California, Reeves won a scholarship to the ASL after previously attending the Pratt Institute and the California School of Design, which would later become the San Francisco Institute of Art.3 Back in New York, Reeves studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the ASL , developing her graphic

skills while pursuing professional opportunities in the textile trade. 4

D uring World War I, Crawford hired Reeves to produce illustrations for Women’s Wear while trying to convince the fashion industry to mitigate its Eurocentrism by drawing upon the nation’s museum collections.5 Crawford and Culin provided industry insiders, including Reeves, with access to Asian, Indian, and “primitive American” costumes and textiles at the Brooklyn Museum. 6 Through creating elegant images promoting Crawford’s reformist agenda, Reeves established her abiding passion for studying and interpreting the globe’s diverse material heritage.7

WILLIAM D. MOORE

1. “Ruth Reeves Performs ‘Noble Experiment,’” The Art Digest 5, no. 6 (December 15, 1930): 21; Noga Bernstein, “Maya Modern: Ruth Reeves and the Guatemalan Exhibition of Textiles and Costumes ,” American Art 34, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 44–71; William D. Moore, “’You’d Swear they Were Modern’: Ruth Reeves, the Index of American Design, and the Canonization of Shaker Material Culture,” Winterthur Portfolio 47, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1–34.

2. Lauren D. Whitley, “Morris De Camp Crawford and the ‘Designed in America’ Campaign, 1916–1922,” in Creating Textiles: Makers, Methods, Markets: Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America 215 (1998): 410–419; “Stewart Culin is Won by Brooklyn Institute,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Feb. 18, 1903): 3; Stanford M. Lyman, “Two Neglected Pioneers of Civilizational Analysis: The Cultural Perspectives of R. Steward Culin and Frank Hamilton Cushing,” Social Research 49, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 690–729; “Robert Stewart Culin,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (April 29, 1929): 8; “Stewart Culin, 70, Dies; Was Curator of Museum Here,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle , April 8, 1929: 28.

3. “School of Design Shows Its Work,” San Francisco Call and Post (May 18, 1912): 12.

4. Whitney Blausen, “Textiles Designed by Ruth Reeves,” (master’s thesis, SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, 1992: 4–8.

5. Blausen, 13; Whitley.

6. M. D. C. Crawford, “Special Design Room at Brooklyn Museum,” Women’s Wear (October 22, 1918): 2; “Brooklyn Going Ahead of Paris in Setting Fashions for U.S.” Brooklyn Citizen (March 6, 1923): 2; M. D. C. Crawford, “Modern Costumes from Museum Documents,” Women’s Wear (April 27, 1918): 12–13; See Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928 (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2013).

7. “Creating Modern American Fashions by Getting Ideas from Old Documents, Etc,” Women’s Wear (August 31, 1917): 34.

OPPOSITE: RUTH REEVES, “THREE IDEAS FOR NEGLIGEES SUGGESTED BY MUSEUM DOCUMENTS” PUBLISHED IN WOMEN’S WEAR , DECEMBER 19, 1918 ABOVE: RUTH REEVES, DRESS (FRONT), C. 1930. LINEN, PLASTIC (BAKELITE). THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, PURCHASE, GOULD FAMILY FOUNDATION GIFT, IN MEMORY OF JO COPELAND, 2018 (2018.149)

Peggy Bacon

Margaret Frances “Peggy” Bacon (1895–1987) was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and died in Kennebunk, Maine, at the age of 91. Her life, which spanned much of the twentieth century, yielded a prolific body of work across the visual and literary arts. Drawn to what she called the “absurdity of expressions and situations,” Bacon documented her experiences in irreverent and incisive images— especially of the artistic landscapes in New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. 1

Bacon’s father, Charles Roswell Bacon, and her mother, Elizabeth Chase Bacon, were artists who had met in 1890 at the Art Students League. The vibrant art school would later play a similarly formative role in their daughter’s life. After first enrolling in the School of Applied Design for Women and the School of Fine and Applied Arts (later known as the Parsons School of Design), Bacon found a better fit at the League, where she would remain from 1915 through 1920. She attended life and composition classes led by instructors Kenneth Hayes Miller and John Sloan, portraiture with George Bellows, and painting under Andrew

Dasburg. Sloan, whom she described as “fun and caustic and derisive and snarly and wonderful and delightful,” made the strongest impression. 2

T he Art Students League was a wellspring of ideas and relationships for the young artist. There, she met lifelong friends like Dorothea Schwartz, Katherine Schmidt, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Niles Spencer, and her future husband,

Alexander Brook. It was also at the League where Bacon honed her witty documentary style, depicting her daily experiences with detail and gentle satire. In her words: “I wanted to set down as much as I could of life around me…. What amused me was important. That was my impulse.” 3

It was while studying at the League that the artist began to practice

drypoint printmaking, the medium for which she is perhaps best known today. Although it was not among the courses offered there, Bacon taught herself the technique with an unused printing press in the League’s basement. She quickly found that drypoint suited her love of artistic struggle. In her words: “The harder the work, the more intense was my pleasure in it.”4

To make a drypoint, a diamondpointed needle is used to carve lines directly onto a bare metal printing plate—a process that differs from etching, which involves drawing a needle through a layer of soft waxy ground that has been applied to the plate surface. As Bacon explained, “I never cottoned to drawing in wax, but I loved digging in.” 5 Bacon would continue to work in this medium until the 1950s, with the decade of the 1930s marking her most prolific printmaking period.

T he Lunch Room (Lunch at the League) (1918) represents Bacon’s first work in drypoint. The cafeteria at the Art Students League held an important place in her routine and appears as the setting for several other early prints. 6 Bacon would work on her plates in the lunchroom itself, capturing the lively postures and expressions of her peers from firsthand observation. She included her own watchful face at

“I never cottoned to drawing in wax, but I loved digging in.”

—Peggy Bacon

far left, seated next to fellow students Dorothy Varian (in stripes) and Doris Rosenthal.7 As she recounted, “I ate my meals at the Art Students League in the lunchroom and on Saturday afternoon I was very mad because the ASL was closed. So friends like Ann Redford and Edmond Duffy, Kuniyoshi and Katherine Schmidt and I would cover all the exhibitions in New York on Saturday afternoon.” 8 Duffy, who was later a caricaturist for the Baltimore Sun , appears at top right, looking askance at the other male students who gape awkwardly in the back.9

T he self-portrait Lady Artist offers a window into Bacon’s identity as a printmaker—as others perceived her and as she perceived herself. Perched in a snug studio between a curious spider and a white cat, the bespectacled artist applies an etching needle to a small metal plate. Engrossed in her work, she appears to reference the drawing of a nude woman before her. The female nude, among the most prominent genres of Western art, was considered a pinnacle of academic art education. However, women were largely excluded from anatomical study under the gendered constraints of feminine modesty and propriety until the beginning of the twentieth century. 10

W ithin this art historical context, Bacon’s composition indicates her awareness of the fraught issues that surrounded the female gaze and visibility. Indeed, Bacon portrays her

own vocation (as a “lady artist”) under the lens of public scrutiny—dozens of onlookers from the opposite building ogle her, mirroring our gaze as viewers and heightening an awareness of the very act of looking. Despite being caught between these sight lines, Bacon is focused solely on her print—and with a closer look, we see that she has etched not the nude but rather the bare outline of a cat. In a sly refusal of art-world tropes, she opts instead for a favorite subject of her own choosing: cats, which appear throughout her work as a personal emblem.

RAMEY MIZE

1. Peggy Bacon, quoted in “Maine Profiles: Peggy Bacon at 90—an interview with Lynn Franklin,” unidentified newspaper, np. Peggy Bacon artist file, Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

2. Interview with Peggy Bacon conducted by Paul Cummings, May 8, 1973, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ ajax?record_id=edanmdm- AAADCD_oh_211938. For an investigation of the artistic relationship between Bacon and Sloan, see Sara F. Meng, “Peggy Bacon and John Sloan: Their Urban Scenes, 1910–1928,” Woman’s Art Journal 25, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2004): 18–25.

3. “Maine Profiles,” np.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Other prints that feature the lunchroom at the Art Students League include another print by the same title, Lunch at the League (also 1918), as well as Carrie (1918).

7. Roberta K. Tarbell and Janet A. Flint, Peggy Bacon: Personalities and Places (Washington, DC : National Gallery of Art, 1975), 12 and 93.

8. “Maine Profiles,” np.

9. Tarbell and Flint, Peggy Bacon , 93.

10. Jane Silcock, “Genius and Gender: Women Artists and the Female Nude 1870–1920,” The British Art Journal 19, no. 3 (Winter 2018/19): 20.

PEGGY BACON, LADY ARTIST, 1925. DRYPOINT, 11 11/16 × 9 3/16 IN. THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. MALCOLM L. MCBRIDE 1930.537

Robert Henri

Robert Henri (1865–1929) was a leading force in early twentieth-century American art and was among the foremost teachers wielding broad influence, both to many of his students and to succeeding generations. His reputation as an educator nearly approaches the recognition he received as a painter and artist advocate. Teaching became a vital aspect of Henri’s career after he made a concerted decision to teach as his primary means of income, freeing him to paint what he wished.

He taught multitudes of students at a number of schools, including many through the Art Students League. There, nearly six hundred students, including many well-known artists, passed through his classes.1 Among his best-known students whose work exhibits a wide range of stylistic practice were George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Guy Pène du Bois, Adolph Gottlieb, Edward Hopper, Frank Tenney Johnson, Rockwell Kent, Niles Spencer, and Leon Trotsky (briefly). Hopper, Bellows, and John Sloan (whom he mentored) all paid homage to Henri’s artistic influence and to his ability to arouse the creative spirit in students. Hopper called Henri “the most influential teacher I had,” 2 and both Sloan and Bellows called Henri their “father in art.” 3

Henri had an extended affiliation with the League. He was first approached to teach there as early as 1902, and again in 1904, although his other teaching commitments at the New York School of

Art precluded his taking on additional obligations at the time. 4 League recordkeeping is inconsistent and Henri first appears as an instructor in the 1916–17 course catalogue for portrait painting, although he actually began teaching at the League in 1915.5 He most often taught classes in painting or composition, and also gave lectures and offered critiques. His last published listing in the course catalogue was for the 1922–23 season, and he was cited as having an ongoing association with the league even in years he did not teach, most often due to summer travel. He was recognized as an honorary member of the League in the 1925 Fiftieth Anniversary publication.6 Nonetheless, he apparently taught at the

League in the 1927–28 session, the year before he died.7

A nother outgrowth of Henri’s association with the League was a book based on his teachings—a notable resource for art students— The Art Spirit—compiled by his devoted student Margery Ryerson and published in 1923. Ryerson studied with Henri from 1915 to 1918 and found his teaching so compelling that she arranged his precepts and axioms into a book that she assembled from notes she took in classes, melded with other sources.8 Henri was considered one of the most inspiring and charismatic teachers; his style of instruction was generalized and motivational but minimal on actual technique, as he intoned, “there can be no set rule laid down for the making of pictures…” or “There are many ways of painting pictures, and there are many kinds of pictures, each claiming special procedure.” 9 The text is nonlinear and not sequential, and need not be read in any particular order. It has never been out-of-print, is still assigned reading for art students, and is an oft-cited source of inspiration for practicing artists.

number of his former students), attesting to his influence as an art educator.10

VALERIE ANN LEEDS

1. See The Immortal Eight and Its Influence, exh. cat. (New York: The Art Students League of New York, 1983), 100–103. Also see Marian Wardle, ed., American Women Modernists, exh. cat. (Provo: Brigham Young University in association with Rutgers University Press, 2005), esp. 117–237, which is an in-depth study of women artists who studied with Henri, including many at the Art Students League.

2. Edward Hopper, “John Sloan and the Philadelphians,” Arts 11 (April 1927): 174.

3. Helen Farr Sloan, “Robert Henri: An Appreciation,” in Robert Henri: Painter, exh. cat. (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1984), xii; and George Bellows, “‘The Art Spirit’: by Robert Henri,” Arts & Decoration 20 (December 1923): 26.

4. Henri diary, November 13, 1902, Estate of Robert Henri, LeClair Family Collection; and Board Minutes, Art Students League, January 20, 1904.

5. Margery Ryerson apparently began studying with Henri in 1915. See Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, ed. Margery Ryerson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1923), 10; and Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 119.

6. See Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition of The Art Students’ League of New York, January 22 to February 2, exh. cat. (New York: The Art Students’ League, 1925).

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Art Students League in 1925, a series of exhibitions was held, and Henri was selected as among the artists featured in the initial group (that also included a

7. See course catalogues, Art Students League archive. Henri’s peripatetic travel plans presented scheduling problems in terms of his knowing when he would return from summer travels to be available for teaching or lecturing. He likely would have taught more if he had not traveled so frequently. See for example, The Art Students’ League of New York, 1922–23 , 14. Also see Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri, 134; and pages 119, 126, 129, 130, 131, and 133. Henri began teaching at the League in 1915, although he does not appear in the school course catalogue for a number of years that he was known to have taught. He also taught in 1917, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1927, and 1928. He consciously chose to not teach in 1923, the year The Art Spirit was published, which he believed would spark sales.

8. Two letters to Art Students League classes are among the most frequently cited sections of The Art Spirit. See “Letter to the Class, Art Students League, 1915,” and “Letter to the Class, Art Students League, 1916,” in Henri, The Art Spirit, 10 and 25.

9. “Letter to the Class, Art Students League, 1915,” and “Letter to the Class, Art Students League, 1916,” in Henri, The Art Spirit, 10 and 25.

10. Perlman, Robert Henri, 134.

“Henri was considered one of the most inspiring and charismatic teachers; his style of instruction was generalized and motivational but minimal on actual technique, as he intoned, ‘there can be no set rule laid down for the making of pictures…’”

Yasuo Kuniyoshi

“I had a great hunger for friends and companionship as a natural reaction from my lonely wanderings. At the League I found warmth and kindness that I sorely needed…”

—Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) was one of the most prominent painters in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1948 he was the first living artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—which is ironic, as immigration laws made it impossible for him to become an American citizen.

T he Art Students League played a key role in Kuniyoshi’s career, first as a student, then as a teacher. He had come to the United States from Japan when he was seventeen years old, and became interested in art while living in Los Angeles, an interest that led him to move to New York when he was twenty-one. By the time he enrolled at the League in 1916, he had attended four other art schools, but at the League he found his home. “I had a great hunger for friends and companionship as a natural reaction from my lonely wanderings. At the League I found warmth and kindness that I sorely needed…. I made fast friends with Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, Henry Schnakenberg, Katherine Schmidt, Reginald Marsh, Edmund Duffy and Arnold Blanch.” 1

He studied at the League in New York from 1916–20, always with Kenneth Hayes Miller. Kuniyoshi’s friend, Peggy Bacon, introduced him to etching, and printmaking would be an important component of his artistic output, though after his time at the League he

made mostly lithographs. His etching Men Around a Table (c. 1916–18), with its quartet of inebriated men, shows his artistic independence even early in his career. His teacher, Miller, was an advocate for traditional Renaissance single-point perspective and strongly modeled, three-dimensional form, which Kuniyoshi here rejected for an off-balance composition of pure line organized on a diagonal which evokes the spaces of nineteenth-century Japanese ukiyo-e prints. A fifth man, the only active figure, staggers into the scene from the top left, severely cropped by the edge, a composition Miller would never advocate, and an early example of the eccentricities that would in various ways characterize Kuniyoshi’s art for the rest of his career. In the summer of 1917 Kuniyoshi studied at the League’s Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, inaugurating a relationship with the art colony that would be lifelong, as he and his first wife, Katherine Schmidt, built a house there in 1929. In 1933 he started teaching at the League, which he would continue to do almost continuously until his death in 1953, by which time he had become the leading Asian American artist in the United States.

In 1950 Life magazine published a two-page color spread of thirty-one illustrious League alumni with examples of their works.2 Kuniyoshi is seated front

and center, next to his old friend, Peggy Bacon, the only woman present (Georgia O’Keeffe is represented by a portrait). He is the only artist of color or Asian descent in the group. Times have changed.

TOM WOLF

1. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Monograph Number 11 (New York: American Artists Group, 1945), np.

2. Arnold Newman’s group portrait illustrated the article “U.S. Schools: They Face a Crisis,” Life, October 16, 1950, 172–3.

YASUO KUNIYOSHI, FIGURES AROUND A TABLE , C. 1916–18. ETCHING, 4 15/16 × 4 IN. FUKUTAKE COLLECTION © 2025 ESTATE OF YASUO KUNIYOSHI / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VERSION OF ARNOLD NEWMAN’S ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT OF NOTABLE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE ALUMNI AND INSTRUCTORS WAS PUBLISHED IN COLOR IN A SPECIAL ISSUE OF LIFE , “U.S. SCHOOLS: THEY FACE A CRISIS,” OCTOBER 16, 1950. NEWMAN PHOTOGRAPHED THIS GROUP ON JUNE 1, 1950 IN THE AMERICAN FINE ARTS SOCIETY BUILDING’S FORMER VANDERBILT GALLERY, WHICH HAD BEEN CONVERTED TO STUDIO SPACE TO ACCOMMODATE AN INFLUX OF STUDENTS ON THE GI BILL AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR. AMONG THOSE PICTURED ARE FRONT, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, HENRY BILLINGS, ALEXANDER BROOK, WHITNEY DARROW JR., PAUL CADMUS, OTTO SOGLOW,

ROBERT PHILIPP, PEPPINO MANGRAVITE, PEGGY BACON, YASUO KUNIYOSHI, ARNOLD BLANCH, VACLAV VYTLACIL, DEAN CORNWELL, WILL BARNET, REGINALD MARSH, AND BEN SHAHN. BEHIND, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, GIFFORD BEAL, HARRY STERNBERG, PHILIP EVERGOOD, JOHN GROTH, ERNEST FIENE, RUSSELL COWLES, BERNARD KLONIS, HENRY SCHNACKENBERG, WILLIAM ZORACH, ADOLPH DEHN, KENNETH HAYES MILLER, STEWART KLONIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR; CHRIS BUCHHEIT, BUILDING SUPERINTENDENT; FRANK VINCENT DUMOND, EUGENE SPEICHER, OGDEN PLEISSNER, CHAIM GROSS, SIDNEY DICKINSON, AND LOUIS BOUCHÉ. ARNOLD NEWMAN/ARNOLD NEWMAN COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

In a night class in Intermediate Drawing at the Art Students League on 57th Street in New York City in 1938, about eleven students sit at drawing boards in silence, save for the occasional sharpening of their pencils on pieces of fine-grade sandpaper. Kimon Nicolaïdes (1891–1938), an instructor at the League for fifteen years, speaks to each student in low, murmuring tones, leaving few sounds in the room besides the sandpaper.1 The drawing surfaces are torn manila sheets—mostly discarded business forms—and litter the floor; most will be thrown away after use. This evening’s lesson includes exercises on cheap gray construction paper. Student Mamie Harmon fixes her eyes on a model who holds poses for less than a minute at a time, makes a gesture drawing of the pose first with white crayon, then goes over the contours in black.2 This drawing she saves, in accordance with Nicolaïdes’s recommendation that the students throw away most of their drawings and keep only one or two as records of progress.3 Nicolaïdes wordlessly squirrels away some of those discarded for the class portfolio.

To an art and design student of the last thirty years or more, these techniques and scenes will sound unexceptional— standard, even. The drawing instruction manual that resulted from Nicolaïdes’s classes, The Natural Way to Draw, became a national bestseller, assimilating so deeply into American art school curricula that it became constitutive of drawing education itself. 4 Postwar avant-garde artists like Grace Hartigan, Carolee

Schneemann, and Louise Nevelson have cited it as formative.5 For Harmon, too, who would edit The Natural Way after Nicolaïdes’s premature death in 1938, the course was revelatory. Instead of lecturing, Nicolaïdes told his students to imagine touching the things they saw instead of merely looking at them, harnessing all five senses to attain deep physical intimacy with the drawn object. Their use of contrasting crayons compelled students to remember the model’s body in different positions and layers in quick succession, to stay with the contours of the figure while sensing (rather than seeing) light and shade.6 The social and ethnic diversity of the students, from a public library worker to a recent Russian immigrant, is a testament not just to the city’s dynamic makeup but also to Nicolaïdes’s ability to draw nearly everyone to his claims that touch and vision were inseparable.7

Nicolaïdes’s method centered on the page as a space of low-stakes play from whence both bodies and subjects could form. By paying attention to gestures and movements inherent in all objects, a drawing student could develop insight into a new and generative more-than-human world. “Even a pancake has gesture,” he explained in his book, the text of which was taken almost invariably from his inperson lessons. “There is gesture in the way in which a newspaper lies on the table or in the way a curtain hangs. Gesture describes the compound of all forces acting in and against, and utilized by, the model.” 8 From the classroom to pedagogical text, Nicolaïdes’s attention to these minor, flickering ways of being prompted and intermingling of creative forces helped reconcile bodies and objects in relation to the drawing surface and beyond.

KATIE ANANIA

1. As artist Lloyd Goff wrote in an early-1940s essay memorializing his instruction, “[Nicolaïdes’s] manner of giving criticism (in a voice so low that other members of the class could not hear what he was saying) always made me feel that the diagnosis was meant for me, and me alone.” Goff, untitled undated essay, Mamie Harmon papers relating to Kimon Nicolaïdes, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Kimon Nicolaïdes, The Natural Way to Draw, 162.

3. Kimon Nicolaïdes, The Natural Way to Draw, 18.

4. Several interviews and oral histories position The Natural Way to Draw as nothing short of a complete shift in the way that figure drawing was taught in art schools of the United States. Artists who encountered this book in reprinted form or attended courses that follow Nicolaïdes’s basic pedagogical tenets are so numerous that it is difficult to establish a full constellation. However, explicit mentions of Nicolaïdes’s methods range widely from the feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann (in interviews with the author on July 31, 2010 and October 24, 2014) to the architectural theorist David Seamon, who mentioned Nicolaïdes in his book A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 1979). In other recent correspondence, the curator Will South has noted,

“Back in the ’70s, as for a long time thereafter, The Natural Way to Draw was a standard tool. Everybody I knew had it, whether or not they bought into its point of view. Into this century, drawing instructors, including many in NYC , were using this book and this approach. It was akin to a Bible of life drawing.” Such a report is a typical indication of the proliferation of this method and its imprint on American drawing pedagogy. Will South, email to the author, January 24, 2017.

5. Carolee Schneemann, interview with the author, July 31, 2010; see also Appendix 1 in Margaret Mayhew, “Modeling Subjectivities: Life-Drawing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Art Education,” PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2010: 282; Cathy Curtiss, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24; Laurie Lisle, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life, 47.

6. As Harmon put it, these more advanced two-tone assignments were “a great introduction to the problems of painting.” Mamie Harmon, letter to her mother, February 23, 1935. Mamie Harmon papers relating to Kimon Nicolaïdes, Archives of American Art.

7. In a letter to her mother on May 8, 1936, Mamie Harmon mentioned a Russian immigrant classmate who “suddenly lost his mind.” While few details about this episode were given—it forms a scant paragraph in Harmon’s letter—Harmon did write that “[the student’s] family didn’t seem to understand or care much about it—Nick managed to get him in the sanitarium.” This is notable because it posits a formulation of Kimon Nicolaïdes’s drawing classroom as a place through which the affective bonds of chosen family were forged. Mamie Harmon papers related to Kimon Nicolaïdes, Archives of American Art.

8. Nicolaïdes, Natural Way to Draw, 29.

The drawing instruction manual that resulted from Nicolaïdes’s classes, The Natural Way to Draw, became a national bestseller, assimilating so deeply into American art school curricula that it became constitutive of drawing education itself. Postwar avantgarde artists like Grace Hartigan, Carolee Schneemann, and Louise Nevelson have cited it as formative.

Noboru Foujioka

The painting American Spirit was made by the Japanese artist Noboru Foujioka, who was born in Hiroshima (1896–unknown). He came to the United States in 1910 and attended the Portland Museum Art School in Oregon before moving to New York. He studied under Frank Vincent DuMond, Mahonri Young, and John Sloan at the Art Students League from 1916 to 1919. Introduced to the Ashcan School by Sloan, Foujioka continued to depict scenes from dark side of society while in the United States and after his return to Japan.

During the same period, Japanese consul general Kyo Kumasaki took notice of him. With his support, Foujioka had the opportunity to relocate to Paris from 1919 to 1920, where he studied under Achille Émile Othon Friesz and Charles Guérin. His works Still Life and A Portrait of Madam X were accepted for the Salon d’Automne in 1921. After returning to New York, he held a solo exhibition at the Nippon Club in 1924. Most of his works were realistic paintings influenced by Van Gogh, but after returning to the Art Students League in the 1920s, his style changed from realism to paintings in the style of the Ashcan School. This transformation occurred during the economic boom after World War I. Foujika depicted the dark side of this boom. His paintings were displayed in the annual exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists and the Salons of America from 1924 to 1927. Later, Foujioka said of his time studying at the Art Students League,

“Mr. John Sloan completely overturned my academic style of painting.”1

American Spirit was displayed in the tenth annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1926. It depicts a game of poker. The man wearing glasses on the upper left side looks pleased, while the two men on the painting’s lower right side hold their heads and others watch the game from the left. The picture shows the decadence of 1920s society. Torajiro Watanabe reported that, “American Spirit depicts a gambling house where people reveal their desire to become wealthy.

Foujioka does so with his characteristic sense of humor.”2

Foujioka moved to the West Coast in 1927 and held several solo exhibitions in San Francisco. American Spirit was purchased by a wealthy man in San Francisco for $1,000. After returning to Japan in 1933, he held several solo exhibitions in Tokyo and Osaka. He continued to paint gloomy scenes, this time of Japanese cities in the 1930s.

The Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita (Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, 1886–1968), who was a friend of Foujioka, wrote in the foreword to the catalogue of Foujioka’s 1935 solo exhibition: “He is an artist who used his sensitivity and strength to depict the bottom rungs of society.”3

MAI SATO

1. Shin-sekai, March 14, 1928.

2.

3.

New York Shimpo, March 10, 1926.

Noboru Foujioka, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Seijyu-sha Gallery, 1935).

“He

is an artist who used his sensitivity and strength to depict the bottom rungs of society.” —Tsuguharu Foujita

Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn (1898–1969), one of the most prominent socially and politically engaged artists in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s, studied at the Art Students League at two critical moments in his career. The League’s philosophy of artistic individuality and stylistic diversity aligned with Shahn’s credo of nonconformity, which he articulated in the 1950s in response to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism and in resistance to the suppression of civil liberties by anticommunist crusaders of the McCarthy era. But the League’s artist-run, nonhierarchical model and its inclusiveness and affordability also spoke to Shahn’s socialistic leanings, no doubt informed by his father—a woodcarver and anti-czarist activist from Russian-controlled Lithuania—and by the working-class, Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in which he grew up.

Shahn first enrolled at the League in 1916. The ambitious teenager was determined to educate himself after his parents had removed him from school a few years earlier so he could work (as a commercial lithographer) to help support the family. Of note are the Lectures on Anatomy he signed up for in November 1916, delivered by the eccentric, legendary draftsman George B. Bridgman.1 Bridgman gained fame for his methodical formulas in drawing the human form and for his instructional books, including those that “delve into the representation of features, faces and hands, for which he retained a

particular fascination. He wrote his lauded Book of a Hundred Hands [1920] because he could not find an instructional publication that, in his opinion, adequately conveyed the way an artist should approach this complex feature.” 2 Given Shahn’s own lifelong preoccupation with hands, Bridgman’s teachings clearly left a lasting impact. Indeed, hands became the most characteristic motif in Shahn’s art—from the strong hands of work, to the anguished hands of grief, the fierce hands of protest, and the raised hands of spiritual uplift. Decades later, in spring 1941, Shahn had another consequential encounter with League classes. By then, he was a mature artist with growing fame, but still struggling financially. This was the time of his most prestigious New Deal mural commission, and one he enthusiastically embraced as his most important: The Meaning of Social Security, awarded in 1940 by the Section of Fine Arts from 375 anonymous submissions. The mural was to be painted in true or dry fresco for the main corridor of the newly minted Social Security Administration building in Washington, DC . Shahn aimed for a visual interpretation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1934 message to Congress about Social Security, which the artist called “one of the real fruits of democracy.” 3 To tackle this major commission in the nation’s capital, Shahn enrolled in the League’s Mural, Composition and Fresco Painting class for May 9–29, 1941, taught by Jean Charlot—the distinguished French-

American muralist of Mexican heritage. A draftsman on archaeological excavations and a scholar of indigenous Mexican art, Charlot was vitally important as an insider-outsider figure. Yet he has been underappreciated in US art history. He assisted Diego Rivera, completed the first work of the Mexican mural renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s in true fresco, and was instrumental in documenting and publicizing the influential movement abroad. 4 Charlot was also an instructor at the Art Students League on and off between 1931 and 1941, which proved critical for Shahn. But Shahn was a veteran muralist, so why would he have needed instruction in fresco? He had learned true fresco in 1933 from el maestro Rivera, as an assistant on the ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural, and by 1941 he

had successfully completed impressive New Deal murals, notably a buon fresco for the cooperative town of Jersey Homesteads (1936–38) and a fresco secco for the Bronx Central Post Office (1938–39).

T he answer to this question can be found in the League’s basement, where League staff recently addressed the challenge of what to do with a group of largely unidentified yet historically significant fresco studies on their walls— partially blocked by furniture and since 1996 covered with plexiglass sheets. The fresco studies were investigated in 2017 by the League’s archivist, Stephanie Cassidy, and photographed in 2020, when the school closed during the COVID -19 pandemic.5 In conducting research for the present essay, this author identified one of the fresco studies of bridge builders

BEN SHAHN, PUBLIC WORKS [FROM THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SECURITY MURAL, WEST WALL], 1940–42. FRESCO SECCO, 105 × 184 9/16 IN. WILBUR J. COHEN FEDERAL

The leading artist-jurors of the mural competition had already praised Shahn’s sketches for their “variety in the tempo and texture,” “well integrated” design, “power and imagination,” and how they relate the theme of security to images of unemployment, construction, agriculture, and recreation.

as the work of Shahn and his young assistant John Ormai, which they created in preparation for the Public Works panel of the Social Security mural. While they are unknown to most scholars today, in their day the Shahn-Ormai true fresco studies were recognized by the likes of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., esteemed director of the Museum of Modern Art, who came to see them in situ on June 24, 1941, and who accepted one of the two panels (“ball players”), presumably for MoMA . 6

T he extant fresco study reveals how Shahn used League resources to practice for his high-profile project and sought the stellar skills, knowledge, and access to the fresco materials of Charlot, his friend since at least 1930 and author of a 1933 essay that brought national attention to Shahn’s paintings.7 Shahn learned from Charlot “a number of tricks” for a less traditional fresco approach and said he found “this new and freer way of working much closer to [his] own work than…the pretty cut and dried ‘old master’ method” that he had previously used.8 Shahn’s assistant also came through Charlot, who recommended his brilliant student Ormai as an expert plasterer in the precise and time-sensitive work of true fresco. (Notably, Ormai and Charlot had each submitted sketches for the mural competition and Charlot won an honorable mention.) Following the ShahnOrmai fresco sessions at the League

and those in Shahn’s garage in Jersey Homesteads, where they made detached fresco studies, the two left for Washington, DC , in the summer of 1941 to begin work on the mural. But after great frustration with the poorly prepared wall, Shahn had to change from buon fresco to fresco secco, using egg tempera on dry plaster. This meant that Ormai’s special skills were no longer needed, and the promising artist was released from this potentially lifechanging opportunity.9

Despite the major technical problems, Shahn said in a 1944 interview in Magazine of Art that the Social Security mural was his “best work.”

The leading artist-jurors of the mural competition had already praised Shahn’s sketches for their “variety in the tempo and texture,” “well integrated” design, “power and imagination,” and how they relate the theme of security to images of unemployment, construction, agriculture, and recreation.10 Charlot himself, who saw Shahn as “one of America’s best contemporary muralists,” singled out the Social Security mural (and the Bronx mural) in his article “Murals for Tomorrow” for Art News (July 1945), which forecast “the post-war prospect of a new deluge of mural commissions.” Shahn’s murals, according to the article, illustrate the artist’s “sense of scale, formal compositions related to architecture,

monumental color, and willingness to tell a story,” which earned him Charlot’s “keen admiration.” 11

W hile Charlot’s authoritative writing on murals contributed to Shahn’s acclaim as a muralist, his fresco workshop at the League laid the groundwork for the Social Security mural—a work that helped propel Shahn to national fame. (Shahn’s reputation would be secured with a retrospective at MoMA in 1947.) The significance of the Social Security mural also lies in its timing; it was completed in June 1942, six months after the United States entered World War II. War mobilization attached pro-war sentiment to the work; at the same time, ironically, the war effort led to the termination of the Section arts projects in 1943. (The war also catalyzed the phase-out of mural classes at the League). The Social Security mural thus signaled the end of an era—a remarkable experiment in federal art patronage in peacetime to which Shahn felt totally committed. And as this essay illuminates, a close look at Shahn’s time at the Art Students League demonstrates how the school’s venerable instruction in fresco, flexible policies, and openness to creative collaboration made possible one of the nation’s most dynamic, resonant, and enduring works of New Deal public art.12

1. Benjamin H. Shahn, Student registration record, Archives of the Art Students League of New York ( AASL).

2. “George B. Bridgman,” Illustration History, Norman Rockwell Museum, illustrationhistory.org/artists/george-b-bridgman.

3. Ben Shahn to Edward Bruce, Section of Fine Arts, July 14, 1941, Ben Shahn papers, Archives of American Art (BSP-AAA).

4. Ben Shahn, Student registration record, AASL . On Jean Charlot’s key role in Mexican muralism, see writings by Dafne Cruz Porchini and Tatiana Flores. See also Linda Downs’ s essay on Charlot in this publication.

5. Stephanie Cassidy generously provided information on the fresco studies as a group, which were covered with sheet rock during the Covid lockdown, and which represent a largely unexamined treasure trove.

6. See Jean Charlot Diaries, Jean Charlot Archive ( JCC), University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Library. The diaries also indicate that Charlot and Ormai attempted in July 1941 to detach the Shahn-Ormai fresco studies but were unsuccessful. They likely removed the ball players panel (present location unknown), leaving the bridge builders panel intact. JCC archivist Malia Van Heukelem generously assisted the author in piecing together the puzzle of Shahn’s “hidden” true fresco studies at the League.

7. Jean Charlot, “Ben Shahn,” Hound & Horn 6, no. 4 (July–September 1933): 632–634.

8. Ben Shahn to Mr. Edward B. Rowan, Section of Fine Arts, June 3, 1941. Drafts of this letter are in BSP-AAA

9. On John Ormai, see “The Benefits of Art Federal Project Let Berks Christian Muralist Work with Ben Shahn,” Morning Call, December 15, 1991, mcall. com/1991/12/15/the-benefits-of-art-federal-project-let-berks-christian-muralist-workwith-ben-shahn/. See also Jean Charlot Diaries and mural-related documents, JCC

10. Press Release, Federal Works Agency, Public Buildings Administration, Section of Fine Arts, October 30, 1940, BSP-AAA

11. The mural survived a postwar campaign to destroy it and has been the subject of contemporary critique regarding race matters as well as praise for its complexity, compared to more typical New Deal murals. It resists the “glorification of workers” of Soviet socialist realism and avoids “simplistic celebration of the ‘American way.’” See Laura Katzman et al., Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2023), 82. On Shahn as a muralist, see the extensive writings of Diana L. Linden.

12. In 1950, Ben Shahn served on a select jury for the League’s 75th anniversary exhibition and sat for Arnold Newman’s iconic photograph, Art Students League Alumni Group. In 1967, Shahn was elected an honorary member of the League as a “staunch and cooperative friend.” See Shahn–League correspondence, BSP-AAA

LAURA KATZMAN

RIGHT: BEN SHAHN WITH JOHN ORMAI, DETAIL OF BRIDGE BUILDERS [STUDY FOR PUBLIC WORKS PANEL, THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SECURITY MURAL], 1941. BUON FRESCO, APPROX. 102

John Sloan

“Teaching has taken years of my life. But I feel that I must do it, that I must reach as many students as I can to arouse in them the creative spirit.” —John Sloan

A largely self-taught artist, John Sloan (1871–1951) became known as a chronicler of everyday urban life in New York, earning him the moniker “painter laureate of Manhattan.” 1 He was befriended and mentored by Robert Henri, whom he met in Philadelphia in 1892, and they shared a lifelong friendship as well as a vision of artistic freedom and interest in drawing subjects from the world around them. Sloan was a key figure in organizing the important independent exhibitions of The Eight, in 1908 at Macbeth Galleries, and the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists, both in New York. He also became president of the Society of Independent Artists in 1918, a post he retained until his death.

Sloan formed an extended association with the Art Students League, becoming a celebrated and inspiring teacher with legions of students during his tenure (over one thousand documented students). His classes were so popular that the most enthusiastic students called themselves “Sloanian nuts.” Alexander Calder, Elsie Driggs, Adolph Gottlieb, Reginald Marsh, Barnett Newman, and David Smith numbered among those who studied with him, and Jackson Pollock too, although he disliked Sloan’s class and dropped it.

Sloan moved to New York City in 1904 from Philadelphia, where he had been working as an illustrator and commercial artist. He began to supplement his income by teaching art, initially as a substitute for

Henri. For the next decade Sloan taught sporadically at various art schools until 1916, when he became a faculty member at the Art Students League and where he would teach most years until 1938. He led a variety of courses, but most often life drawing and painting and pictorial composition. Sloan was slow to gain success as a painter, but he remained dedicated to his own artistic vision.2

Teaching therefore became an important source of income for him to sustain himself economically.

Sloan was elected president of the Art Students League’s Board of Control in 1930, although it turned out his term was short-lived due to a rupture with the institution precipitated by opposition to his invitation to famed German modernist George Grosz to teach at the League the following fall. Jonas Lie, among other board members, objected even though Grosz had been extended earlier invitations from the League to teach. In April 1932, Sloan resigned over the rescission of the invitation; ironically, Grosz became an instructor at the League in the 1933/34 season.3

I n 1939, Sloan’s teaching philosophy and techniques were compiled and published as a book titled Gist of Art, with much assistance from Helen Farr, an ardent student of his who kept and gathered notes on his teachings. 4 In a general sense, Sloan continued Henri’s legacy of inspirational teaching, but he

married that with more detail, practical advice, and technical information, as well as the inclusion of many of his own works with descriptive notes. He modestly professed, “If I am useful as a teacher it is because I have dug into my work.” 5

Upon Sloan’s election as president of the board of the League in 1930, he acknowledged his belief in the Art Students League, as being “the largest and most successful cooperative art institution in this country.” 6 He also affirmed his dedication to teaching, asserting, “Teaching has taken years of my life. But I feel that I must do it, that I must reach as many students as I can to arouse in them the creative spirit.” 7

VALERIE ANN LEEDS

1. Stated in a review of Sloan’s 1952 Whitney Museum retrospective exhibition in Cue, January 12, 1952, 13, as quoted in John Loughery, John Sloan: Painter and Rebel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), xxii.

2. He had only had his fourth sale of a painting by the time of the 1913 Armory Show. See Loughery, 191.

3. “Sloan Quits in Row as Art League Head: He Wanted to Invite George Grosz, German Modernist, as a Teacher; Opposed by Jonas Lie, Latter Offered Resignation but It Was Declined —LongStanding Friction Revealed,” New York Times, April 9, 1932, 17. Also see the course catalogue: Art Students League, 1933/1934, Winter Season, Archives of the Art Students League, np. Grosz taught at the League for several years.

4. A year after the death of Sloan’s wife, Dolly, he married Helen Farr in 1944. Also see John Sloan, Gist of Art: Principles and Practice Expounded in the Classroom and Studio, Recorded with the Assistance of Helen Farr (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), 7.

5. Sloan, Gist of Art, 6.

6. Sloan, Gist of Art, 10.

7. Sloan, Gist of Art, 7.

Edwina Dumm

Frances Edwina Dumm (1893–1990) is best known as the creator of the comic strip Cap Stubbs and Tippie, which ran daily in newspapers across the United States for an astonishing forty-eight years. Before turning to comic strips, Dumm was the first woman to be hired to work full-time as a political cartoonist in the United States. Later in life, she was sought after to illustrate several books, including Alexander Woollcott’s Two Gentlemen and a Lady (1928) and Burges Johnson’s Sonnets from the Pekinese (1935). In 1950, along with Hilda Terry and Barbara Shermund, Edwina became one of the first women to be inducted into the National Cartoonists Society.

D umm was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, to Frank Edwin Dumm and Anna Gilmore Dennis Dumm. Dumm’s family eventually settled in Columbus, Ohio. Upon finishing high school, she immediately enrolled at the Landon School of Illustration

and Cartooning, a Cleveland-based correspondence program. Dumm’s artistic debut came in 1915 when a local newspaper, the Columbus Monitor, hired her for full-time work. As a political cartoonist, she was contributing cartoons on international affairs before the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote had even been passed. Dumm eventually contributed everything from editorial cartoons, illustrations, caricatures, cartoon features, and comic strips throughout

Her work was held in such high regard that in 1978, the National Cartoonists Society presented her with the Gold Key award—making her the second-ever winner, following Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster. To this day, she remains one of only two women cartoonists to ever win the Gold Key in the society‘s history.

that time. When the Monitor folded in 1917, Dumm had saved up enough money to head east to New York City. Her portfolio made an impression on George Matthew Adams, who owned a syndicate for comic strips and columns, and quickly got Dumm started on a strip that became Cap Stubbs and Tippie and made Dumm famous in her field.

S hortly after arriving in New York, she enrolled in classes at the Art Student League that helped her develop and hone her craft. She had great respect for George B. Bridgman, whose classes she took over the span of two decades. During her earliest years at the League from 1917 to 1921, she studied anatomy with Bridgman for months at a time, which provided a crucial understanding of how bodies move through space when brought to life in her then-nascent comic strip. In 1919–20, she expanded her skills with watercolor classes, life drawing with Sidney Dickson and Mahonri Young, as well as illustration and composition with Frederic Gruger. The classes had an undeniable influence on her skillset, and her style rapidly evolved throughout this period. Life drawing in particular was something she has no formal training in, as her prior studies at the Landon School were

conducted entirely through the mail. She began to sketch from life more and more frequently in her daily practice, as seen in drawings from her vacations to the Jersey Shore shown here. Dumm continued to enjoy the instruction and comradery that she found at the League until 1941.

I n addition to Cap Stubbs and Tippie, Dumm had success with other canine cartoons, Sinbad and Alec the Great , the latter of which was syndicated for more than thirty years. After retiring in 1966 at the age of seventy-three, Edwina lived out her remaining twenty-four years enjoying the cozy and supportive world she had built for herself in Manhattan, as well as in her vacation home in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her work was held in such high regard that in 1978, the National Cartoonists Society presented her with the Gold Key award—making her the second-ever winner, following Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster. To this day, she remains one of only two women cartoonists to ever win the Gold Key in the society‘s history.

CAITLIN MCGURK

Wanda Gág

“A still life is never still for me, it is solidified energy and space does not impress me as being empty.” —Wanda Gág

The tale of how Wanda Gág (1893–1946) went from rural Minnesota to New York City in 1917 is in some ways as storybookish as the illustrated childrens’ titles for which she is best known today: Millions of Cats (1928), The Funny Thing (1929), and The ABC Bunny (1933). Growing up the eldest of seven children in an immigrant Bohemian community outside of Minneapolis, Gág became the head of her household at age 24 following the untimely death of her parents. Raised in a community of artists and craftspeople, Gág’s commitment to artmaking was nourished from an early age. “I spent my earliest years,” she recalled in her diary, “in the serene belief that painting and drawing, like eating and sleeping, belonged to the universal and inevitable things of life.” 1 Faced with supporting herself and her siblings, Gág won a scholarship that covered tuition at the Art Students League for 1917–18 and offered her a means to turn her vocation into a career.

Her move to New York, where she rented a room at the Studio Club of the YWCA , was a jarring one.2 And while she felt immediately out of place, Gág eventually found her stride visiting museums and galleries, attending art classes, and making friends with fellow artists and students through classes at the League with Robert Henri, Frank Vincent DuMond, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, among others. She made her first prints in this time: drypoints produced under the instruction of Mahonri Young.3

Gág’s work from her League years

(she would renew her scholarship in 1918) reflects this sense of both alienation and fecundity. The energy and attitude that would become the hallmark of her mature style is already apparent in her New York works, which often take the modern city as their subject. Elevated Station, for instance, poses an artful commentary on urban life. Using heavy shading and stark contrasts, Gág transforms the wooden station at 81st Street and Columbus Avenue into a vibrating form that appears to throb with life along with the trees that dance behind it. Disorienting and vibrant, the station is starkly devoid of human activity. And yet the scene reverberates with a sense of pulsing energy. The animated shapes and curvilinear, twisting contours epitomize Gág’s developing aesthetic vocabulary and introduce motifs that recur across her drawings and prints.

Gág’s artistic coming of age in the city also entailed a familiar struggle to support herself and her siblings with her abilities as an illustrator. She tirelessly took on paying jobs painting lamp shades, dyeing batiks, designing advertisements and fashion drawings, and pursuing commercial illustration whenever she could, including for a toy design venture called Happiwork. At the same time, she found a home for her creative work in the vibrant political print culture of the day, contributing cover illustrations for pathbreaking leftist magazines such as New Masses. By the early 1920s Gág was making a modest living as a commercial artist at the expense of her other unrealized aspirations, nurtured

at the League but remaining frustratingly dormant. As her siblings grew, married, and pursued their own paths, Gág was able to make the decision to give up her stifling commercial work and to look beyond the city for artistic inspiration.

F leeing to rural Connecticut, Gág’s art once again took on a life of its own. Living without heat or running water, Gág relished barefoot walks outside, discovering endless source material in the rural surroundings of fields, flowers, mushrooms, and cabin interiors, “trying to extract from them the marvelous inexhaustible secrets of their existence.”4

Working incessantly, Gág found that the ordinary material of sandpaper, easily accessible from the local hardware store, could “giv[e] one…the quality of vibrations that one so much wants.” 5

Using it, she perfected her technique of short contour strokes that convey the sense of inherent energy she found in even commonplace inanimate objects.

“A still life,” she stated, “is never still for me, it is solidified energy and space does not impress me as being empty.” 6

Across the late 1920s to early ’30s, Gág’s prolific drawing practice began to find appreciative audiences in New York. In 1925 the Weyhe Gallery (then directed by Carl Zigrosser) accepted nineteen of her drawings on consignment, and her works featured in the Art Students League’s Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition at the

American Fine Arts Society Galleries. Her first solo exhibitions at Weyhe in 1926 and 1928 propelled Gág from the fringes of the New York art world toward its center, which she inhabited with her characteristic wit, humor, and perspicacity up to her untimely death in 1946. Now seventy-five years later, we are coming back to this remarkable artist with fresh perspectives, ready to wonder again with her vibrant, slanted vision.

LAUREL GARBER

1. As quoted in Carl Zigrosser, The Artist in America: Twenty-Four Close-Ups of Contemporary Printmakers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 34. Gág kept extensive diaries throughout her life. Her entries from 1908 through 1917 were compiled and first published in 1940 in Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings from the Years 1908–1917 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press).

2. Herschel V. Jones, the managing editor of the Minneapolis Journal, sponsored Gág’s room and board for this year in New York, a continuation of his support for her studies for three years at the Minneapolis School of Art. See Audur H. Winnan, Wanda Gág: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 4.

3. Audur H. Winnan documents that Gág also attended lectures and classes at the League by C. Lewis Hind, George Luks, John Sloan, Charles Shepard Chapman, and Ernest Haskell. See Winnan, Wanda Gág, 6–7.

4. Diary entry, Autumn 1922, Wanda Gág Collection, Department of Special Collections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania and quoted in Winnan, Wanda Gág, 13.

5. Anne Herendeen, “Wanda Gág: The True Story of a Dynamic Young Artist Who Won’t Be Organized,” Century Magazine 116, no. 4 (August 1928): 430.

6. Application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1938, Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota and quoted in Carl Zigrosser, “Wanda Gág, Artist,” The Horn Book Magazine (May–June 1947), 176.

Reginald Marsh

“Nulla Dies Sine Linea” is the motto of the Art Students League of New York, and no artist associated with the League better exemplified the dedication to drawing than did Reginald Marsh (1898–1954). “He was,” said a friend, “as much an addict with pen and paper as a chain smoker with a cigaret. He had to be sketching, even at a funeral.” Marsh himself confessed, “When I feel neglected, I reach for my sketchbook and soon everybody is gathered around, watching me draw!” 1 He drew everything, everywhere he went in the city: the skyline, river traffic, trains and bridges, and especially people. Marsh was fascinated by the figure, dressed or hardly so, seen in complex groupings on the beach at Coney Island, on the subway, at burlesque theaters, or along the Bowery. A posthumous appreciation in Life magazine in 1956 described him

watching people with binoculars from the window of his Union Square studio, and published a photo of him doing just that. This occupational voyeurism was impressed upon Marsh’s students. “Stare at Michelangelo casts. Go out into the street, stare at the people. Go into the subway, stare at the people. Stare, stare, keep on staring.” 2

M arsh was born in Paris to a mother and father who were both artists. When he was two, the family moved to New Jersey. Marsh attended Yale University and illustrated the campus humor magazine, and after graduation worked as a freelance illustrator in New York—he was one of the first cartoonists for The New Yorker. He began studying at the League with John Sloan and met his first wife, Betty Burroughs, who was the daughter of Bryson Burroughs, curator at the

“Stare at Michelangelo casts. Go out into the street, stare at the people. Go into the subway, stare at the people. Stare, stare, keep on staring.”

—Reginald Marsh

Metropolitan Museum of Art and a former League student and teacher, and Edith Woodman, a sculptor and former League Student. He returned to Paris in 1925 and immersed himself in its museums, an experience that inspired him to attempt multifigure compositions.

W hen he got back to New York, Marsh re-enrolled at the League, studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller and George Luks. The earthy physicality of Marsh’s work owes something to Luks, Sloan, and

the Ashcan School in general (“Well-bred people,” he said, “are no fun to paint”),3 but Miller was his true mentor. Miller, who practiced a more controlled classicism, sized up Marsh’s carnal interests, writing, “You are a painter of the body and sex is your theme.”4 Years later, Marsh wrote, “I still show him every picture I paint. I am a Miller student.” 5 He also studied with Jacques Maroger, whose advocacy of a white lead painting medium was influential when I was a student at the League, forty years later.

M arsh was an instructor at the League between 1935 and the year of his death, 1954. His exhortation to students to stare at Michelangelo, then take directly to the streets and subways, not only summarized his personal credo but could serve as the philosophical addendum to “Nulla Dies Sine Linea.” There are artists who taught at the League longer, but few are more deeply connected—the League’s collection includes forty-two paintings and prints by Marsh.

JERRY WEISS

1. Edward Laning, “Reginald Marsh,” American Heritage 23, no. 6 (1972): americanheritage.com/reginald-marsh.

2. Reginald Marsh, “Let’s Get Back to Painting,” Magazine of Art 37 (December 1944), 296.

3. Reginald Marsh, Lloyd Goodrich, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Reginald Marsh . New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1955.

4. Ellen Wiley Todd, The “New Woman” Revised : Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 178.

5. Marsh, “Let’s Get Back to Painting,” 293.

Otto Soglow

Evenings for Otto were busy and filled with classes taught by John Sloan. His days were punctuated with work to save money needed to take classes at the Art Students League.1 Otto Soglow (1900–1975), born in New York and the son of working-class German Jewish immigrants, worked his first art job painting baby rattles in a sweatshop. He then worked as a shipping clerk and even took a switchboard gig that ended in him walking out. He wanted to be an actor more than anything, but the five-foot-three powerhouse had to “forget his crushed dramatic ambition by becoming the second Rembrandt.” 2 And so

he enrolled in the Art Students League just after the Great War to become a painter.3

It isn’t clear if Soglow wanted the fame or the fortune of acting or just the dramatic release, but he eventually did get the notoriety and fortune that eluded him as a performer when his pantomime-style comic strip The Little King took off first in the New Yorker in 1931 and then with its 1934 syndication in Hearst’s Sunday comics.

B efore his success in the funny pages, Soglow had a robust studentship at the Art Students League from 1919 to 1926 primarily under John Sloan, who

But perhaps more importantly, it was [John] Sloan’s assertion that “Linework in a black and white drawing is accepted as a complete expression” that Soglow took to heart with the creation of his simple and playful rotund monarch.

Soglow described as “against all forms of commercialism.”4 Soglow initially followed in his teacher’s footsteps, illustrating for leftist periodicals such as The Liberator and New Masses. What a coincidence then that Soglow would defy his mentor and ultimately produce one of the most commercially successful comic strips of all time. But perhaps more importantly, it was Sloan’s assertion that “Linework in a black and white drawing is accepted as a complete expression” that Soglow took to heart with the creation of his simple and playful rotund monarch.5

T he Art Students League was Soglow’s professional endeavor, but it was also a social one. Not only did he hang out with his fellow artist classmates, including Adolph Gottlieb,6 Soglow met his wife, Anna (née Rosen) in 1928 at one of the infamous Art Students League costume balls dressed as a Navy officer replete with a bellhop’s cap.7 They had a daughter, Tona, who, under his tutelage, became a fine artist in her own right.

It’s hard to convey Soglow’s longstanding celebrity in our current heretoday-gone-tomorrow milieu, but his name was known far and wide at the time. He was so popular that he was even profiled in a small-town Arkansas newspaper, declaring what a “cutup” he

was with a “merry face wreathed in smiles most of the time.” 8 Soglow’s celebrity was made apparent in a short 1943 film in which he played himself drawing caricatures for merchant marines at the Merchant Seamen’s Club.9

S oglow passed away in 1975, drawing The Little King strip up until his death. He may have never made it as an actor, but his time with the Art Students League was instrumental to him living out his dream of creating one of the most important performances of the midcentury, albeit on paper.

JACQUE NODELL

1. “O. Soglow Creator of ‘The Little King’ Achieves a Brand-New Style in the Ancient Art of Comic Pantomime,” Nashville Banner, February 22, 1935.

2. “Little King Comic Strip to Start in Times-News Sunday” Kingsport (TN ) News, February 14, 1950.

3. Dutch Treat Club Yearbook , 1963, 112.

4. Ruth Thompson, “Fabulous Funnies to be a TV Special,” The Sentinel (Carlisle, PA ), February 3, 1968.

5. John Sloan in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Presents the 75th Anniversary Exhibition of Painting & Sculpture by 75 Artists Associated with The Art Students League of New York (New York: The Art Students League of New York, 1951), 28.

6. Tom McGlynn, “The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation: A History of Artistic Necessity and Mutual Aid,” Brooklyn Rail (July–August 2019), brooklynrail. org/2019/07/artonic/The-Adolph-and-Esther-Gottlieb-Foundation.

7. “Little King Comic Strip to Start in Times-News Sunday”

8. Julian Blanshard, “In New York,” Hope (AR) Star, May 25, 1933.

9. The Army-Navy Screen Magazine, no. 6 (U.S. Army Signal Corps Pictorial Service, 1943) archive.org/details/TheArmy-NavyScreenMagazine06/04+Merchant+Marine+ Theres+Something+About+A+Sailor.mp4.

Mary Huntoon

“I

firmly believe that all artists are practicing self therapy. They always have been aware of the self therapeutic power of their trade.” —Mary Huntoon

Artist and art therapist Mary Huntoon (1896–1970) was born Mary Huntoon Atkinson in Topeka, Kansas.1 After graduating from Topeka’s Washburn University in 1920 and newly married, Mary Huntoon Hoyt moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League for the next six years. She studied life painting with Frank Vincent DuMond, anatomy with George B. Bridgman, illustration with Wallace Morgan, and attended Robert Henri’s lessons on painting and color. She learned etching and lithography from Joseph Pennell, studying with him between 1923 and 1926. Pennell began the League’s Graphic Arts program in 1922, numbering Huntoon among his earliest students. A sign-up sheet for a sketching trip to boat around Manhattan offered to Pennell’s etching class of 1925 lists Will Low Bacher, Ilse Bischoff, Andrew Butler, Marion Freeman, Amy Gutzman, Eleanor Frances Lattimore, Joseph Margulies, William Charles McNulty, Ruth Blanchard Miller, Fugi Nakamizo, and Olga Rosenson among Huntoon’s classmates. 2

In 1926, Pennell connected Huntoon with an assignment to create a series of etchings in Paris for the George Putnam newspaper syndicate. She primarily lived and studied in Paris and Corsica from 1926 to 1931, taking lessons in engraving from Joseph Hecht. While in Paris in 1926, she befriended Stanley William Hayter and used skills acquired at the League to teach him how to make his first aquatint, a year prior to Hayter’s founding of Atelier 17.3

Huntoon’s printmaking during her time at the League is similar to Pennell’s in both subject (mostly landscapes) and style, but her linework becomes more sure and energetic as her style progresses. In 8th Street, Kansas City, MO (1929), we see Huntoon’s take on a perhaps surprisingly bustling scene in downtown Kansas City. The pitched roof in the distance marks the mouth of a tunnel for a streetcar that once connected downtown to nearby industrial areas.

Huntoon returned to Topeka in 1931, where, with few exceptions, she lived until her death in 1970. Upon Huntoon’s return to Kansas she served as the Kansas director of the Federal Art Project (1936–37). Although her work predates the full flourishing of the field of art therapy, she was one of its earliest formal practitioners. 4 She began teaching art at Topeka’s Menninger Clinic in 1934, and helped establish and direct the Department of Art, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital (1946–58). Her career as an art therapist reflects her own arts tutelage in that she supplied patients (whom she called students) at the hospital with the tools and training necessary to produce art, but departs from that training through her emphasis on this creative production as therapy. Much like a word she coined to mean the process by which a patient might come to understand the meaning of art they produced as “artsynthesis,” Huntoon’s practice as an artist and art therapist

seems to have synthesized her training and experience. She stated, “I firmly believe that all artists are practicing self therapy. They always have been aware of the self therapeutic power of their trade.” 5

KATE MEYER

MARY HUNTOON, 8TH STREET, KANSAS CITY, MO , 1929. ETCHING, 10 7/8 × 8 3/8 IN. SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, GIFT OF WILLIS C. MCENTARFER, 1973.0132

1. Huntoon’s most complete biography is Joyce P. Fent, Beyond the Drawing Room: The Art of Mary Huntoon (1896–1970), exh. cat. (Salina, KS: Salina Art Center, 1994). Huntoon is discussed in Helen Langa, “American Women Printmakers: Adventurous Choices, Modernist Innovations,” in American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910–1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 77–81; and Elizabeth G. Seaton, Paths to the Press: Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1918–1960, exh. cat. (Manhattan, KS: Beach Museum of Art, 2006), 162–3. Huntoon’s catalogue raisonné of prints is Kate Meyer and Sadie Arft, “The Prints of Mary Huntoon,” (University of Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art: KU ScholarWorks, 2021), kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/31885.

2. “List signed by students of Joseph Pennell, 1925,” Mary Huntoon Papers, Kansas Collection, RH MS 209, Box: 4, Folder: 19, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS . For an online exhibition drawn from these papers, see: “Mary Huntoon: Artist & Art Therapist,” Kenneth Spencer Research Library, exhibits.lib.ku.edu/exhibits/show/mary-huntoon--artist.

3. This collaboration is outlined in Christina Weyl, “Stanley William Hayter and Mary Huntoon: An Artistic Friendship in Interwar Paris,” Print Quarterly 36, no. 2 (June 2019): 169–71.

4. Huntoon’s career as a pioneering art therapist is explored in Linney Wix, “Looking for What’s Lost: The Artistic Roots of Art Therapy, Mary Huntoon,” Art Therapy 17, no. 3 (2000): 168–176.

5. Joy Miller, draft of Associated Press article about Huntoon and the Winter Therapy Program, in “Personal correspondence, January–June 1948,” Mary Huntoon Papers, RH MS 209, Box 1, Folder 26, quoted in Fent, Beyond the Drawing Room , 33.

Elizabeth Olds

Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Olds (1896–1991) was a noted WPA printmaker who recorded scenes of labor and urban life, a promoter of silkscreen as a viable form of fine art, and a celebrated children’s book authorillustrator. She initiated her art education in her home state of Minnesota, and in 1920 secured a scholarship with the Art Students League. As Olds would later write, it was in New York, under the mentorship of Ashcan School artist George Luks, that her education “really began.”1

A lthough Olds had applied with the hope of studying under Robert Henri, she came to credit Luks’s quick “field” sketching technique as the most formative tool of her career.2 Luks frequently based paintings on his Lower East Side sketches, and instructed Olds to similarly record fleeting scenes from daily life.3

Olds originally trained as a portraitist, and in her early career helped support herself by the sale of her oil portraits. In her successful Guggenheim Fellowship application, she noted her desire to combine the “refinement” of European painting traditions with modern American styles, but while in Europe she never abandoned her “field sketching.”4

Returning to the United States in 1929 and sensitive to the growing impacts of the Great Depression, she quickly determined that her art should reflect contemporary American life.

Olds accepted a portrait commission from the Rees family in Omaha in 1932. There she began experimenting with lithography at Samuel Rees’s printing business. This allowed her to utilize her League training in a new way: sketching quickly and fluidly, directly on the lithographic stone. It changed the course of her career, and Olds joined the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) as a printmaker in 1933. In this early iteration of what would become the WPA, Olds visited local relief programs and documented the people and services she observed.

Olds returned to New York City and joined the WPA from 1936 through 1939. In the city, she captured the vitality of her immediate environment with the skilled eye of a careful observer. Olds created lithographs that documented workers in meatpacking plants, steel mills, and coal fields, relying on her quickly executed sketches drafted onsite. Later, promoting silkscreen as a fine art rather than commercial form, she enabled Americans to purchase prints at a more feasible price than previously possible.5 From 1945 to 1963, Olds published six children’s books, applying

[Olds’s] time with the League instilled in her the notion that truth can be found in a fleeting moment, and it empowered her to capture and harness those moments for reflection and study.

her keen powers of observation and attention to accuracy towards her goal of creating appealing and meaningful “picture textbooks.” 6

T hroughout her career, Olds was shaped by early training with Luks and the Art Students League. With an appreciative, compassionate, and sometimes satirical eye, Olds’s images reflect 1930s–1940s America but also advocate for a society in which workers’ rights, individual dignity, and racial equality are valued and more fully realized. Her time with the League instilled in her the notion that truth can be found in a fleeting moment, and it

empowered her to capture and harness those moments for reflection and study.

TRACY BONFITTO

1. Olds noted that “in New York, my education began” in a 1973 unpublished autobiographical essay. Elizabeth Olds papers, 1917–1976. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 12.

2. Ibid.

3. The Emmett Hudspeth Collection of Elizabeth Olds Art and the Benjamin O. Rees Collection of Elizabeth Olds Art, both in the collection of the Harry Ransom Center, contain many examples of Olds’s sketches, including scenes from cafés, the reading room of the New York Public Library, and Grand Central Station.

Examples of Luks’s sketches can be found in the HRC ’s Elizabeth Olds Collection of George Benjamin Luks.

4. As reported in the article, “Minneapolis Woman Wins Art Fellowship,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), April 19, 1926. In 1926, Olds became the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the visual arts.

5. Olds, who had been a member of the WPA Graphic Arts Division Silk Screen Unit, displayed works for sale in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1940 exhibition Color Prints Under $10

6. Olds describes this philosophy in her unpublished lecture, “Mass Reproduction of Prints,” given at Smith College, July 19, 1944. Elizabeth Olds papers, 199–206.

Raphael Soyer

Raphael Soyer (1899–1987) always knew he wanted to be an artist. As a child in Russia, he decorated his bedroom walls with postcard reproductions of art by Michelangelo and Rembrandt. In 1912, rampant antisemitism forced his family to flee because their “Right to Live” permit was revoked, and they soon emigrated to New York City. Shortly after, Soyer began taking art classes.

W hile holding odd jobs, Soyer first took free evening drawing classes at the Cooper Union in the mid-1910s, and then spent four years at the free school of the National Academy of Design. Soyer’s rigorous education at the traditional Academy provided visual and technical training in the form of analytical knowledge of anatomy and perspective, which he found unfavorable: “I made a conscious effort to forget everything I had learned there,” Soyer recollected.1 By contrast, his comments about the Art Students League are lengthier and laudatory. Soyer recounts a desire to attend the League because “great men taught there at one time or another,” specifically mentioning John Sloan, George Bellows, and Max Weber.2 But he lamented the fees, remembering they were about $14 a month, and was grateful that an uncle agreed to help pay the tuition.3 From 1920 to 1926, Soyer intermittently studied at the League with various teachers, but especially Guy Pène du Bois, who in turn was a pupil of Robert Henri.

T he Art Students League’s philosophy was antithetical to that of the Academy,

and the school’s most prominent artists worked on gritty urban subjects frowned upon by their stuffier academic counterparts. Sloan and Henri, who both taught at the League while Soyer studied there, were painters of New York, native-born Americans, and artists who had achieved success. Painting the grim realities of New York life propelled their artist group, The Eight, to fame in the 1910s, beginning with their February 1908 collective exhibition at New York’s Macbeth Galleries. Understandably, the pair held great appeal for Soyer. Soyer approvingly remarked on the “livelier, freer, noisier, and less orderly” atmosphere of the League as opposed to the Academy, and was happy that he could choose his teachers and change classes monthly. 4 Pène du Bois fostered a more personal approach, and in general students were urged to follow their own path. The school advocated sketching everywhere, and encouraged students to paint subjects that ignited their passions. Henri’s The

Art Spirit—a compendium of the artist’s teachings at the League in the form of essays, class notes, and letters–emphasizes the importance of knowing the work of the masters, but not copying them slavishly, and of sketching everything one sees. He especially stresses that an art school’s purpose is to nurture “individuality of thought and individuality of expression.” 5 Sloan, one of the artists Soyer most admired, similarly wrote in Gist of Art, a book about his teaching philosophy: “Paint what you know and what you think. Keep your mind on such homely things, such deep-seated truths of reality, that there is no room for the superficial.” 6 Soyer learned those lessons well, and remembered that after he was done with classes at the League, “[I] began to paint my immediate environment in an altogether personal manner.” 7 Indeed, rather than painting technically correct nudes or portraits in the vein of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, Soyer adopted a more expressive style in line with his League teachers, some members of The Eight. Eventually, he painted gritty scenes of urban life characteristic of that group’s work.

Soyer especially acknowledged his debt to Sloan in the self-written introduction to his 1968 American Artists Group monograph. There he recognized Pène du Bois and Sloan as figures “whose personalities as well as their work and opinions have influenced my work. ...Their chance praise and studied comment have

meant very much to me.” 8 Soon before he died, Soyer wrote the introduction for a 1986 catalog chronicling an exhibition featuring images of the city, where he pointed to Sloan as a “well-known, in fact, famous painter” from the 1920s and early ’30s, and describes the “socially minded” Sloan as “a great influence.” 9

T he importance of the Art Students League on Soyer’s work cannot be understated. By following the artistic credo of the League and adopting subjects akin to the foremost artists who worked there, Soyer eventually became one of the central realists of the next generation. Part of the collective known as Social Realists, Soyer distinguished himself during the Great Depression with unglamorous, socially conscious portrayals of urban life. And with that success, Soyer was invited to teach at the League—an invitation that he viewed as “a great honor.” 10

SAMANTHA BASKIND

1. Raphael Soyer, Raphael Soyer (New York: American Artists Group, 1946), unpaginated. For more on Soyer, see Samantha Baskind, Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

2. Raphael Soyer, Self-Revealment: A Memoir (New York: Maecenas Press/Random House, 1969), 61.

3. Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist (Washington DC: New Republic Books, 1977), 212.

4. Soyer, Diary of an Artist , 212.

5. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923; reprint New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 17 and 224. Henri reiterates this philosophy on p. 233.

6. John Sloan, Gist of Art: Principles and Practice Expounded in the Classroom and Studio (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), 41.

7. Soyer, Self-Revealment , 62.

8. Soyer, Raphael Soyer, unpaginated.

9. Raphael Soyer, “Introduction,” in Ellen Ekedel and Susan Barnes Robinson, The Spirit of the City: American Urban Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, 1900–1952 , exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 1986), 4. In a 1951 Art Digest article, Soyer was quoted as saying that the predecessors he most admired were Sloan and Pène du Bois. Paul Bird, “A Soyer Profile,” Art Digest 25, no. 14 (April 15, 1951): 8.

10. Soyer, Self-Revealment, 64.

By following the artistic credo of the League and adopting subjects akin to the foremost artists who worked there, Soyer eventually became one of the central realists of the next generation.

Max Weber

By the time he joined the League’s teaching staff in 1919, pioneer American modernist Max Weber (1881–1961) had become a recognized authority on the emergence of modern art. His experiences in Europe and breadth of art historical knowledge were tantalizing to a generation of American artists anxious for news from abroad at a time when the diversity of art

deemed “modern” and heated debates as to its enduring value, made for a confusing and stimulating period for artists and art schools alike. As a young man, Weber had immersed himself in the exciting art scene in Europe, particularly Paris, from 1905 to 1908. There he had discovered Paul Cézanne’s work, met Pablo Picasso, and studied with Henri Matisse, whom

Back in New York, Weber fought to pass along his keen understanding of modern art to American audiences through press interviews and publications, forging a compelling body of his own art as he did so.

he described as valorously leading the Fauves to “abandon the slavish copying of nature.” Recalling the passionate and revolutionary environment of the French capitol, Weber described the annual salons and avant-garde galleries there as “storm centers” that generated new ideas, which he likened to “artistic atom bombs.” 1 Visits to Gertrude and Leo Stein’s renowned salon introduced him to their collection, which included Cézanne’s Bathers (1904), Matisse’s Joy of Life (1905), and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude (1906).

Ba ck in New York, Weber fought to pass along his keen understanding of modern art to American audiences through press interviews and publications, forging a compelling body of his own art as he did so. By 1915, an impressive stream of Cubist and Futurist-inspired paintings dealing with increasingly popular urban subjects emerged from his studio, including Rush Hour: New York and Chinese Restaurant.

W hile Weber’s work became more realist and focused on humanitarian concerns in the 1920s, his League drawing classes offered an important conduit to modernism for those interested in it.

Sculptors Dorothy Dehner and David Smith described him as a “rare and invaluable”2 source of information about modern art. One student recalled that while some League instructors were progressive, Weber was as “far out” as any

she had studied with and that most of his students were painting “cubistically.” 3

Reproductions of student work in the League course catalogs suggest directions taken by his students, such as the lithe, Cézannesque figures in a drawing by Elise Mannell. 4 Most well-known of Weber’s League students was Mark Rothko, a fellow Russian émigré of Jewish heritage, whose themes and tortured figures may have reflected Weber’s deep respect for primitive art and his emphasis on a spiritual dimension in his later work. Weber must also have passed along to Rothko his fervent response to Matisse’s strong color.

T hough he left teaching to focus on his own work, Weber never left the art scene, serving on many exhibition juries and leading the American Artists’ Congress in the 1930s. Respected and acclaimed, his work was included in the second exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, Nineteen Living Americans, and was presented in a retrospective exhibition the following year.

PAMELA N. KOOB

1. Max Weber on His Class with Henri Matisse, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 22, 1951, Max Weber Papers 1902–2008, Item ID 15702, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Interviews with Dorothy Dehner, October 1965–December 1966.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

3. Interview with Ruth Armer, August 14, 1974, Reel 3196, frame 0190.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

4. Art Students League course catalog, 1921–22, p. 8, Archives, Art Students League of New York.

Anne Goldthwaite

Anne Goldthwaite (1869–1944), along with Isabel Bishop, was one of the first women artists to become a prominent instructor at the Art Students League. Her tenure as a teacher of more than twenty years, from 1921 to 1943, spanned a pivotal period in American art from the development of early American modernism through the Great Depression and World War II. An influential figure whose contributions have largely been forgotten, Goldthwaite was involved in transmitting modernist trends from Paris to New York around the time of the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show. She was also a feminist, activist, suffragette, and advocate for women artists.

B orn in Montgomery, Alabama, Goldthwaite pursued artistic training in New York with the support of her uncle. She studied at the National Academy of Design and with Walter Shirlaw. In 1906, Goldthwaite moved to Paris, where fellow artist Frances Thomason introduced her to Gertrude Stein. 1 She visited Stein’s studio frequently and was exposed to the work of Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne, which she noted were “the most remarkable pictures I had ever seen” and provided an “introduction to what we now call Modern Art.” Goldthwaite also became a member of a group of artists called Académie Moderne. They met regularly, invited art critic Charles Guérin—a disciple of Cézanne—to critique their work, and organized annual exhibitions.

I n 1913, with the outbreak of World War I, Goldthwaite returned to New York, where she exhibited in the Armory Show, cementing her reputation. As a painter, she was known for her portraiture, landscape, and genre scenes, which incorporated modernist principles in composition, brushwork, and color. She was also a respected printmaker, acclaimed for her etchings, drypoints, and lithographs. An introduction to artist and arts patron Katherine Dreier, led to portrait commissions of Dreier and her sister Dorothea. Dreier and Goldthwaite were both involved in the suffrage movement, and in 1915, Goldthwaite served on the organizing committee for the Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture for the Benefit of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign at Macbeth Gallery. 2 G oldthwaite brought this wealth of experience to her position at the Art Students League. Alongside her teaching, in the 1930s, she also created murals for the post offices in Atmore and Tuskegee, Alabama, under the New Deal Art Project, Treasury Section of Fine Arts. Goldthwaite returned to Montgomery every summer and became known for her depictions of southern life during the Depression such as the prints The Young Laundress and Her Daughter. Most importantly, her strong support of women artists surely inspired and empowered many of her students. In a 1934 radio talk, she asserted: “[We] want to speak to eyes and ears

An influential figure whose contributions have largely been forgotten, Goldthwaite was involved in transmitting modernist trends from Paris to New York around the time of the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show. She was also a feminist, activist, suffragette, and advocate for women artists.

wide open and without prejudice—an audience that asks simply—is it good, not—was it done by a woman.” 3

JILLIAN RUSSO

1. Adelyn D. Breeskin, Anne Goldthwaite 1869–1944 (Montgomery, Alabama: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1977), 13.

2. See “Anne Wilson Goldwaite, 1869–1944” Reid Hall, Columbia University Global Centers, reidhall.globalcenters.columbia.edu/content/goldthwaite.

3. Quoted in Breeskin, Anne Goldthwaite 1869–1944 , 9.

Adolph Gottlieb

When the seventeen-year-old Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) entered John Sloan’s illustration class at the Art Students League in January of 1921, he must have felt his world open to him. Sloan was a prominent artist, an American who succeeded in the profession of painter. This was a new model for Gottlieb, whose family was supported by his father’s small stationery business and his uncle’s budding law practice. The revelations of that first class helped inspire Gottlieb to leave home and work his passage to Paris in June of that year.

A s he later told Martin Friedman, “Sloan made me aware of what was happening in France. He was somewhat interested in French art, but, of course, his attitude was that cubism, for example, was very good training for an artist. It would prepare an artist to do serious work, to construct a picture on a sound basis.” 1

G ottlieb stayed in Paris for a few months. He visited the Louvre daily, attended drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and saw contemporary artists in the galleries and Salons. For the next year, Gottlieb traveled and studied art at galleries and museums throughout central Europe. He then returned to New York and resumed classes at the League. In addition to Sloan and Henri, Gottlieb studied with Richard F. Lahey and Henry Schnakenberg on and off between 1924 and 1926. Of his teachers at the League, Gottlieb said, “The

activity of Sloan and Henri—I think they were about the best, and they had a very liberal attitude and they were open to all the new ideas.” 2

John Sloan had the greatest impact. “He tried to get people…to do things that were not exactly literal and to work from imagination or memory. So he implanted that idea rather early in me. When I came back from Europe, aside from any work that I did in art schools…I did other sorts of things. Imaginary compositions, landscapes, figure scenes that I worked up from sketches.” 3

O f course, the Art Students League was more than just teachers. Gottlieb met Barnett Newman, a lifelong friend, through the League in 1922. Alexander Calder and Gottlieb were classmates in 1924. Forty-two years later, Gottlieb, as a member of the first NEA panel to award a public art commission, voted to award the commission to Calder.

J ohn D. Graham, a monitor of Sloan’s class, became a close friend. In an era when regionalism and provincialism dominated American art, Gottlieb and Graham were progressives who advocated their belief that art is international and universal, and both valued the art of non-Western people and premodern cultures. The art and ideas Gottlieb shared with these friends were central to the development of American art in the important years of the mid-twentieth century.

G ottlieb entered the Art Students League with a vague idea of becoming

Gottlieb and Graham were progressives who advocated their belief that art is international and universal, and both valued the art of non-Western people and premodern cultures.

an artist. The concepts to which he was exposed and the environment of working artists he experienced there, along with the friendships he made, gave him the assurance to realize that idea.

SANFORD

HIRSCH

JOHN

SLOAN’S 1924 ART STUDENTS LEAGUE CLASS. ADOLPH GOTTLIEB IS AT THE TOP CENTER, WITH A MOUSTACHE. COURTESY OF ADOLPH AND ESTHER GOTTLIEB FOUNDATION, NY

1. Adolph Gottlieb, interview by Martin Friedman, East Hampton, 1962, “Interview with Adolph Gottlieb” typescript of a tape recording on file in the archive of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York.

2. Ibid.

3. Adolph Gottlieb, interview by Dorothy Seckler, New York, 1967, “Interview with Adolph Gottlieb” typescript of a tape recording on file in the archive of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York.

Helen Farr Sloan

In looking at biographical notices, exhibition descriptions, and even her obituary, Helen Farr Sloan (1911–2005) is defined by shifting monikers: artist, philanthropist, author, wife, educator. All fit her, as Sloan had an extraordinarily

full life dedicated to the arts. Her work benefited countless scholars, her donations have populated some of the most important art collections, and her dedication to collecting and preserving archival materials form a crucial

JOHN SLOAN, HELEN AT THE EASEL , C. 1947. CASEIN TEMPERA UNDERPAINT, OIL-VARNISH GLAZE ON PANEL (SOME SHIVA PONSOL COLORS USED), 23 15/16 × 20 IN. © 2025 DELAWARE ART MUSEUM / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

…perhaps [Sloan’s] greatest contribution and her most important defining artistic legacy was how she creatively, cleverly, and unrelentingly reimagined and manifested the role of the widow as an art practice.

backbone of documents to which most narratives about twentieth-century art in the United States are indebted. Yet perhaps her greatest contribution and her most important defining artistic legacy was how she creatively, cleverly, and unrelentingly reimagined and manifested the role of the widow as an art practice. After the death of her husband, artist John Sloan, Helen took a historically marginalized social and cultural position and transformed it, reshaping a role for her husband and herself in the art market, in museum collections, and in art-historical narratives.

Helen’s time at the Art Students League of New York proved crucial to her future contributions. Born to a wealthy family, she attended elite secondary schools and in 1921 at age ten, took her first classes at the League. She returned six years later and took her first classes with John Sloan. He was, at that point, fifty-six years old and while he had notable earlier career as a member of the Ashcan Circle, his style of social realism was often deemed traditional in light of the modernist turn toward abstraction after the Armory Show. By the time he taught Helen, he was appreciated as a vibrant instructor but one whose significance as an artist had peaked. Helen took classes at the League on and off with John Sloan and others for the next decade. While the influence of

her time there is evident in her painted works, perhaps more important to her subsequent career was the time she spent at the League honing her skills and building a collection of art and books.

T he two stayed in touch and when John’s wife died, Helen stepped in and aided him in making some order to his art and finances. They were married a year later, and she began to craft what would be her lifelong project: the primary narrator of the life and art of John Sloan. After his death, she concretized his reputation with an emerging group of academics and museum professionals looking to build canons and historical framing around US art. She strategized with scholars, promising access to art and documents in exchange for profiling and exhibiting John’s work. Simultaneously, she donated his art in deliberate ways to high-profile collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Library, and worked aggressively to center his work and archives at the Delaware Art Museum. While a talented artist, John Sloan became well-known through Helen’s initiatives; his legacy was her art, her scholarship, her creation, and she shaped her widowhood into an intellectual and artistic profession.

ALEXIS L. BOYLAN

Russel Wright

Wright recalls [League instructor Kenneth Hayes Miller] observing that, “I was not painting, I was carving on canvas and that I showed more of a feeling for three dimensions than for two.”

“The year in New York had made it impossible for me to take [endure] Princeton,” declared Russel Wright (1904–1976), the American industrial designer, as he reflected on the 1921–22 academic season he spent at the Art Students League. Wright received his family’s permission to move to New York City at age seventeen with the understanding that after a year at the League, he would follow in his father’s footsteps by attending Princeton University and eventually pursue a career in law. However, what Wright described as his “exciting year of great growth,” changed this trajectory. He dropped out of Princeton two years later and never completed a formal degree.

At the League, Russel Wright initially enrolled in Kenneth Hayes Miller’s Morning Life Drawing and Painting class, studio time, and lectures on anatomy and perspective.1 “[Miller] obviously did not like my work because he would seldom stop to give me any criticism,” quipped Wright decades later. After asking for more feedback, Wright recalls Miller observing that, “I was not painting, I was carving on canvas and that I showed more of a feeling for three dimensions than for two.”

Wright considered this astute criticism and enrolled in Modeling with A. Sterling Calder for the remainder of his time at the League. Wright’s shift to sculpture and the medium’s embrace of working threedimensionally marked a turning point in

his practice, one that set him on a path to becoming a prolific designer of modern everyday domestic objects for America’s middle class.2

A lso profoundly impactful was Wright’s friendship with Sarah Senter Whitney, whose husband, Boardman Robinson, was a prominent political cartoonist and an instructor at the Art Students League. Whitney, who studied in Paris with Auguste Rodin before marrying Robinson, recalled that Wright’s studio was next to her own. At the time Wright, just two years older than Whitney’s eldest son, was learning to support himself for the first time, and struggled to make ends meet. “Perhaps it was this fact that ingrained in his mind the idea of food which, in turn, made him design the dishware which you see on every table these days,” surmised Whitney of this period in Wright’s life. She helped him secure a summer job at Chilmark’s Barn House, a cooperative of like-minded artists, writers, and intellectuals she and Robinson helped found on Martha’s Vineyard. For Wright, who had never experienced the ocean, Barn House presented a vibrant, creative, and multigenerational community that was quite distinct from his uppermiddle-class upbringing in Lebanon, Ohio. Additionally, he spent a weekend at the Robinson’s home in Croton-onHudson. “Here for the first time, I saw

SCULPTURE OF RUSSEL WRIGHT AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, POSSIBLY A SELF-PORTRAIT, C. 1921–22. PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, COLLECTION OF ANN WRIGHT

ABOVE, LEFT: RUSSEL WRIGHT AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, C. 1921–22. PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, COLLECTION OF ANN WRIGHT ABOVE, RIGHT: MARY EINSTEIN WRIGHT, UNTITLED DRAWING , C. 1923. INK ON PAPER, COLLECTION OF GARY AND LAURA MAURER BELOW: MARY AND RUSSEL WRIGHT, 1950. SILVER GELATIN PRINT, MANITOGA / THE RUSSEL WRIGHT DESIGN CENTER. COURTESY MANITOGA / THE RUSSEL WRIGHT DESIGN CENTER

and fell in love with the Hudson River,” professed Wright.3

Yet, likely the most influential member of the Art Students League in Wright’s life was someone he would meet years after his studies, his future wife Mary Einstein. Mary enrolled at the League in October 1922, missing Russel by a few short months, and studied there on and off with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Leo Lentelli until November 1924. 4 She later met Russel Wright in Woodstock, New York, where she studied with Ukrainian-American sculptor Alexander Archipenko. Russel, who was making his way in theater, was working as a set designer for Woodstock’s free-spirited Maverick Festival. They married in 1927, an elopement witnessed by League alumni and friend Don Brown, and Archipenko’s wife, artist Angelica Archipenko. Wright credits his days at the Art Students League for introducing

him to modern art, but stated that, “under Mary’s guidance, I began to learn something about the movement of modern design.” She encouraged him to shift careers, and by 1929, they established a design practice. Together, they would return to the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard and envision their own home near the banks of the Hudson River—Manitoga, an experimental modernist home and 75acre woodland garden. Their American Modern dinnerware is considered one of the bestselling lines of all time. Sets of American Modern were even used at the Barn House’s communal kitchen in Martha’s Vineyard, and, according to the community’s scrapbook, the pieces were “obtained through his good offices—at a discount.” 5

STEFFI IBIS DUARTE

1. Registration records for Russel Wright, 1921-22, Archives of the Art Students League.

2. Biographical information from Donald Albrecht, Robert Schonfeld, Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001); Additional information and quotes from Russel Wright, interview by Marley Beers Thomas, c.1975.

3. Wright, c. 1975; Albert Christ-Janer, Boardman Robinson (University of Chicago Press, 1946); Arthur R. Railton, “Artists and Other Free Spirits at Chilmark’s Barn House,” The Dukes County Intelligencer, August 1995, 3–34.

4. Registration records for Mary S. Einstein, 1921–22 and 1924–25, Art Students League; her gaps in enrollment were likely due to travel and study at Cornell University’s School of Architecture.

5. Wright, c. 1975; Albrecht et al., 2001, p. 13–17, 35; City of New York, Office of the City Clerk, Marriage Certificate for Russel C. Wright and Mary S. Einstein, 1927. Collection of Ann Wright; Railton, “Artists and Other Free Spirits,” 8.

D. Graham

John

“I went to see Graham because I thought he knew something about art and I had to know him. I knocked on

his door, told him I had read his article….

He

looked at me a long time, then just said, ‘Come in.’”

—Jackson Pollock

It would be hard to imagine the intense anticipation with which thirty-five-yearold John D. Graham (1886–1961) crossed the threshold of the Art Students League in December 1922 to register for his first formal art instruction. Born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski, in Kyiv, Ukraine, to a family of the hereditary Polish nobility, Graham trained in the law and served as a regional magistrate before joining an elite cavalry division of the Czar’s forces in World War I. Despite the chaos of war and subsequent outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, Graham managed to secure Polish identity papers. By the end of 1920, after a harrowing escape across Europe, he reached the port of Antwerp, where he boarded a creaky troop transport bound for New York. He immigrated at Ellis Island under the name, now devoid of any Russian inflection, Jan Dabrowski.

A lthough he took classes for just over a year, the League became for Graham the home, family, and life that he had forever abandoned and also formed the nexus of relationships that would foster his career. “All my life, from earliest childhood, I have been drawing and wanted to be an artist but…[with] no one that could advise me, nor one whose judgment I could trust, I was like a vessel without a captain.” 1

Graham registered for John Sloan’s life class, where he was soon appointed monitor. Fellow student Alexander Calder described him as his “best friend” and

recollected: “I was never conscious that he [Graham] was much older… (he) first attracted my attention by drawing a nude with two pencils, one red and one black and starting with the feet and running right up.” 2

A lthough nearly a generation older than most of his fellow students, Graham quickly made lifelong friendships with, among others, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Jacob Kainen. Adages heard in Sloan’s classes surely buoyed Graham’s resolve, including: “Though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living. It makes living, living.”

“Don’t be afraid to borrow…. Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.” 3 Sloan later purchased Graham’s Still Life—Pitcher and Fruit (1926; signed John D. Graham) 4 for his own collection. Throughout his career, Graham struggled with financial insecurities and railed against critics’ rancor, yet never doubted his decision to become an artist.

O ver his first extended stay in Paris in 1928, Graham became friendly with Stuart Davis, who had sublet League instructor Jan Matulka’s studio there. Back in New York in 1930, Davis began to teach at the League and later he and Graham befriended the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky. Matulka recognized mutual influences among the three and organized an exhibition for the League Gallery in 1931.

During the 1930s, Graham was painting less and writing more. His seminal article “Primitive Art and Picasso,” which appeared in the April 1937 Magazine of Art, continued to have widespread influence on younger artists well into the 1940s and ’50s. It was said that Jackson Pollock, who studied at the League when he first came to New York in 1930, carried a rolled-up copy of the article in his back pocket. In a later interview, his friend the artist Nicholas Carone (who also studied at the League) recalled what Pollock had once confided in him: “I went to see Graham because I thought he knew something about art and I had to know him. I knocked on his door, told him I had read his article, and then he knew. He looked at me a long time, then just said, ‘Come in.’” 5

ALICIA G. LONGWELL

1. John D. Graham, Baltimore, letter to Duncan Phillips, Washington, DC, April

2, 1928, John D. Graham Records, Archives of American Art, Microfilm reel 1935, frame 245.

2. Alexander Calder, Calder: An Autobiography in Pictures (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 61.

3. Many of these adages were later compiled by Sloan and published in Gist of Art, 1938

4. In this period he began using the name John D[abrowsky] Graham, explaining that the surname was a palimpsest of his father’s name.

5. Quoted in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: Pushcart Press, 1987), 56.

ABOVE: JOHN D. GRAHAM, STILL LIFE—PITCHER AND FRUIT, 1926. OIL ON

×

Deane Keller

“...to be a

draftsman of

real power would

be the basic aim of either a painter or a sculptor. Drawing opens up most of the vistas of great art. Teachers of drawing, painting, and composition are no good if they cannot demonstrate what they have in mind.”

—Deane Keller, Notes on Drawing, Painting, and Composition, Book 1, 1962

With these words, Deane Keller (1901–1992)—draftsman, painter, portraitist, educator, and Monuments Man— affirmed his training with George B. Bridgman at the Art Students League in 1922 and 1923 as the core experience of his artistic life.

D eane Keller’s journey began with his mother, Caroline Gussman Keller, a student of Howard Pyle in the 1890s. Keller was thrilled by books illustrated by Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, who was Pyle’s student. But as a young adult, Keller found his principal teacher and inspiration in Bridgman. “You’ve got to learn to draw or you can’t paint,”

Bridgman declared. Keller later recalled that in class Bridgman would sit down at the drawing horse, look at a student’s work, and thrust up his open hand—not saying a word, expecting the student to hand him the chamois so he could erase and correct.

E ach of Keller’s several hundred portrait commissions demanded a level of performance—from the charcoal drawing and transfer to canvas, through underpainting and final rendering. Keller found in each portrait subject the craft-based challenge that called on his early work at the League, his study at the American Academy in Rome (where he witnessed the art of the Italian Renaissance), as well as his

awareness of the work of other League students he knew, such as the sculptor Malvina Hoffman.

Ba sed on his substantial portrait production, Keller is the most richly represented artist in Yale’s collection of American painting. Yet his enduring personal goal was to be a mural painter in the tradition of Edwin Howland Blashfield and Abbott Handerson Thayer—students of Jean-Léon Gérôme, as was Bridgman, at the École des Beaux-Arts.

I n his professional life, Keller received two major mural commissions (from Johns Hopkins University and New Haven Free Public Library), donated murals, and drew up designs for murals never fully realized. Keller’s thinking and acting in the mural space was a welcome shift away from the constant pressure and deadlines required by portraiture. Murals advanced at a slower pace; they allowed Keller to depict interrelations, settings, and entire figures—elements he usually could not include in his portraits. He could paint subjects that interested him—community, patriotism, medicine, education, history, friendship. And, most importantly, while he was working on a portrait, the in-process murals were always in view on his studio walls—and therefore on his mind. Every

few months, Keller stopped portrait work and devoted some days only to the murals, broadening his vision and attending to Bridgman’s range of concern: heads and hands, but also full bodies in movement, gesture, attitude.

I f mural work was liberating for Keller, so was the act of teaching, as Professor of Drawing and Painting at Yale. His own students included his son Deane Galloway Keller (1940–2005, League instructor from 1996 to 2003); Rudolph Zallinger, muralist for The Age of Reptiles mural (1947) at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History; and architect Eero Saarinen.

Toward the end of his career, Keller executed a mural in honor of

his friend Robert Kiphuth, the famed Yale coach. Suggested by Thomas Eakins’s paintings of the Agnew and Gross clinics, he situated Kiphuth as the object of veneration. This mural, with its swimmers ready to compete, represented a late demand for Keller’s draftsmanship, evoking his joyful and focused hours with Bridgman at the League fifty years earlier.

WILLIAM KELLER

Deane Keller Papers, Yale University Library MS1685, archives.yale.edu/ repositories/12/resources/4514. Deane Keller 1901–1992: An Exhibition of Drawings (Old Lyme, CT : Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, 1994).

William B. Keller, “Deane Galloway Keller (1940–2005),” Lines from the League (Spring 2015), 16–19.

DEANE KELLER

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) was not the oldest of the group that would come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists, but many of his colleagues regarded him as their elder statesman. He attended the Art Students League beginning in the fall of 1922 as a high school senior, commuting there from the Bronx. He first took beginners’ drawing classes six afternoons a week, working from antique casts under the instructor Duncan Smith. Newman recalled, “I kept plugging away” at a rendition of the Belvedere torso. To his surprise, Smith selected the work for the League’s annual exhibition that showcased the best student works. “It was, to me,” Newman later said, “the highest role a man could achieve—it was a dream.” 1

Newman wanted to attend art school full-time, but his father convinced him to continue on to college. In 1923, he matriculated at the City College of

New York and majored in philosophy, but having made a compromise with his parents, he could continue classes at the League. He ultimately took only one life drawing class with William Von Schlegell five evenings a week, in October 1923. In

1929–30, he studied painting with John Sloan and Harry Wickey. It was at the ASL that Newman met Adolph Gottlieb, who greatly impressed him because Gottlieb was already a dedicated artist. The two remained close friends and augmented their education at the ASL by visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Newman stopped painting by 1940 and eventually destroyed all his pre-1945 work. He later said that by 1941, he had the feeling that “the world was coming to an end…. The whole issue of painting, I felt, was over because it was impossible to paint flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello.” 2 Newman was driven to search for a new aesthetic appropriate to the historical moment. He had an epiphany in 1948 with a work he later recognized as his “first” painting, which he eventually titled Onement I. It is a smallish painting with a maroon

surface and a feathery textured band of orange running up its center. This vertical, and occasionally horizontal, band would become emblematic of Newman’s work, and in the 1960s, it was referred to by the artist himself as a “zip.” His advocacy for new forms ultimately served to position him within the burgeoning movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism. N ewman did not have solo exhibitions until 1950 and 1951, both of which were received with great puzzlement and little praise. In the late 1950s, with a tremendously successful retrospective, Newman began to gain traction with his work, reaching the zenith of his success, mostly from a diverse group of younger artists. Throughout his life, he was a dedicated student of art, art history, and an active critic. Newman was a tireless promoter of the new American painting, much of it completed by former ASL students including Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

EILEEN COSTELLO

1. Barnett Newman in Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), 11.

2. Barnett Newman, “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Mathews,” 1967, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 287.

His advocacy for new forms ultimately served to position him within the burgeoning movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism.

Joseph Pennell

Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) established the League’s etching class in 1922 at the request of Gifford Beal, then serving as the president of the League’s Board of Control. 1 Though born in Pennsylvania, Pennell had spent most of his career in Europe working as an illustrator and sometimes printer for James McNeill Whistler. At the League, he wanted to lay the foundations for an “American School of the Graphic Arts” that would rival training in European cities like Leipzig. 2 The key, according to Pennell, was to ensure his students mastered printmaking as a trade, learning the

craft from start to finish. Rather than handing over their marked plates to a printer, whom Pennell disparaged as “middlemen who are not artists,” participation in Pennell’s class required that students marked, etched, inked, and printed their own work.3

I n addition to building students’ competency with the core mechanics of printmaking, Pennell stressed experimentation and innovation to achieve desired effects. 4 He encouraged his students to look widely at historic prints—he hung reproductions of prints by Rembrandt and Whistler in the

classroom and took students often to the Metropolitan Museum and the Grolier Club—and pressed them to apply these techniques in their own prints. An art critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle went so far as to say, “the class resembles nothing so much as a laboratory… [Pennell] allows each student to experiment.” 5

Eu gene Camille Fitsch, who enrolled in Pennell’s class in January 1923 and eventually served as its monitor, captured this classroom dynamic in one of his student lithographs. 6 Conveying at once frenetic energy and serious intent, Fitsch centers the scene around Pennell, the tallest figure who stands behind the bed of the classroom’s etching press. He and nearby students stare downward to regard a newly pulled print and are immersed in conversation about the work. The studio’s large windows illuminate the room, revealing students in motion, deeply concentrating on another step

in the complicated process: marking a plate, cranking the printing press, smoking a plate, or regarding freshly etched markings.

Pennell oversaw the League’s printmaking program until his death from influenza in 1926. He hired Fitsch— among several others—to teach their own printmaking classes, thus strengthening the League’s place as one of the twentieth century’s most preeminent centers of graphic arts education.

LAUREN ROSENBLUM AND CHRISTINA WEYL

1. For more background on the League’s printmaking program, see Pam Koob, A Century of Paper: Prints by Art Students League Artists 1901–2001, exh. cat. (New York: Art Students League, 2002).

2. Elizabeth Robbins Pennell uses this term in her commentary in The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), 277, 288. Pennell, himself, discussed the need to build a national school of the graphic arts but does not appear to have used this specific terminology. See Joseph Pennell, “Craftsmanship and American Graphic Art: An Experiment in Teaching and Some Results,” New York Times, July 29, 1923.

3. Pennell, “Craftsmanship.”

4. Pennell’s emphasis on experimentation was part of a larger trend in the graphic arts that began with the late-nineteenth century etching revival in Europe and America. Thank you to colleague, Ad Stijnman, author of Engraving and Etching, 1400–2000 (London: Archetype Publications, 2012) for making this point.

5. “Joseph Pennell’s Class in The Graphic Arts Exhibits,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle , April 6, 1924.

6. Koob, 4.

An art critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle went so far as to say, “the class resembles nothing so much as a laboratory…[Pennell] allows each student to experiment.”

Harry Sternberg

Over thirty-three years of teaching at the Art Students League, Harry Sternberg (1904–2001) blended conscience and craftsmanship to produce an art and a pedagogy “of the people and for the people.”1 His association with the League began in 1922 as a student in George B. Bridgman’s life drawing class. 2 In the late 1920s, League instructor Harry Wickey tutored Sternberg privately in etching, offering both technical instruction and professional advice that launched his career as a printmaker.3 In the winter of 1933, Sternberg himself began teaching printmaking and composition.

Mechanization and its consequences for workers captivated Sternberg as a young artist and political actor. 4 “My father,” he once said, “was always on the wrong end of a machine.” 5 Dance of the Machine (1935), exhibited in the League’s sixtieth anniversary exhibition in 1936, epitomizes the artist’s moral opposition to exploitative working conditions as well as his fascination with industrial imagery.6 Across three prints, Sternberg’s surreal entanglements of nude figures and machinery decry the subjugation of workers and visualize a better future.

Dance of the Machine was printed by Will Barnet, a student shortly thereafter hired as the League’s youngest-ever official printer.7 As his teaching developed, Sternberg found more ways to include his students in his success. In 1936, when he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Sternberg brought Blanche Grambs, Riva Helfond, and other students with him on his trip documenting the conditions in Pennsylvania’s coal country.8 Contrasting the miners’ virtuosic work in dangerous conditions underground with their families’ poverty on the surface, Sternberg’s

prints from these years refine the critique expressed in Dance of the Machine 9

I n his teaching, Sternberg emphasized not just content, but craftsmanship, which he defined as “thorough knowledge and control of the mediums of expression.” 10 This knowledge and control held redemptive, even therapeutic, potential: in 1945 and 1946, he taught drawing and silkscreen to physically and psychologically wounded soldiers at the War Veterans’ Art Center, an initiative organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 11 Sternberg’s commitment to fostering both skill and self-expression left an impression: Charles White, who studied at the League in 1942–43, called Sternberg “the most important teacher I ever had” and said he “opened my eyes to my feelings.”12

Sternberg’s artistic preoccupation with mechanization and his pedagogical commitment to craftsmanship both stem from the belief that the conditions under which one works matter. Labor undertaken freely and controlled by the artist or worker affords dignity, while alienated labor—automated, coerced, poorly compensated—oppresses. Sternberg articulated these concerns through the language of class struggle, remarking that “my contacts have been mostly with the men who work the machines and very little with the men who own the machines.

It’s a matter of choice.” 13

I n an essay on printmaking and education, he explicitly connected industrial labor and the printmaker’s craft, arguing that while craftsmanship “give[s] meaning to living and doing… mass production, mechanical devices, and specialization have nearly eliminated these qualities from our society.” 14

Sternberg’s printmaking and his teaching both address this loss, using his craftsmanship to assert the dignity of the men who work the machines.

ROBIN OWEN JOYCE

1. Harry Sternberg, “Credo,” in One Hundred American Jewish Artists, ed. Louis Lozowick (New York: Yidisher Kultur Farband Art Section, 1947), 180.

2. Student registration records, Archives of the Art Students League of New York.

3. Letter from Harry Wickey to Harry Sternberg, August 26, 1928. Harry Sternberg Papers, 1927–2000, box 1, folder 27. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

4. For treatments of Sternberg’s images of laborers in the context of his peers, see for example Helen Langa, “Strength, Stress, and Solidarity: Imag(in)ing American Labor in the Depression Era,” Southeastern College Art Conference Review 13, no. 1 (1996): 2–13 and Erika Doss, “Looking at Labor: Images of Work in 1930s American Art,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24 (2002): 230–57.

5. Transcript, Interview with Malcolm Warner, 1994. Harry Sternberg papers, 1927–2000, box 1, folder 2. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

6. The 60th Anniversary Exhibition of Members and Associates of the Art Students League of New York (New York: The Art Students League, 1936), 16.

7. Pamela N. Koob, Will Barnet and the Art Students League (New York: Art Students League of New York, 2010), 8.

8. On Sternberg’s radical students, see James Wechsler, “Winifred Milius Lubell’s Depression-Era Sketchbooks,” Archives of American Art Journal 45, no. 1/2 (2005): 33–41 and James Wechsler, “The Great Depression and the Prints of Blanche Grambs,” Print Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Dec. 1996): 376–96.

9. Ellen Fleurov, No Sun Without Shadow: The Art of Harry Sternberg, exh. cat. (Escondido, CA: California Center for the Arts, 2000), 23–24.

10. Harry Sternberg, “The Lost Art of the Bitten Plate,” The League 12, no. 4 (May 1941): 4.

11. Victor D’Amico, The War Veterans’ Art Center, 1944–1948: An Experiment in Rehabilitation through Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948). Photocopy in Harry Sternberg Papers, 1927–2000, box 1, folder 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

12. Oral History Interview with Charles W. White, March 9, 1965. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

13. Transcript, Interview with Malcolm Warner, 1994.

14. Harry Sternberg, “Craftsmanship, Printmaking, and Contemporary Education,” College Art Journal 9, no. 2 (Winter 1949–50), 205.

Dance of the Machine (1935), exhibited in the League’s sixtieth anniversary exhibition in 1936, epitomizes the artist’s moral opposition to exploitative working conditions as well as his fascination with industrial imagery.

Alexander Calder

At the Art Students League, as throughout his career, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) charted a singular course. “When I went to the Art Students League,” he recalled, “I was too old + formed in [my] way of thinking to be trapped by any system of ‘art’ proposed to me, unless I really found it good.” 1 Calder’s parents, the sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder and

painter Nanette Lederer Calder, raised him within arm’s reach of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Ashcan School, which invigorated his creative energies. By the time he enrolled at the League in the fall of 1923, at the age of twentyfive, he found himself among familiar instructors who embraced new realities and unconventional styles. His father

“When I went to the Art Students League, I was too old + formed in [my] way of thinking to be trapped by any system of ‘art’ proposed to me, unless I really found it good.” —Alexander Calder

had just finished a stint as a modeling teacher at the League (1918–22), and John Sloan was a family friend. Progressing swiftly through his painting, drawing, lithography, and etching courses, Calder displayed a cross-disciplinary spirit and a strong sense of self. “There’s no formula,” he once said, “but using your senses.” 2

A lthough Calder’s time at the League was brief (1923–25), it left a lasting impression. In his 1966 autobiography, Calder described in detail his fellow students, including John D. Graham and Robert Osborne Chadeayne, and his instructors, including Sloan, Guy Pène du Bois, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Boardman Robinson. He appreciated how Sloan did “not [try] to make you do it his way but [urged] you to develop some capabilities of your own.” He was fond of Robinson, an “excellent teacher…a real person.” Life in and around 1920s New York City served as his favored subject matter: “My chief delight was probably hanging up the canvas with a few nails and string. Thus I could attach it to a fence, a post, or anything. I guess the center of my composition was usually a derrick or some such device, and I tried to carve out its most potent features from the surrounding atmosphere.” 3 Rendered in fluid brushstrokes, Calder’s paintings were grounded in their immediacy. In Excavation (c. 1924), interpenetrating elements of mass, line, scale, and

arrested movement encompass a dramatic space. This composition, in particular, contemplates a device that seven years later Calder would fashion out of wire: a derrick-like base to set nonobjective sculpture in motion.

I n Sloan’s and Robinson’s classes, Calder honed his talent for line drawing. Line is entirely “a mental invention,” to quote Sloan, and it was one that Calder used to realize an art of action in two dimensions—in subway drawings, assignments for the National Police Gazette, and brush drawings at the Bronx and Central Park zoos. 4 In February 1925, Calder lifted line from the page to create in wire a threedimensional valentine for his mother; in Paris, a year later, he harnessed the expressive energy of line to devise massless wire portraits, or drawings in space. Sloan would later marvel at Calder’s “ingenious manipulation of a continuous thread of wire” in a medium he ultimately stretched to its limits, overturning sculptural boundaries in his mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles.5

SUSAN BRAEUER DAM

1. Alexander Calder, “The Evolution,” manuscript, Calder Foundation archives, 1955–56, 115.

2. Calder, “The Evolution,” 84.

3. Alexander Calder, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures , ed. Jean Davidson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 61, 67.

4. John Sloan, “Drawing,” John Sloan on Drawing and Painting: The Gist of Art (New York: Dover, 2010), 57. Revised republication of the work originally published by the American Artists Group, Inc., New York, in 1939.

5. Van Wyck Brooks, John Sloan: A Painter’s Life (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1955), 145, quoted in Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 149.

Frank J. Reilly

Frank J. Reilly (1906–1967) came to teach his classes at the Art Student’s League of New York every day dressed in a conservative business suit. He said that every artist should have a trademark to be remembered by their students and counterparts. He always wore shirts with extra wide collars. He never wore a smock, gloves, or a beret. Many thought he looked like a house detective, or a bartender.

Actually, Mr. Reilly was a showman. Perhaps he got that from his father, who was in show business. He felt his students should learn by doing, so when teaching, he never put a brush or a pencil in his hand; he simply instructed his students what to do. When he started teaching at the League, he would give lectures every Friday night for a small fee. As his classes grew, he gave his students two lectures a week on drawing, painting, and “picture making.” In the spring he did landscape lectures. He was totally dedicated to presenting his teaching methods in great detail.

He also spent time interviewing other famous artists to broaden his teaching methods. He adopted whatever was considered to be the best by the greatest number of people for the greatest length of time. If he had a problem in painting or composition, he went to his favorite illustrators, such as Dean Cornwell, whom he regarded as the best illustrator of all time. He wanted to be as good as his friend Cornwell. He knew it would take many years to catch up to him, but worked hard at it. This caused

Of course, [Reilly’s] class was always packed. He told me “If you don’t look good, I don’t look good”—so he always gave one hundred percent of himself.

quite a bit of animosity between him and other instructors—so much so that one day when Reilly was walking down the hall at the League, he was actually punched by a fellow instructor!

In my opinion, Frank J. Reilly was the one instructor who conveyed the most information to his classes. He taught his students how to think, how to see, and how to do. He supplemented his criticism with orderly lectures of the techniques of drawing and painting. Of course, his class was always packed. He told me “If you don’t look good, I don’t look good”— so he always gave one hundred percent of himself. He loved to talk and talk. On summer nights, when his evening class

let out, he would stand with his students outside the front of the Art Students League building to discuss artwork, artists, etc. Occasionally, after class, we all went to a coffee shop around the corner from the League for interesting artrelated discussions. Mr. Reilly considered his students as family, and he had a very strong bond with them. He told me that he did not think he would ever be regarded as one of the great artists of all time, but that he would always be remembered for being one of the greatest teachers of drawing, painting, and “picture making” who ever lived. I’m sure many people would agree.

JACK FARAGASSO

OPPOSITE: SCENES FROM THE FRANK J. REILLY CLASS, C. 1950. ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

ABOVE: MAX SCHWART, E. LESLIE WAID, JAMES BAMA AND FRANK J. REILLY AT THE REILLY PARTY, HELD IN THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK GALLERY, MAY 1949. STUDIES BY J. GABODA, F. VAZ, AND K. THOMASIAN ARE

Marion Greenwood

About Henri Matisse, Lawrence Gowing writes: “Some painters seek out art as if by instinct and fall on it with fury; some of them receive it at birth….” 1 Marion Greenwood (1909–1970) was born to a Brooklyn family of artists and “fell on” art with determination, if not fury. Her path was set. Yet had she not left Erasmus Hall High School for the Art Students League at fifteen, she would not have met George B. Bridgman, whose glowing letter of support assured her 1927 Yaddo residency. George Peabody would not have commissioned a portrait of Yaddo founder Spencer Trask for $1,000, which funded Greenwood’s study at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She wouldn’t have retreated to Yaddo in 1932 and launched a relationship with writer Josephine Herbst, nor journeyed with Herbst and her husband John Herrmann to Mexico, where she learned fresco from Pablo O’Higgins and catapulted to fame as the first woman to paint a mural there. She returned in 1934 to work with Diego Rivera, who called her one of the “greatest living women mural painters.” 2 Greenwood’s choice of the Art Students League changed everything.

From 1924 to 1928, Greenwood made the journey from her home in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay to the League. In Bridgman’s class, she honed anatomical mastery. John Sloan passed on leftist politics and his Ashcaninfluenced celebration of working people.

Greenwood embraced “the human thing” in art as a catalyst for social change, filling her Mexican and WPA murals with

portraits of laborers and campesinos. In the multiracial, international studio of German immigrant modernist Winold Reiss, she joined friend and sometimes lover Isamu Noguchi, Aaron Douglas, and other artists. Reiss’s embrace of cultural diversity inspired her travels from New York and Woodstock to the Southwest, Mexico, Europe, and Asia, and a year in Hong Kong with her British-born husband. Greenwood’s freewheeling romantic life and independent spirit defied expectations for women. She was one of two women artist-correspondents during World War II, lived on sales of her work, and railed against critics whose highest praise was “painting like a man.”

Greenwood’s portraits and lithographs garnered numerous awards, among them a Carnegie Institute prize for Mississippi Girl (1945), a painting that

[Greenwood] returned in 1934 to work with Diego Rivera, who called her one of the “greatest living women mural painters.” Greenwood’s choice of the Art Students League changed everything.

hung between a Picasso and Matisse. She was elected to the National Academy of Design, and more than thirty museums own her work. Yet artistic focus on “the human thing” sidelined her when Abstract Expressionism and other movements eclipsed realism. It’s time to reassert Greenwood’s place in the pantheon of women artists now garnering overdue recognition.

JOANNE B. MULCAHY

1. “Matisse: The Harmony of Light” in Major European Art Movements, 1900–1945 , eds. Patricia E. Kaplan and Susan Manso (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977).

2. James Oles, “The Mexican Experience of Marion and Grace Greenwood” in The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940, eds. Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2006), 88.

MARION GREENWOOD, INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE COUNTRYSIDE (FRESCO DETAIL). MERCADO ABELARDO L. RODRÍGUEZ, MEXICO CITY, 1935–6. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOANNE B. MULCAHY, © THE ESTATE OF MARION GREENWOOD

Margaret Lowengrund

Upon moving to New York in the fall of 1924, Margaret Lowengrund (1902–1957) immediately enrolled at the Art Students League, where she remained a graphic arts student through the spring of 1926. Experience in the school’s bustling printmaking studio was the first among several models that informed her decision in 1951 to establish The Contemporaries, the innovative, hybrid printmaking workshop and gallery.1

O nly two years before Lowengrund arrived at the ASL , the school had invited internationally renowned artist Joseph Pennell to revive its printmaking program. Thus, Lowengrund was fortuitously among the first generation of American art students to attend his “great school of graphic art.” 2 There, she encountered Pennell’s nascent efforts to break down a field-wide hierarchy that differentiated between the “refined” process of etching as an art form and the commercialism previously associated with lithography by charging his students to learn both. In need of a dedicated lithographer, Pennell attempted to overcome an institutionalized tension between the creative approach of the printmakerartist and the skilled craft of the commercial printer by hiring ASL student Charles Wheeler Locke, who had previously attended a trade school for skilled artisans. Lowengrund took classes with both men that initiated a

Grounded in the lessons of her past, Lowengrund’s effort [through The Contemporaries] was a vital precedent and catalyst for the collaborative workshops and printer-publishers that subsequently proliferated and profited during the 1960s American Print Renaissance.

sustained passion for lithography over the course of her lifetime.

L owengrund’s prints produced at the ASL focused on portraits of working people and city architecture, showing her to have been a keen observer of modern life. A lithograph of the Highbridge (c. 1925), for example, depicts the oldest bridge in New York City as seen from the ground. This viewpoint accentuates the strong verticality of its stone barrel vaults instead of the popular pedestrian promenade. It situates the area’s landmark water tower in a space of deep recession to emphasize the composition’s upward thrust, likely encouraged by an exploration of perspective observed in Pennell’s prints. Lowengrund’s intaglio prints of this period draw directly upon James McNeill Whistler’s use of the etched line to both delineate form and mark out shadow. She also adopts his favored subject matter in images of shopfronts and doorways.

I n the decades after attending the ASL , Lowengrund continued to print in European ateliers in the 1920s, the shared studios in the idyllic artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York, during the 1930s, and the politically charged urban milieu of the Graphic Arts Division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in 1939. These experiences

fostered practical knowledge and formed a creative vision for her novel endeavor, The Contemporaries.

From its inception, The Contemporaries was an unprecedented enterprise in the United States with its fusion of production, exhibition, and sales of modern graphics by living artists under one roof. Through it all, Lowengrund saw the significance of graphics—and lithography specifically—in defining contemporary art for her work and that of her peers. Grounded in the lessons of her past, Lowengrund’s effort was a vital precedent and catalyst for the collaborative workshops and printerpublishers that subsequently proliferated and profited during the 1960s American Print Renaissance.

LAUREN ROSENBLUM AND CHRISTINA WEYL

1. Lauren Rosenblum and Christina Weyl, A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries, exh. cat. (Munich, Germany and New York: Hirmer Publishers and Print Center New York, 2023).

2. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, vol. II (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), 271, 273.

Louise Nevelson

Best known for her monochromatic wall sculptures constructed from wood and introduced in the late 1950s, Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) took her first steps toward creative freedom at the Art Students League. Born Leah Berliawsky, a Jewish émigré who left Ukraine with her family to escape religious persecution, the artist settled in Rockland, Maine, in 1905. By 1922, Berliawsky had wed shipping magnate Charles Nevelson and had one child, but conventional married life restricted her professional ambitions. Interested in becoming a visual artist, Nevelson enrolled in the League in 1924. She took a Saturday afternoon drawing course with portraitist and printmaker

Anne Goldthwaite, who reportedly did not inspire Nevelson. 1 Yet the sculptor unknowingly benefitted from Goldthwaite, who as a suffragette and activist fought gendered barriers to advance pathways for women artists in the twentieth century.

N evelson struggled for years with the demands of being a wife and mother before she was able to re-enroll in the League in 1929, taking life drawing and

painting classes with Kenneth Hayes Miller in the morning and drawing classes with Kimon Nicolaïdes in the afternoon. Miller adhered to Old Master techniques of draftsmanship and painting, while Nicolaïdes taught line drawing, encouraging students to look only at the model as they worked. 2 Stewart Klonis, a former student of the two teachers before becoming

LOUISE NEVELSON, LUNAR LANDSCAPE , 1959–60. PAINTED

Nevelson pursued a nonconformist path as an artist, exploring unconventional and untried methods of artmaking first evident in her League studies.

the League’s executive director, described their contrasting pedagogical instructions. “If you got too tight working with Miller,” recalled Klonis, “then you went to Nicolaïdes to loosen up, as they say, in sketching and so on.” 3

A lthough Nevelson’s student figural drawings reflect Miller’s emphasis on structure and Nicolaïdes’s interest in gesture, the sculptor conceived bodies anew on paper. Her instructors inspired experimentation, and even though Miller was an austere and imposing personality, he reportedly “attracted people who were individualists.”4 Nevelson pursued a nonconformist path as an artist, exploring unconventional and untried methods of artmaking first evident in her League studies. At times, the artist drew figures with disproportionate limbs and torsos that appear stacked on the sheet, forecasting her sculptural practice of packing found objects into rectangular boxes or crates and amassing them into walls.

H aving separated from her husband in 1931, Nevelson went to study with Hans Hofmann, first in Munich, Germany, and again at the League from 1932–33. In her autobiography, Nevelson credited Hofmann’s teachings on Cubism as the inspiration for her signature box or cube in which she layered wood fragments in low and high relief to create plays of light and

shadow.5 Nevelson’s wall sculptures, however, also reflect the influence of Miller. He staged models in settings for students to paint, encouraging them to think of the picture “as a design, as a whole,” and integrate their compositions with monochromatic underpainting. 6 Even though she used disparate wood objects from New York City litter piles as her artmaking materials, Nevelson, too, conceived her sculptures as complete designs, which she unified primarily through monochromatic black, but also white and gold paint. Transforming her surroundings into large-scale assemblages, Nevelson often alluded to urban or natural settings.

SHIRLEY REECE-HUGHES

1. Laurie Wilson, Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 58.

2. Robert F. Brown, Interview with Alexander Stoller, Oral History Program, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, December 10, 1976, unpaginated.

3. Paul Cummings, “The Art Students League, Part I,” Archives of American Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1973): 21–22.

4. Quote is by art historian Lloyd Goodrich in Cummings, “The Art Students League, Part I,” 15.

5. Louise Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks: Taped Conversations with Diana MacKown , ed. Diana MacKown (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 43–44.

6. Goodrich described the details of Miller’s teachings in Cummings, “The Art Students League, Part I,” 14.

Barbara Shermund

Shermund contributed nearly six hundred cartoons to the New Yorker, and just under a dozen covers. She went on to become a mainstay at Esquire magazine from the late 1930s into the 1960s, and also contributed cartoons to most other major magazines of the era including Life , Judge , and Collier’s .

Barbara Shermund (1899–1978) was an early magazine cartoonist, and one of the first women to be published by the New Yorker. Her career spanned the heyday of American magazines from the 1920s through the 1960s, and her earliest work boldly tapped the zeitgeist of first-wave feminism. Beginning in 1925 and continuing into the mid-1940s, Shermund contributed nearly six hundred cartoons to the New Yorker, and just under a dozen covers. She went on to become a mainstay at Esquire magazine from the late 1930s into the 1960s, and also contributed cartoons to most other major magazines of the era including Life, Judge, and Collier’s. Throughout her career, she illustrated numerous books for well-known cultural figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Ilka Chase, and John Philip Sousa II, among others. Her newspaper cartoon, Shermund’s Sallies, was syndicated nationally by King Features from 1944 through 1957. Before the Mad Men era, Shermund broke into advertising illustration, drawing advertisements for Pepsi-Cola, Ponds, Victrola, Frigidaire, and many more. In 1950, she made history as one of the first

women to be admitted for membership into the National Cartoonists Society.

Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund was the daughter of an architect, Henry Shermund, and a sculptor, Fredda Cool. She attended the California School of Fine Arts from 1918 to 1922,

where she studied painting and printmaking. CSFA was among the most prestigious programs for art at the time, and in 1920, its students were awarded the highest number of honors nationally from the Art Students League of New York. Shermund’s name was listed among the honorable mentions for the ASL’s annual scholarship competition. In 1924, Shermund went on a trip to visit New York City, and stayed to start a new life. Immediately after relocating, Shermund enrolled briefly in an uninstructed sketch class at Art Students League in March of 1924. Although this was her first and only recorded class there, it was her immersion in the Art Students League community around Woodstock, New York, that would have a profound influence on her in for years to come.

By the late 1920s, Shermund began making regular visits to the then-robust art colonies in Woodstock, New York, often for whole summers at a time. She would continue to visit throughout the next two decades, building deep and lasting relationships and professional connections there. Buoyed by the presence of the Art Students League’s summer program in the area from 1906 through 1922, Woodstock had become an epicenter in the northeast for artistic experimentation. In the 1930s Shermund studied lithography out of a

rustic workshop in the basement of the Woodstock Art Association under Grant Arnold, the first lithographic printer for the League. Arnold’s was one of only a few lithography studios in the United States at the time.

Ba rbara Shermund lived out her last decades drawing at her kitchen table and swimming in the channel across from her home in Sea Bright, New Jersey. She died in 1978 in Middletown, New Jersey.

CAITLIN MCGURK

Grant Arnold

Grant Arnold (1904–1988) was the first professional lithographic printer hired by the Art Students League of New York. In 1929, he joined Charles Wheeler Locke’s lithography class at the League, where he discovered he had a natural affinity for working on stone, and became totally absorbed in the lithographic process. With the help of his teacher, Arnold aimed to achieve the beautiful tones of the early nineteenth-century European lithographers. When Locke was away, other students in the class often asked Arnold for advice and to help them print their work. It was not unusual for artists interested in lithography to struggle with the printing process, and to work with a knowledgeable printer.

Toward the end of the school year in the spring of 1930, Arnold was recruited by Arnold Blanch of the Woodstock Artists Association to go to Woodstock, New York, for the summer to set up and operate a

lithographic studio to print for some of the artists in town.1 Woodstock had been the headquarters from 1906 to 1922 of the League’s Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, and continued to maintain a close connection with the institution.

Arnold was avidly sought out as a master printer over the course of the 1930s by artists including League instructor Yasuo Kuniyoshi and students from the League who spent time in the area during the summer months.

By the end of the first summer Arnold had accumulated twenty-five prints and $400 in extra revenue.2 With their approval, he kept a signed printer’s proof of each edition of an artist’s work. These prints make up a large portion of the Grant Arnold Collection of Fine Prints at the State University of New York in Oswego. On returning to New York in September of 1930, Arnold showed Locke the collection of twenty-five lithographs

Arnold was avidly sought out as a master printer over the course of the 1930s by artists including League instructor Yasuo Kuniyoshi and students from the League who spent time in [Woodstock] during the summer months.

he had assembled in Woodstock. His teacher shared them with the Art Students League’s Board of Control, who asked Arnold to exhibit them in the school gallery.3 At the close of the exhibition, the board asked Arnold to be the League’s lithographic printer, which entailed printing for students and League members. Soon Arnold was also enlisted to print for Eugene Camille Fitsch’s evening lithography class.

A rnold worked for two years as the Art Students League’s printer. A number of League students for whom Arnold printed went on to establish significant artistic careers, including Cecil Bell, Emil J. Bistram, Aaron Bohrod, Francis Criss, Don Freeman, and Prentiss Taylor. In 1931 he printed for the school’s painting instructor Thomas Hart Benton. Locke even invited Arnold to come to his studio in Brooklyn and print for him. 4 Eugene Camille Fitsch also invited Arnold to his studio to print for him as well as his friends, among them the comic strip illustrator Percy Crosby.5

In the autumn of 1932, Arnold and his wife Jenny settled upstate full-time, where he continued to work in the basement of the Woodstock Artists Association

until 1940. Arnold was also productive as a printmaker and authored Creative Lithography and How to Do It, published in 1941, which is a still widely read book that explores the technical ins and outs of this complex and demanding medium.

BRUCE WEBER

1. Grant Arnold, “Woodstock: The Everlasting Hills,” unpublished manuscript, 49. A copy of the completed typed manuscript is in the archives of the Historical Society of Woodstock.

2. “Woodstock: The Everlasting Hills,” 81.

3. I also would like to thank Michael Flannagan, former director of the Tyler Art Gallery at SUNY Oswego, for providing a copy of Coy Ludwig’s “Interview with Grant Arnold,” which took place over the course of December 1978 through May 1979. Hereafter, this will be referred to as Arnold Interview. The reference to the exhibition at the League appears in the interview on p. 16.

4. Arnold Interview, 148.

5. Arnold Interview, 101.

Paul Cadmus

Although the Art Students League helped propel the education and technical skill of one of America’s most celebrated twentieth-century artists, Paul Cadmus (1904–1999), with instruction from teachers like William Auerbach-Levy, Joseph Pennell, and Charles Locke, the school also transformed his life in ways rarely illuminated. 1 In 1934, the United States Government censored and seized Cadmus’s WPA-commissioned painting The Fleet’s In! (1934) for its lewd depiction of enlisted men partaking in debaucherous behavior that alluded to homosexual acts. In response, the artist created a nearly identical etching of The Fleet’s In!, producing the first prints at the Art Students League. 2

T hanks to the means provided to him by the school, Cadmus began the process of preserving and disseminating a significant piece of early twentiethcentury American queer art in the face of government censorship that persisted for decades. While this account is an immediate example of the League’s influence on Cadmus through its facilities, the school was also the catalyst for precious, intangible experiences that included some of the most important relationships and artistic inspirations in his life.

B etween 1928 and 1932, he met Jared French while taking sketching and etching classes at the League. Hailing from Rutherford, New Jersey, French had entered the League hoping to establish

a career as a fine artist. While the two became lovers for a time, even venturing to Europe together during their early twenties, French also had a profound effect on Cadmus as an artist: “Jerry French, however, got me started into painting pictures other than just direct from life, just composing pictures, trying to be more like the Old Masters. He was a great influence—very important. He persuaded me that I actually could be an artist and that I needn’t be a commercial artist, which I had been.” 3

Without the bonds cultivated with French at the Art Students League, Paul Cadmus would have never blossomed into an artist whose beautiful, queer aesthetic still resonates and inspires today.

Friendship and leisure forged at the League also played pivotal roles. In the 1930s, while taking classes, Cadmus and French also met Margaret Hoening, who would later marry French and take his surname. The three formed a lifelong connection that manifested in the art collective PaJaMa, utilizing the first two letters of their names, where they took ethereal photographs of each other on beach vacations. According to Cadmus, the photographs “were just playthings. We would hand out these little photographs when we went to dinner parties, like playing cards.”4

A lthough the photographs are far from the formal rigor of the three artist’s other works, an intoxicating, magical realist style permeates these uncanny black-and-white images. The

dramatic placement of beautiful bodies on barren, windswept beaches mystically transforms the scenes into something both familiar and otherworldly. More than just exercises, these photographs indicate the lasting links that the League directly nurtures, whether it be career-altering inspiration or amity found in the joyful documentation of beach vacations.

I n one of PaJaMa’s photos, presumably taken by Cadmus, we see Jared and Margaret French along with a third figure, the now-renowned American painter George Tooker. Cadmus became a major force in aiding Tooker’s artistic progression as they attended sketch classes together at the

Art Students League. Although Tooker was studying under Reginald Marsh, Cadmus influenced him to move away from Marsh’s looser egg tempura technique into a more precise one, which helped to solidify Tooker’s exacting, enigmatic surrealist style.5

A long with this mentorship, Cadmus was also, at one point, the elected vice-president of the Board of Control at the League, signaling not only his enduring participation as a student but also his commitment to guiding the development of artists in New York. 6 Technical applications, friendships, teaching, and profound growth are all a part of Cadmus’s indelible ties to a cherished New York art institution;

Thanks to the means provided to him by the school, Cadmus began the process of preserving and disseminating a significant piece of early twentieth-century American queer art in the face of government censorship that persisted for decades.

however, as reflected by the community he formed at the school, his story is one of many legacy-defining ones fostered through the Art Students League.

BRYAN MARTIN

1. Philip Eliasoph, Paul Cadmus: Yesterday & Today (Miami: Miami University Art Museum, 1981), 7.

2. “Oral history interview with Paul Cadmus,” interview by Judd Tully, Archives of American Art, March 22–May 5, 1988, aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-paul-cadmus-12619#transcript.

3. David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 41–42.

4. PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French), Margaret French, Paul Cadmus, Provincetown , c. 1945. Museum of Modern Art, https://www. moma.org/collection/works/291425.

5. “Oral history interview with Paul Cadmus,” interview by Judd Tully, Archives of American Art, March 22–May 5, 1988, aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-paul-cadmus-12619#transcript.

6. Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1991), 130.

ABOVE: PAJAMA (EST. 1937) © COPYRIGHT, MARGARET FRENCH, GEORGE TOOKER AND JARED FRENCH, NANTUCKET. C. 1946. GELATIN SILVER PRINT, SHEET: 4 1/2 × 6 3/4 IN. IMAGE: 4 1/2 × 6 3/4 IN. PROMISED GIFT OF JACK SHEAR, INV.: P.2017.4, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART/NEW YORK, NY/USA, DIGITAL IMAGE © WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART / LICENSED BY SCALA / ART RESOURCE, NY OPPOSITE: CARL VAN VECHTEN, [PORTRAIT OF PAUL CADMUS, WITH SIDE PANEL ON RIGHT OF PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHS OF OTHER PEOPLE], DECEMBER 7, 1937, PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT: GELATIN SILVER, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, CARL VAN VECHTEN COLLECTION, LC-USZ62-103727

Dorothy Dehner

The Art Students League was the center of Dorothy Dehner’s (1901–1994) life from 1925 to 1931. However, it was the community she found there, more than the instruction she received, that would shape her personal and professional life. Her early classes at the League disappointed her by not fulfilling expectations of advanced art set by her recent travels in Europe. 1 Nonetheless, in October 1926, when her landlady famously directed new tenant David Smith to seek out Dehner regarding his interest in art classes, she enthusiastically recommended the League “and it[s] methods and its attitudes to its students.” 2

A lthough committed to the study of art, Dehner was still working out other

aspects of her life. Before her 1925 trip to Europe, she flirted with fashionable social circles, attending balls at the Plaza Hotel and outings with “white” Russians. Remnants of this life persisted, as Dehner purchased couture gowns in Paris.3 And, for a year or two while enrolled at the League, every morning she went horseback riding in Central Park before her classes. 4 Evidence of

It was the community she found...that would shape her personal and professional life.

these different worlds lingered in the photograph marking her 1927 wedding to Smith, where she wore a scarf designed by Roman Chatlov, a Russian-born painter and costume designer who once had a crush on her.5

I n the late 1920s, Dehner’s life was more and more enmeshed with the League. She and Smith formed an influential friendship with Wilhelmina Weber and Tomás Furlong, two older painters actively involved in running the self-administered institution: Weber as the League’s Executive Secretary and Furlong as its Treasurer. When, in 1929, both left their posts abruptly, one explanation was Furlong’s alleged improprieties over Weber’s pay.6 However, for Dehner their ouster resulted from tensions over the League’s aesthetic direction. Despite the cloud over Weber’s and Furlong’s departure, the couple left one final, crucial mark on the institution, having been instrumental in the hiring of Jan Matulka as an instructor.7 With his classes, beginning in 1929, Dehner was finally taught by someone who had firsthand experience of recent developments in Europe. 8

Czech-born, and having made regular sojourns in Paris, Matulka could share his knowledge of Dada and Surrealism as well as Cubism and German Expressionism with his students. However, in his classroom, the emphasis

was on Cubist-influenced forms.9 But perhaps most important for Dehner and the other students in his course was his ability to communicate what it meant to be an artist. As Dehner would observe, a significant number of Matulka’s students became professional artists.10

Yet, once again, the League disappointed Dehner and her colleagues by ending Matulka’s position after only two years. Officially, the explanation was his class no longer met the minimum enrollment, but his sympathizers believed he was dismissed because of his embrace of advanced art.11 In protest, Dehner and others from the class formed a cooperative where Matulka continued to teach, but after a few months Dehner and Smith drifted away, soon setting off to explore independent artmaking in the Caribbean.12 Dehner’s student days were over.

PAULA WISOTZKI

1. Dorothy Dehner interview with author, 1985.

2. Dorothy Dehner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Box 3, Folder 21.

3. Dorothy Dehner interview with Patricia Renick, 1987.

4. Dorothy Dehner interview with Judd Tully, 1980, cited by Michael Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 57.

5. Dehner interview with Renick.

6. References to Weber and Furlong’s departures, and the controversy surrounding them, appeared in the Autumn 1929 and Winter 1930 issues of The League: A Triannual News-Bulletin Published by the Art Students’ League of New York

7. Brenson, David Smith , 81.

8. Dorothy Dehner, “Memories of Jan Matulka,” in Jan Matulka: 1890–1972 , exh. cat. (Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), 78.

9. Patterson Sims, “Jan Matulka: A Life in Art,” in Jan Matulka: 1890–1972 , exh. cat. (Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), 9–37.

10. Dehner, “Memories,” 77.

11. “Chronology,” Jan Matulka: The Global Modernist (Chicago: TMG Projects, 2004), 71. 12. Dehner, “Memories,” 79.

Mark Rothko

A central figure in what is generally referred to as Abstract Expressionism or the New York School, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) followed a similar evolutionary path as most other artists so categorized. Over the course of his lifetime, Rothko shifted from an experimental figurative mode (as distinct from working in social realist or illustrative styles) to art that became abstract, regardless of its initial origins in the visible world. 1

Marcus

R othkowitz was known by this name until 1940, but we shall refer to him as Mark Rothko, even while discussing work and events before his name change. In late 1913, with his mother and elder sister, Rothko left his birthplace in what was then Dvinsk, Russia, to join his father and two older brothers in Portland, Oregon, where they had settled with other family members.

At Yale University from 1921 to 1923,

initially on scholarship, Rothko studied the history of philosophy among several academic subjects, with the intention of entering a more practical field than art, perhaps the law. Rothko lost his scholarship within his first year, and after the second, he moved on to New York, likely for political and social reasons. He also shifted his focus to art. Rothko quickly became aware of the Art Students

MARK ROTHKO, ABSTRACTION , C. 1944/46. WATERCOLOR, PEN AND BLACK INK,

“Art must be arresting and provoking of attention.” 2 —Mark Rothko

League, where he studied from 1924 through 1926.3

T he young practitioner studied still life with Max Weber and life drawing with George B. Bridgman, artists whose approaches were vigorous and painterly in the case of Weber, and more linear and controlled in the case of Bridgman. Thus, embedded in Rothko’s early understanding of artistic possibilities are issues of dichotomy and a range of visual responses determined by each situation or subject. A later contact between Rothko and the ASL was in 1951, when he studied printmaking (including etching and lithography) with Will Barnet. Perhaps he was considering making original fine-art prints, but to date none are recorded among his works on paper. He also may have wanted to bone up on these processes because of interest from his students. 4

Additionally, Rothko’s grasp of the potential value of absorbing earlier masters, and the availability of great paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are embedded in his lifelong study of Pompeiian murals, artists including Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, and Cézanne; and attention to subjects drawn from biblical stories, both Old and New Testament. The emotional ambiguity of much of Rothko’s work from the 1920s through the end of his life reflects the ongoing questioning, rethinking, and relearning that is essential to Jewish society and the understanding of religion, tradition, and culture in which the artist was

steeped as a child. This powerful belief in uncertainty never left him.

A bout 1945 Rothko’s art is marked by major transitions as he shifted from figuration to abstraction. An example on paper is Abstraction, c. 1944/46, reproduced here. The painting maintains the sense of discovery that is evident in all of Rothko’s best works, in their form, ostensible subject, and materiality, the last of which is reflected in his use of multiple media in a single work throughout his oeuvre.

Moreover, Rothko’s approximately two decades of teaching children at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, starting in the late 1920s, retained in his memory and his imagination the brilliance possible when looking around at aspects of the quotidian world, as often as not for the very first time.

RUTH FINE

1. There is a vast bibliography on Rothko and his art. Among the most expansive are David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas (Washington, DC : National Gallery of Art, 1998). Anfam’s chapter, “The Early Years, 1924–1939 ,” 26–45, delves into the period under discussion here. Essential also are the artist’s writings as referenced in Writings on Art: Mark Rothko (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), and in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Also useful are Glenn Phillips and Thomas Crow, eds. Seeing Rothko (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2005), based on a 2002 symposium, Frames of Viewing: Seeing Rothko; and Ma rk Rothko, with essays by Kate Rothko Prizel, Christopher Rothko, and others (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2022). Lee Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1978) is a useful historical reference.

2. This language is based on Rothko’s first essay “New Training for Future Artists and Art Lovers,” in Writings on Art: Mark Rothko, 2.

3. There were few art schools, university art departments, or commercial art galleries in the United States prior to the end of World War II, when the GI Bill greatly extended academic art studies. Thus, the Art Students League held a place of high importance not only in New York, but for aspiring artists from across the country. The engaging variety of the faculty’s practices offered many possible directions for students to consider, as did the range of work by the student body.

4. My thanks to Stephanie Cassidy for sending me the records of Rothko’s activities and contacts at the ASL

Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) taught at the Art Students League from 1926 to 1935. Offering classes in Life Drawing, Painting, and Mural Composition, Benton honed the stylistic and theoretical framework of Regionalism, a colorful, dynamic style of representational painting that focused on modern scenes of American workers, landscapes, and everyday life. Simultaneously, Benton shaped the creative interests of students including Alexander Calder, Edward Laning, Joseph Meert, Archie Musick, Charles and Jackson Pollock, and Fairfield Porter. Whether or not his students sustained his focus on the American Scene or ventured in different directions, Benton’s classes helped build the ASL’s reputation as an independent and democratic school where American art was treated seriously as the “productive work” of American citizens.1

Benton’s teaching philosophy was largely based on “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” a series of articles published in The Arts from 1926 to 1927 that outlined his approach to dynamic picture-making in the modern age. “Benton had a perfectly logical system of teaching,” recalled Charles Pollock, who studied with him during his first year at the ASL . He promoted “an intensive study of the Renaissance masters—Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens” to help students learn “the fundamental underlying structures” of light, modeling, and scale that challenged the pictorial limitations of inertia and flatness.2 He used the term

“hollows and bumps” to describe how oppositional forces such as light and dark generated rhythm and movement to create a dynamic and dramatic style. Benton’s theory of art was also a personal guide. “I taught what I was trying to learn,” he later recalled. “I worked in the class…I drew there, too. We made compositional analyses.” As he told Francis V. O’Connor in 1964, “My students didn’t study under me but with me.” 3

B enton was a popular teacher and attracted a close group of students, some of whom traveled with him on sketching trips and posed for his numerous mural commissions. Jackson Pollock, who took Benton’s Life Drawing and Mural Composition classes from 1930 to 1932, modeled for his America Today mural (1930–31), originally painted for the New School for Social Research. Benton downplayed his classroom influence, later writing, “Looking back, I can see that I was not a very practical teacher, especially for novices.”4 Yet his “system of teaching” made an impact. In 1950, Jackson Pollock remarked: “I spent two years at the Art Students League. Tom Benton was teaching there then, and he did a lot for me. He gave me the only formal instruction I ever had, he introduced me to Renaissance art and he gave me a job in the League cafeteria. I’m damn grateful to Tom. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting.” 5

ERIKA DOSS

“I spent two years at the Art Students League. Tom Benton was teaching there then, and he did a lot for me… He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting.” —Jackson Pollock

1. Lauren Kroiz, Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 117.

2. Charles Pollock quoted in J. Richard Gruber, “Thomas Hart Benton: Teaching and Art Theory,” PhD diss. (University of Kansas, 1987), 197.

3. Paul Cummings, oral history interview with Thomas Hart Benton, July 23–24, 1973, 37. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Francis V. O’Connor, “The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912–1943,” Artforum 5, no. 9 (May 1967): 17.

4. Thomas Hart Benton, “And Still After,” in An Artist in America , 4th rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 333.

5. Berton Roueché, “Unframed Space,” New Yorker (August 5, 1950): 16.

Georgette Chen

Georgette Chen (1906–1993), born Chang Li Ying, probably in China, and listed as Georgette Tsang on her 1926–27 enrollment card, blended influences from traditional Chinese painting and twentieth-century modernism, which she brought to her adopted home of Singapore when she moved there permanently in 1954. Chen’s decision to attend the Art Students League was an easy one, given that her student address was 5 East 57th Street, near the League’s Building at 215 West 57th Street, making for a pleasant walk just two blocks south of Central Park. Likely inheriting her artistic pursuits from her father, businessman Tsang Kin Chiang (also known as Chang Sen Chek and Zhang Renjie), Chen had determined that she wanted to be an artist from an early age but rejected the traditional ink painting encouraged by her father. New York City was familiar to Chen, who studied at Horace Mann Junior High School in the Bronx from 1920 to 1923.

C hen’s teacher during her brief time at the League was the renowned Kenneth Hayes Miller in whose Life class she enrolled. Other such classes in the course catalogue specified “for men” and “for women;” one can assume that Chen’s

class was mixed gender. Although less important from pedagogical and thematic standpoints in Asian cultures generally, study of the nude form was not prohibited in China, whereas in the Western tradition, the depiction of the nude human form is considered one of the high-water marks of artistic achievement. None of Chen’s nude figures exist from her time at the League. However, female nudes from the 1930s, likely done when she was a student at the Parisian Académies Biloul and Colarossi, which were popular among Americans and other non-French students, and where men and women were allowed to work from nude models in the same studio class. One drawing of a female nude could easily have been completed for Miller’s class.

C hen returned to Paris in 1927, where she had lived between 1914 and 1919, and her family maintained a residence on the Seine’s Left Bank.1 There, Chen not only fully embraced the

lush palettes and heavy impasto of European modernism but met and married Eugene Chen, a supporter of Kuomintang leader Sun Yat-sen, who passed away in 1944 after a marriage lasting fourteen years. 2 A brief remarriage, subsequent divorce, and resettlement to Singapore followed. Chen became the first female faculty member of the city’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, leading to decades of artistic activity and personal contentment.

I n Singapore, Chen produced an enormous amount of work as the only woman of the five artists developing Nanyang art: a fusion of Eastern subjects in a Western style.3 Portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and cityscapes all fascinated the artist, who learned Malay and adopted the name Chendana, meaning sandalwood. Terengganu Market of 1960 manifests the rich palette of high-keyed oil paints that characterized her Nanyang paintings. In her adopted homeland, Chen found that “The forms and gorgeous colors of this multiracial society constantly inspire and feast my avid eyes.”4 Chen’s legacy as a Nanyang painter and influential teacher in Singapore persists, and numerous exhibitions of her work have been organized to honor the first woman to receive Singapore’s 1982 Cultural Medallion in visual art. Chen’s

experience at the Art Students League was a brief moment of her journey to artistic greatness.

CHRISTINE CRAFTS NEAL

The author would like to thank Savannah College of Art and Design for funding this research through a Sabbatical Award.

1. During this time, she attended the recently established Lycée Jules-Ferry.

2. Eugene Chen was placed under surveillance for anti-Japanese activities from 1941 to 1944; Chen remained with him. Her father was also a supporter of Sun Yat-sen.

3. Yeo Mang Thong, “The Nanyang School: A Fantasy in the Hearts of Commentators,” National Gallery Singapore, nationalgallery.sg/magazine/nanyangschool-fantasy-hearts-commentators

4. J. Lee, “Georgette Chen: A Biographical Introduction,” from The Artist Speaks: Georgette Chen (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2018), 78. As quoted in Christine Neal, “Bringing French Modernism to Singapore: Nanyang Painter Georgette Chen,” French Cultural Studies, 34, no. 2 (2022).

In Singapore, Chen produced an enormous amount of work as the only woman of the five artists developing Nanyang art: a fusion of Eastern subjects in a Western style.

David Smith

David Smith (1906–1965) was born and raised in Indiana. He attended various universities and worked a series of jobs, including as a welder in a Studebaker plant, before arriving in New York City in the late summer of 1926 with the intention of becoming an artist. He soon met Dorothy Dehner, who encouraged him to enroll at the Art Students League; they would marry the following year. The League exerted a profound influence on Smith both in and outside of the classroom, shaping the formal and theoretical principles that would define his artistic practice. His first courses were Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition with Richard F. Lahey and woodblock printing with Allen Lewis. Between 1927 and 1930 he studied drawing with Kimon Nicolaïdes and painting with John Sloan and Jan Matulka. Although Smith would become known as one of the era’s most innovative sculptors, he did not study sculpture at the League.

M atulka advocated an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking and was an essential source of information about European modernism. From him, Smith learned the practice of adding texture and volume by mixing paint with pebbles or sand, the way some Surrealist and Cubist artists did. 1 Smith would later trace a logical connection between his foundation in painting and his practice of making constructed, chromatic sculpture, as “color and objects applied to the surface.” 2 Other

lessons concerning the importance of subjectivity and of the natural world—issues that would preoccupy Smith until the end of his career—were imparted by Nicolaïdes. In a letter dated February 1929, which Smith kept throughout his life, Nicolaïdes challenged his students to seek artistic identity beyond technique, by observing the laws of nature. “If [the artist] reaches that affinity with nature,” Nicolaïdes wrote, “beauty will result. It matters not that at the moment through formula and acceptance of conventional standards his work is considered vulgar, obscene, stupid, pretty and what not. It will have been an act of art, and the result will be art. Your job, then, is to get at the truth, the truth as you will be able to understand it, not neglecting to use all of your means to arrive at it.” 3 Smith appears to have carried this message in mind when he and Dehner traveled that summer to Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains, to stay at an artists’ retreat run by Wilhelmina Weber Furlong, a painter and executive secretary of the League, and her husband Tomás Furlong, treasurer and board member. By mid-August, Smith and Dehner purchased a rustic house on seventy-seven acres of land overlooking

ABOVE: SCULPTURE GROUP, BOLTON LANDING, NEW YORK, 1961. PHOTO: DAVID SMITH, THE

Lake George. They would move fulltime to Bolton Landing in 1940. 4

T hrough the Furlongs, Smith met the Kyiv-born artist and theorist John D. Graham, a former League student who was a bridge to European avant-gardism for young American artists. Smith became inspired to apply his welding skills to the making of sculpture after seeing welded sculpture by Pablo Picasso and Julio González in a copy of a French journal owned by Graham. Over the next thirty years, working in relative isolation in the mountains of upstate New York, Smith redefined the possibilities of sculpture by making increasingly large works of steel elements that he welded together and often painted. He arranged them in his fields, in all seasons, in family groups

“If

or like rows of crops, where a dialogue with nature became an integral part of his practice.

JENNIFER FIELD

1. Dorothy Dehner to Margaret Haggerty, September 6, 1967, David Smith, I.32. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Quoted in Michael Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 80.

2. “I belong with painters, in a sense, and all my early friends were painters because we all studied together. …I never conceived of myself as anything other than a painter because my work came right through the raised surface, and color and objects applied to the surface.” David Smith, “Interview by David Sylvester, March 15, 1960. Transcript reprinted in Susan J. Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 325.

3. Kimon Nicolaïdes to class, February 1, 1929, David Smith Archive, Estate of David Smith, New York.

4. Dehner would leave Smith, and Bolton Landing, in 1950; Smith would remain there for the rest of his life.

[the artist] reaches that affinity with nature beauty will result. It will have been an act of art, and the result will be art. Your job, then, is to get at the truth, the truth as you will be able to understand it, not neglecting to use all of your means to arrive at it.”

— Kimon Nicolaïdes (in a letter Smith kept throughout his life)

Milton Avery

In the 1940s, the distinctive style for which Avery became best known emerged in paintings such as Husband and Wife (1945). This jigsaw puzzle of flattened, interlocking shapes shows Avery’s gift for choosing imaginative colors that carried a visual and emotional charge.

Milton Avery’s (1885–1965) enrollment in the Art Students League, starting in 1926, coincided with a period of tremendous change in his life. He had recently turned forty, met and married fellow artist Sally Michel, and moved from Hartford, Connecticut, to New York City. The couple first rented an apartment in the Lincoln Arcade, at Broadway and West Sixty-fifth Street, not far from the school. The move opened up a new chapter in Milton’s life where some of the earlier constraints on his pursuit of a career as an artist had subsided. Notably, Sally insisted that he focus on his painting fulltime while she supported them financially as a freelance illustrator.1 In contrast, for twenty years, Milton had divided his time between art classes and various factory and clerical jobs.

One of earliest forms of documentation of Milton’s first years in New York City are the registration records of the Art Students League. Milton and Sally enrolled in the same Croquis (Life Sketch) classes, or unsupervised sessions where students could sketch from a live model.2 For five dollars a month (or fifty cents a sitting), the evening sessions were offered from 7 pm to 10 pm. The couple attended most nights, given the importance of sketching to their daily artistic practices.

A s Avery’s paintings throughout the 1920s and 1930s reveal, he soaked in art and culture from all corners of the city. He drew and painted many Hartford-era

friends who were also attending classes at the League, such as David Burliuk, Wallace Putnam, and Vincent Spagna. Avery also made scenes of Central Park, the burlesque shows, and people-watched on Coney Island.

A fter just three years, Avery began to find his artistic footing. Immersed in the city, including the classes and instructors at the League, Avery’s network expanded, as did his prospects. In 1928, the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery presented Avery with his first solo exhibition of watercolors. He was included in a group show at the Opportunity Gallery along with younger artists such as Mark Rothko, who would become a lifelong friend and mentee. Perhaps it was the atelier-inspired foundation of Avery’s early classes that framed his mindset as part-student and part-teacher. Throughout a career that spanned nearly half a century, he remained open to artistic exchange and influence in both directions. To close the decade, noted modern art collector Duncan Phillips purchased Winter Riders (The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC) in 1929, making it the first Avery painting to enter a museum collection.3

Continuing his classes into the late 1930s, Avery’s consistent access to live models at the Art Students League was certainly an integral component to his ongoing artistic evolution and experimentation. As he continued to strengthen his command of line, Avery

became more ambitious with his use of color and form, both in his watercolors and paintings.

I n the 1940s, the distinctive style for which Avery became best known emerged in paintings such as Husband and Wife (1945). This jigsaw puzzle of flattened, interlocking shapes shows Avery’s gift for choosing imaginative colors that carried a visual and emotional charge. While the red-faced husband reclines, enjoying a pipe, his wife rendered in cool blues sits with arms crossed, withdrawn.

to hold in his hand, to speak from his heart…. Shall he leave it light and playful or go on to deepen and enrich it? The possibilities are endless.”4

ERIN C. MONROE

O ne key to reading these simplified forms is the drawn detail that conveys texture and line. Avery scratched facial features and accessories, such as the gentleman’s bowtie, into the wet paint. The carefully incised lines reveal the white of the canvas in their wake. With this economy of line, Avery reveals with quiet confidence his astounding ability to say more with less.

Notably a man of few words, it was often Sally who verbalized Milton’s artistic philosophy and approach. On drawing she explained, “What was the fascination with drawing…. A pencil, a stick of charcoal, a pen—something

1. Avery’s earliest introduction to artmaking were classes in a workshop-like setting with Charles Noel Flagg at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford. Flagg established the school in 1888 and modeled it—much like the Art Students League—after the ateliers he saw firsthand in Paris and other European cities. The tuition-free classes and weekly critiques were offered in the evenings which enabled attendees, such as Avery, to continue to be employed during the day. For more on Avery’s early career, see Erin Monroe, Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2021).

2. Archives, Art Students League. My thanks to Stephanie Cassidy for her assistance with my research. As the holdings of the League continue to be researched, catalogued, and digitized, our understanding of Milton Avery’s experiences and the school more broadly are in progress. I extend my thanks to Avery’s daughter, March Avery; grandson, Sean Cavanaugh; and Melissa Medeiros, of the Sally and Milton Avery Arts Foundation, for their insights into Milton and Sally’s time at the Art Students League. A special thanks goes to Sean for identifying the location of the League’s previously untitled watercolor in as possibly Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, MA

3. Two other achievements occurred at this time: Back in Harford, Avery’s oil painting Brooklyn Bridge received a $200 prize as best picture in The Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts: Nineteenth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The following year, Avery’s watercolor White Horse received a $250 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual watercolor exhibition.

4. Sally Michel Avery, quoted in “Milton Avery in Black and White: Drawings 1929–59,” by Linda Konheim Kramer (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1990).

Irene Rice Pereira

In 1929, a group of young modernists, including Irene Rice Pereira (1902–1971), studied avant-garde styles of Cubism and abstraction with Jan Matulka (1890–1972) at the Art Students League. Pereira and classmates Burgoyne Diller, George McNeil, and David Smith would become early members of the American Abstract Artists, founded in 1936. In the catalogue for Pereira’s 1953 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she was said to have “warm respect for [Richard] Lahey’s tolerance,” but Matulka had the greater influence as he “talked about Picasso and Matisse and let her experiment with cubist abstractions.” 1

I rene Rice arrived at the League in the fall of 1927 at twenty-five years old. She had already worked ten years as a stenographer. At 15, she had switched to a vocational track so she could work to support her mother and three younger siblings after her father died of a heart attack. 2 Once her sisters contributed to the family income, she continued her education with evening classes. First, she studied clothing design at the Traphagen School of Fashion, located in the Rodin Studio Building at 200 West 57th Street.3 Founded in 1923, the school promoted experimentation with materials and construction techniques. In 1926, Rice took fashion classes at Washington Irving High School, a

progressive all-girls technical high school founded in 1913. While Rice was there, Lee Krasner was enrolled in the day program and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union held their Workers University there in the evenings. Told her dresses were too bizarre, she was advised to study art instead. 4 She came into her own in the school’s art classes. While day students like Krasner applied to the Women’s Art School at the Cooper Union, Irene moved on to evening classes at the Art Students League.5 She took Richard F. Lahey’s class from September 1927 to May 1929. Her skill was noted, and the League’s 1929–30 course catalogue reproduced one of her nude studies to represent Lahey’s class. 6 The figure has sculptural heft and a patterned background that nods to Matisse. Irene Rice met her first husband, Humberto (Hubert) Pereira, at the League, and they married in January 1929. He took courses on and off from 1922 through 1928, but there is no evidence that they

In the fall of 1931 Pereira traveled to Europe and then to North Africa. She sketched ship machinery along the way, finding the bold shapes of engines and anchors well-suited to the Cubist style she developed with Matulka.

took classes together. Pereira’s younger sister Nita Rice, who later exhibited as Juanita (Marbrook) Guccione, enrolled at the League in April of 1928, taking two months of Homer Boss’s class. Nita then took the Vocational School Evening class through 1931. She had early success in a Surrealist style and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1934.7 Irene and Nita’s younger sister Dorothy was thought to have attended the League as well, but neither Dorothy Rice enrolled at the League in the 1920s or 1940s was their sister.8

Pereira enrolled in Jan Matulka’s life drawing, painting, and composition class in the fall of 1929 after Lahey switched to day classes. Matulka’s introduction to Cubism and the use of materials like sand and wood shavings to add textural interest were exciting. Dorothy Dehner recalled Pereira stuck out as different in Lahey’s course but found her footing with Matulka.9 When his class was cancelled due to low enrollment in 1931, Pereira organized her classmates to study privately with Matulka, finding a space on West 14th Street. The group included Dehner, Smith, Diller, McNeil, and Edgar and Lucille Levy. Pereira returned to the League for one month in 1933 to attend Hans Hofmann’s classes, summarizing later that “it was best to ignore what he said and just watch.” 10

I n the fall of 1931 Pereira traveled to Europe and then to North Africa. She sketched ship machinery along the way,

IRENE RICE PEREIRA,  MACHINE COMPOSITION , 1935–37. OIL ON CANVAS, 34 × 42 IN. THE COLLECTION OF MARY ANNE AND EUGENE A. GARGARO, JR., COURTESY OF JONATHAN BOOS, NEW YORK, © DJELLOUL MARBROOK

finding the bold shapes of engines and anchors well-suited to the Cubist style she developed with Matulka. In Provincetown the following summer she used this imagery in her paintings on humanity’s relation to machines. She continued on this subject through 1936, showing the works in four solo exhibitions at ACA Gallery from 1933 to 1935. Pereira’s first pure abstractions date from 1937 when she was teaching at the Design Laboratory, a Works Progress Administration effort to create a Bauhaus-style school in New York. Much of her teaching was based on Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s book The New Vision, and the materials Pereira used in collages with her students informed the textures and patterns in her paintings.11

EMILY LENZ

1. John I. H. Bauer, Loren MacIver, I. Rice Pereira , exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1953), 40. The two women were the first living women to receive solo retrospectives at the Whitney. The two shows shared one catalogue.

2. By the 1920 census, Irene was a stenographer at an accounting firm and Nita (15) was a clerk at a law firm. By 1925, Irene, Nita, and Dorothy were all working and living together with their mother and young brother.

3. Bauer mentions Traphagen, 41, and Washington Irving High School for fashion then art courses, 42.

4. “Costume Ball Top Artist Began Her Art Career in Boro School,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 14, 1949, the dress comment could have been at Traphagen or Washington Irving High School. Also discussed in Karen A. Bearor, Irene Rice Pereira: Her Paintings and Philosophy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 7.

5. Lee Krasner also came to the League in 1928. In Krasner’s 1972 oral history for the Archives of American Art, she lists Pereira second in a long list of important women artists working since the 1930s.

6. The following year’s catalogue mentions the League had purchased an option to acquire Rice’s work.

7. “Museum Exhibit by 9 Artists Due,” Times Union , Brooklyn, June 29, 1934, 8.

8. The Dorothy F. Rice in the 1920s was likely Dorothy Rice Sims, a wealthy New Yorker and adventurer married to Waldo Pierce from 1912–17. The second Dorothy took classes after Pereira’s sister passed away from cancer in 1941.

9. Email from Karen A. Bearor, March 29, 2024, regarding her 1984 phone calls with Dorothy Dehner.

10. Recounted by her nephew in Bearor, 27.

11. Bearor, Chapter 3, “The Design Laboratory and Pereira’s Introduction to Bauhaus Theories,” discussion of texture and tactility, 80–84.

Roger Tory Peterson

The ascent of Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) from working class, bird-obsessed boy to internationally renowned artist and birding and natural history guru wouldn’t have happened without the Art Students League. Born in remote Jamestown, New York, he could have remained there, watching, sketching, and painting birds with no means to get ahead.

A fter graduating from high school in 1925, Roger decorated furniture at a local company. His boss urged him to leave home and study at the Art Students League.

Roger enrolled in January 1927. Mornings were spent decorating furniture for Deutsch Brothers in the Bronx.1 He studied Antique Drawing with Kimon Nicolaïdes, Lettering, Layout, and Design with Frederic Goudy, and Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition with John

Sloan.2 Roger cited his most influential art teachers as Nicolaïdes and Sloan.3 H e remembered Nicolaïdes—a “dark, extremely thin man with a mustache” who died prematurely. Nicolaïdes taught drawing from plaster casts of ancient sculptures. The teacher’s method of creating the image stayed with him: drawing “lightly on the paper, then modifying and bearing on harder with bolder lines until the form asserted itself.”4

John Sloan gave Roger a “sense of color”—“cool colors receding, warm colors coming forth.” 5 Sloan made him “more at ease with oil paints than so many other bird artists who had not had this basic training…. [Painting with oils] is better suited for the more sensuous moods of nature than watercolor or gouache or designer’s colors.” 6 Roger later attended

“As author, illustrator, editor, and incomparable guide to our wildlife, you have opened our eyes to the beauty, the wonder, and the sanctity of life itself.” —Wesleyan University, honorary doctorate ceremony

the National Academy of Design for traditional art instruction.

Houghton-Mifflin published Roger’s revolutionary Field Guide to the Birds (of eastern North America) in 1934. Offering a diagrammatic approach to bird identification, it was a bestseller.

Interest in birdwatching exploded. He updated his revered book multiple times, and authored and illustrated on the same diagrammatic principles additional field guides to wildflowers and birds of western North America and elsewhere in the world. These books profoundly influenced subsequent artists and authors.

A fter being an artist and educator at the National Audubon Society, Roger turned to writing, co-writing, and illustrating books concerning the lives and conservation of birds and the natural world.

Roger lectured around the globe. His art taught, advocated, and entertained. He was commissioned as a painter for Life magazine and the National Wildlife

Federation. His work was exhibited at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington DC’s Smithsonian, among other institutions.

I n 1985, Roger cofounded the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York to encourage a love of birds and nature and to celebrate his bird art and that of others. He won untold numbers of awards during his lifetime: among them, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980), the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal (1984), and multitudes of honorary doctorates. In naming him a Doctor of Science, Wesleyan University in 1970 echoed the sentiments of numerous others: “As author, illustrator, editor, and incomparable guide to our wildlife, you have opened our eyes to the beauty, the wonder, and the sanctity of life itself.”

ELIZABETH J. ROSENTHAL

1. Memo, “Art School,” from Roger Tory Peterson to the “Devlins,” October 22, 1975, Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History (RTPI).

2. Roger Tory Peterson enrollment history, 1927–28, Art Students League.

3. Memo, “Art School,” from Roger Tory Peterson to the “Devlins,” October 17, 1975, RTPI

4. Memo, October 22, 1975.

5. Roger Tory Peterson, “All Things Reconsidered: My Evolution as a Bird Artist,” Bird Watcher’s Digest (September/October 1996): 20.

6. Memo, October 17, 1975.

7. John C. Devlin and Grace Naismith, The World of Roger Tory Peterson: An Authorized Biography (Montreal: Optimum Publishing Company Limited, 1977), 254.

ROGER TORY PETERSON IN HIS HOME STUDIO, C. 1975, OLD LYME, CT. HE IS SEEN WORKING ON BARN OWLS , A MIXED-MEDIA PAINTING TO BE REPRODUCED AS A LIMITED-EDITION LITHOGRAPH BY THE MILL POND PRESS. SOMETIMES, PETERSON WORKED WITH BIRD SKINS, SUCH AS THOSE SEEN HERE, FOR SOME OF THE FINER POINTS OF A BIRD’S PLUMAGE. ESTATE OF ROGER TORY PETERSON, USED BY PERMISSION, COURTESY OF THE ROGER TORY PETERSON INSTITUTE

Minna Citron

[Citron’s] studies for the [WPA] murals project, first exhibited in October 1940 at the League, received accolades from many—including Eleanor Roosevelt, who attended the exhibition’s opening reception.

The association of American painter and printmaker Minna Citron (1896–1991) with the Art Students League is a long and storied one that began in her student days and ended with her memorial service in 1992. Her illustrious career provides insight into a range of important artistic movements of the twentieth century.

Citron’s first foray into art began while on vacation in Maine in 1924. Attempting to draw the face of a friend’s grandfather, she found herself frustrated by her inability to capture his likeness. Upon returning to New York, Citron signed up for classes at several wellknown art schools. However, feeling that she still could not draw the figure properly, she enrolled at the Art Students League in 1928. It was there, under the tutelage of Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan, Kimon Nicolaïdes, and Harry Sternberg, that she developed the representational style that dominated much of her early work. Those teachers taught her to “see with an artist’s eye... to recognize which forms and shapes express the ‘essence’ of a subject.” While the social realism of Citron’s 1930s work was imbued with satire and witty observations, it was her formal experimentation at the League that became fundamental to her move into abstraction in the 1940s.

Citron’s association with the League continued in the early 1940s when she returned to take Etching, Lithography,

and Composition courses taught by Will Barnet and George Picken. Her newfound interest in printmaking, however, did not mean she forgot the lessons of the previous decade, especially as related to a mural painting class she had taken with Miller in 1929–30. Citron had received a commission from the Work Progress Administration’s Treasury Section of Fine Arts for a series of post office murals in Tennessee, a project that brought her national attention. Her studies for the murals project, first exhibited in October 1940 at the League, received accolades from many—including Eleanor Roosevelt, who attended the exhibition’s opening reception.

Citron’s career found her exhibiting, lecturing, teaching, and taking part in residencies around the world, but New York remained her home. She lectured at the League occasionally, most notably for two lecture series in the late 1940s and early 1950s titled “The Grand Tradition in Modern Art” and “Art: Significance and Criteria.” Her interest in modernism and the uncharted course of her career led her to experiment with a variety of styles in the 1950s and beyond. In the 1970s she returned to the lessons of her student days at the League, and the idea of capturing the “essence” of her subject, as she distilled forms in hard-edge works that are simple, balanced, and powerful compositions.

W hen Citron died, her family organized a memorial service at the League that featured numerous speakers

including former League instructor Will Barnet, artist and educator Judith Brodsky, and the League’s Executive Director Rosina Florio. The service honored Citron’s long career and her association with the institution.

JENNIFER L. STREB

1. Minna Citron and Clemens Resseguier, Minna Citron: Her Stories—Her Work, unpublished manuscript, Minna Citron Archives, Denver, Colorado, 3.

2. Jennifer L. Streb with Christian H. Citron, Minna Citron: The Uncharted Course from Realism to Abstraction (Huntingdon, PA: Juniata College Press, 2012), 10.

3. David Lilienthal, “Two Murals of ‘T.V.A.’ for the Post Office, Newport, Tennessee by Minna Citron,” (New York: The Art Students League, October 8–19, 1940), n.p.

4. “The Grand Tradition in Modern Art,” series included talks titled, “Art: Significance and Criteria,” “The Aesthetic Experience,” “Kinesthetic Element in the Visual Arts,” and “Static Object-mindedness and Space-Time-relationships.” A second series called “Modern Art: A Shared Experience” was held in 1951 and included lectures on “The Picture,” “The Pattern,” “The Creative Process,” and “The Spectator’s Role.” Copies of announcements for these talks were found in the Citron Archives, Denver, CO.

5. Streb, 40.

6. “Memorial for Minna Citron,” New York Times, March 14, 1992, nytimes. com/1992/03/14/arts/memorial-for-minna-citron.html.

ABOVE: MINNA CITRON, PHOSPHATES , 1941. LITHOGRAPH, 9 7/8 × 13 3/8 IN. COLLECTION OF CHRISTIANE H. CITRON BELOW: MINNA CITRON, NUDE , 1929. WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 10 3/4 × 12 1/4 IN. COLLECTION OF CHRISTIANE H. CITRON. BOTH IMAGES © 2025 ESTATE OF MINNA CITRON / LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) is considered one of the leading realist painters during the age of Abstract Expressionism. Born in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1907 to James and Ruth Porter, he was consistently surrounded by the arts. Porter’s interest continued as he attended Harvard University (1924–28), studying with Arthur Pope, Professor of Fine Arts and Director of the Fogg Art Museum. During his time at the university, Porter enrolled in Pope’s course, the Principles of Drawing and Painting and the Theory of Design. Shortly after graduating, Porter decided that a move to New York would be instrumental in his success of becoming an artist.

In hopes of this pursuit, Porter moved to New York in 1928 and enrolled in the Art Students League. First renting an apartment on Fifteenth Street, he decided that living in the Village would be far more advantageous than renting near the school on Fifty-Seventh Street.1 The main impetus for living in the Village was to be near the artistic circles that frequented the school. In a 1968 interview with Paul Cummings, Porter reflected on his desire to attend the institution, noting: “...I like its setup; it didn’t seem to me to be academic. And, of course, it’s run by the students. And the artists, the people who were teaching there—people like Boardman Robinson and Thomas Benton—were people who I respected more than teachers in other schools.” 2 During his two-year tenure at the League, he studied closely with Robinson and

Benton, and it was Robinson’s adaptability with his students that Porter most revered.

B oth artists provided fundamental and advanced instruction at the League with a strong emphasis on figuration. Porter’s time there proved to have longlasting effects on his style and is seen most notably through his devotion to a purely objective technique all while the rise of Abstract Expressionism is happening in New York. With many of his contemporaries finding success in the nonobjective movement, Porter remained true to his approach. Aside from Porter making his way as an artist, he found great success as a critic—Thomas B. Hess, then editor of Art News , hired Porter as an associate editor (1951–58 and through 1967). Porter’s parallel career to many of the Abstract Expressionists converged when he received the Longview Foundation Award for his 1959 review of Willem de Kooning. De Kooning became close friends with Porter and remained so until Porter’s passing in 1975.

A common thread throughout Porter’s career was his ability to capture a moment’s true essence, often reflecting his immediate surroundings. In a 1974 interview for the New York Times, Porter suggested, “Painters are concerned with things. The most prominent things in the painter’s experience are right in front of him….” 3 This concept is prevalent in Porter’s work, in that his closest experiences were what gave him the greatest inspiration. From his New York

“Painters

are concerned with things. The most prominent things in the painter’s experience are right in front of him….” —Fairfield Porter

cityscapes to sprawling Southampton landscapes to airy Great Spruce Head Island scenes and personal portraits of family and friends, Porter was always thoughtful with his representations of what was taking place around him.

KAITLIN HALLORAN

1.

2.

3.

Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 49.

Fairfield Porter, as quoted in oral history interview with Paul Cummings, June 6, 1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

David L. Shirey, “Porter’s Works on Display,” New York Times, December 22, 1974.

FAIRFIELD PORTER, CITYSCAPE , C. 1945. OIL ON CANVAS, 25 × 30 IN. PARRISH ART MUSEUM, WATER MILL, NY, GIFT OF ROBERT FIZDALE, IN MEMORY OF ARTHUR GOLD, 1991.5 PHOTO: © GARY MAMAY. ARTWORK: © 2025 THE ESTATE OF FAIRFIELD PORTER / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

William Zorach

William Zorach (1889–1966) immigrated to the United States in 1893. After working as a lithographer in Cleveland, Ohio, he studied painting at the National Academy of Design from 1908 to 1910 and drawing with George B. Bridgman at the Art Students League for one month. Zorach recalled that Bridgman “told me the kind of drawing I did was beyond the student stage and I shouldn’t be studying. I should get out on my own.”1 In 1910 and 1911 Zorach studied painting in Paris, where he met the artist Marguerite Thompson. The couple returned to New York in 1912, the same year he changed his name from William Finklestein to William Zorach. After 1922 he ceased to create oil paintings and thereafter focused on directly carving sculpture.

Z orach respected the innate qualities of materials, favoring solid blocks unpierced by voids and smooth surfaces alternating with rough textures. “I find my expression in the depth and union of emotional content with the sculptural integrity of form slowly evolved…. I am putting into the rock my deepest and truest vision of life and form.”2 His iconography centered on the most emotionally significant relationships in life—the love between mother and child, a man and a woman, or child and animal. With Affection (1933), for example, Zorach created “a permanent record in stone of the affection children of all races have always had for animals dear to them.” 3

Z orach taught clay modeling and direct carving at the Art Students

League from 1929 to 1959 in the small basement rooms that students dubbed “the dungeon.” As he developed his weekly classes, Zorach also published his aesthetic ideas and techniques. 4 He had the greatest impact on apprentices, including Lee Bontecou, Harold Cousins, Winslow Bryan Eaves, Frances Godwin, Harold Goldstein, Raoul Hague, Margo Harris, Nathaniel Kaz, Robert Miller, Rhoda Sherbell, Benedict M. Tatti, and Challis Walker, who worked in his studio in New York and/or at his summer home in Robinhood, Maine. His enthusiasm for teaching prompted some of his students to teach—Bontecou for decades at Brooklyn College, and Kaz for fifty years and Sherbell for thirty years at the ASL. Margo Hammerschlag studied with Zorach at the ASL from 1950 to 1955. She remained an advocate for direct carving and funded an ongoing biennial National Competition for Direct Carving at the National Association of Women Artists. The William Zorach Memorial Scholarship, established in 1967, lasted for thirty years, the number of years he taught at the ASL.

ROBERTA K. TARBELL

1. William Zorach, Art Is My Life: The Autobiography of William Zorach (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1967), 21.

2. Zorach, Art Is My Life, 67–68.

3. See entry for Affection in Roberta K. Tarbell, “Catalogue Raisonné of William Zorach’s Carved Sculpture,” PhD Dissertation, University of Delaware, 1976, 272–78.

4. Zorach, “Views and Methods,” Creative Art 6, no. 6 (June 1930): 443–5; “Tools and Materials IIC: Carved Sculpture,” American Magazine of Art 28, no. 3 (March 1935): 156–60; and Zorach Explains Sculpture: What It Means and How It Is Made (New York: American Artists Group, 1947).

5. Zorach, “In Affection,” n.d. [early 1940s], Zorach Clippings File, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

“I find

my expression in the depth and union of emotional content with the sculptural integrity of form slowly evolved…. I am putting into the rock my deepest and truest vision of life and form.”

—William Zorach

WILLIAM ZORACH, AFFECTION, 1933. BLACK MARBLE (YORK FOSSIL), 32 × 20 × 11 1/2 IN. MUNSON-WILLIAMS-PROCTOR INSTITUTE, UTICA, NY, ACQ. NO. 45.7, INCISED “ZORACH/1933”

Riva Helfond

Riva Helfond (1910–2002) attended the Art Students League during the early to mid-1930s. Among her teachers was a young Harry Sternberg, who had succeeded Harry Wickey as printmaking instructor. Helfond’s enrollment records indicate that she studied etching and lithography with Sternberg in 1935–36. 1

I n these years Helfond, Blanche Grambs, and other students from the League accompanied Sternberg on one or more trips to the anthracite coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania. 2 Her Mine Foreman , a lithograph in the ASL collection, is likely based on sketches the artist produced at the Lanscoal mine operation near Lansford in Panther Valley. Helfond’s future husband, sculptor Bill Barrett, helped the artists gain access to the site. Members of his Welsh family worked as miners in the region.3

B ecause of dangerous conditions in the mines, most artists weren’t allowed to enter them, but they could visit a “model mine” at Lansford. 4 This is where Helfond may have ridden a shaft elevator with workers and developed the composition for Out of the Pit (Two Miners).

I n the image, a pair of men stand cheek by jowl and wear hats with battery-

powered electric lights. These were replacing carbide lamps with open flames, which could ignite gases and cause deadly explosions.5 Helfond informs us that the men’s safety is not assured by rendering their frowning, muscular visages with a heavy layer of coal dust and grime. Impacts of exposure to high concentrations of coal dust included emphysema and black lung disease.

Helfond was active in the Artists Union and American Artists Congress during the 1930s. Many artists affiliated

In Out of the Pit (Two Miners), Helfond informs us that the men’s safety is not assured by rendering their frowning, muscular visages with a heavy layer of coal dust and grime. Impacts of exposure to high concentrations of coal dust included emphysema and black lung disease.

with these groups depicted the difficult working conditions of American miners to support the organizational drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

I n 1935, while she was enrolled at the Art Students League, Helfond accepted an invitation to join the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project as lithography instructor at the Harlem Community Art Center; she taught there until 1938. Between 1936 and 1941 Helfond also worked as an artist in the New York WPA–FAP printmaking workshop, joining many instructors and students associated

with the League in making prints for public institutions.

ELIZABETH G. SEATON

1. Riva Helfond enrollment records, collection Art Students League. This entry is adapted from the author’s catalogue entry, “Riva Helfond (Barrett),” in Elizabeth G. Seaton, et al., Paths to the Press: Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910–1960, exh. cat. (Manhattan, Kansas: Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, 2006).

2. Among other WPA–FAP artists Helfond introduced to Lansford were Charles Keller and Beatrice Mandelman. Susan Teller, telephone conversation with the author, June 8, 2004.

3. Helen Langa, “Deep Tunnels and Burning Flues: The Unexpected Political Drama in 1930s Industrial Production Prints,” Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology 28, no. 1 (Fall 2002), 46. See also Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 110. Helfond married Barrett in 1941, not before 1936, as Langa suggests. See New York, New York, Index to Marriage Licenses, 1908–1910, 1938–1940, Ancestry.com.

4. Langa, “Deep Tunnels,” 47.

5. Langa, “Deep Tunnels,” 46.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was not the first of the Pollock brothers to attend the Art Students League. His eldest brother, Charles, who had studied there with Boardman Robinson and Max Weber, enrolled in Thomas Hart Benton’s Life class in 1927. He later urged Jackson to follow his lead, describing Benton as a man “with imagination and intelligence.” 1 In the fall of 1930 Jackson dropped out of Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he had been studying sculpture, moved to New York City, and registered for Benton’s Life class in September. Part of the attraction, beyond his brother’s recommendation, may have been Benton’s practice of making elaborate three-dimensional clay models of his compositions, which would have appealed to Jackson’s early interest in sculpture.

A c harismatic teacher who advocated studying the Old Masters and developing solid technical skills, Benton rejected abstraction in favor of American Scene representation. He taught his students to draw their subject matter from first-hand observation. That attitude deeply impressed Jackson, and while he outgrew Benton’s figurative style, calling him “a strong personality to react against,” 2 he never lost the conviction that art should arise from personal experience. As he later explained, “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate

them.” 3 He also retained a grounding in Benton’s rhythmical “bump and hollow” method of creating interlocking curves and waves, which some writers believe underlies Pollock’s abstract compositions.

I n 1932 Jackson switched to Benton’s Mural class, after having worked as an assistant and posed for figures in his teacher’s New School murals the previous year. That experience, and his admiration for the Mexican muralists, stimulated Jackson’s desire to paint murals. During this period, he and other students experimented with fresco technique on the walls of the clay room in the League’s basement, where the evidence is still visible. 4

J ackson remained friends with a number of his fellow League students, including Peter Busa, Herman Cherry, and Joseph Meert, who once saved his life by taking him in on a freezing night when he had collapsed in a snowdrift.5 Several of them kept up their association as workers on the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and members of the Artists Union during the 1930s.

However, though she attended the League only briefly, studying anatomy with George B. Bridgman in July 1928, Lenore Krassner was the most influential of the League’s alumni in Jackson’s orbit. Later known as Lee Krasner, she became his lover in late 1941 and was instrumental in guiding his early recognition under Peggy

Jackson remained friends with a number of his fellow League students, including Peter Busa, Herman Cherry, and Joseph Meert, who once saved his life by taking him in on a freezing night when he had collapsed in a snowdrift.

Guggenheim’s patronage, encouraging him throughout his brief career and managing his estate after his fatal car crash in August 1956.

L ee and Jackson married in 1945 and moved to eastern Long Island, but they maintained their close ties to friends in the New York City art world. And many former League students followed them to the area, including James Brooks, John D. Graham, Adolph Gottlieb, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Mercedes Matter, Philip Pavia, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Betty Parsons, who became Jackson’s dealer from 1948 to 1951, his peak years as a pioneer of what he called direct painting. He was

made an honorary life member of the League posthumously in 1974.

HELEN A. HARRISON

1. Charles Pollock to Jackson Pollock [October 1929], in Sylvia Winter Pollock, ed., American Letters: Jackson Pollock and Family (Malden MA : Polity Press, 2011), 14.

2. Narration for Jackson Pollock, a film by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg, 1951. In a more generous mood, he told an interviewer (Berton Roueché, “Unframed Space,” New Yorker 26, no. 24 [August 5, 1950]: 16) that Benton “did a lot for me. He gave me the only formal instruction I ever had, he introduced me to Renaissance art, and he got me a job in the League cafeteria.”

3. Narration for Jackson Pollock

4. Transcribed audiotaped interview with Nathaniel Kaz (aka Katz, a fellow student), Jackson Pollock: An American Saga archives, Book 16:731/6. Although remnants of the frescos are still extant, it is not known which portions may have been painted by Jackson.

5. Audiotaped interview with Herman Cherry (who shared the apartment with Meert and his wife), June 5, 1982. Jeffrey Potter oral history collection, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY

JACKSON POLLOCK, CHARLES POLLOCK, AND MANUEL TOLEGIAN, 1930. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN, CHARLES POLLOCK PAPERS, 1875–1994, ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Will Barnet

As an artist Barnet always took a vigorously independent route, advancing to the pulse of his own aesthetic and philosophical concerns…. His innovative exploration of pictorial space and reimagining of the human figure in abstract terms accompanied his anticipation of hard-edge abstraction.

Will Barnet (1911–2012) made outstanding contributions to American art for some eight decades as a painter, printmaker, and teacher. From 1929 to 1979, he was a student, printer, and teacher at the Art Students League. In the fall of 1929, he submitted a portfolio of his sketches and was awarded a full scholarship. He moved from his native Salem, Massachusetts, to New York in 1930, where he enrolled in Stuart Davis’s short-lived class in life drawing, painting, and composition.

Barnet next joined the lithography class taught by Charles Wheeler Locke. His decision in the early 1930s to concentrate on printmaking was at least partly motivated by his having learned that the printmaker at the Art Students League, Grant Arnold, was planning to leave his job and move to Woodstock, New York. This spurred Barnet to take a position as Arnold’s assistant and to learn all he could about print media to prepare himself to fill the position when it became vacant. Barnet studied all the methods of producing etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, rapidly developing into a master technician.

Ba rnet was hired as the

League printer and was also engaged to provide instruction to students. This would lead to his first regular teaching position at the school in 1941 as an instructor in graphic arts. He printed for such artists as Louise Bourgeois, William Gropper, Louis Lozowick, José Clemente Orozco, Raphael Soyer, and Charles White. He taught at the League for 38 years, serving as an instructor of painting from 1946 through 1979. His overall teaching career at the League and other schools was outstanding; Barnet eagerly nurtured the development of countless students.

A s an artist Barnet always took a vigorously independent route,

advancing to the pulse of his own aesthetic and philosophical concerns. In the 1930s, he rose to an important level of achievement and recognition as a graphic artist and printer. Over the course of the 1940s, his interest in painting blossomed, and he made a radical shift in both medium and subject. As he turned from prints to painting, he shifted as well from the broad social themes typical of the 1930s to the universal intimacy of his own family. At the same time, Barnet began to incorporate imagery and concepts he discovered by exploring the indigenous cultures of North and South America. This led to his pioneering role in the development in the 1940s and 1950s in the style known today as “Indian Space.” His innovative exploration of pictorial space and reimagining of the human figure in abstract terms accompanied his anticipation of hard-edge abstraction. It was in the early 1960s that Barnet developed the style for which he is now best known, creating tightly and seamlessly composed figurative compositions that share his abstract vision of space and the abandonment of

pictorial illusionism, while embracing a simultaneously modern and classical vision of the figure: its architecture of shape, form, line, and tone set in measured and poetic balance against the surrounding pictorial elements. At the end of his life, Barnet worked again as an abstract painter, re-exploring ideas that had first emerged during the 1940s through the early 1960s.

BRUCE WEBER

Jean Charlot

Jean Charlot (1898–1979), a French-American muralist, was introduced to the Art Students League in 1929 by his friend José Clemente Orozco, one of the three major figures of the Mexican Mural Renaissance along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Orozco had been offered an exhibition at the League and asked Charlot to curate it with Thomas Hart Benton, a teacher at the League who would become one of the leaders of the Regionalist movement in America. 1 According to the art critic Alma Reed, Orozco and Charlot admired the “selfgoverning, self-supporting, and nonprofit organization based on liberal ideas” and “felt a genuine sympathy for the League’s background, often linking it to the rebellion of the Mexican art students and their two-year strike (1911–13) against the San Carlos Academy” a movement that eventually led to the Mexican Mural Renaissance. 2

C harlot lived in Mexico from 1921 until he and his mother, Anita Goupil Charlot, moved to the United States in 1928. He was a draughtsman, an easel painter, a muralist, an archeological illustrator for the Carnegie Mellonfunded excavation of the Mayan temples

at Chichén Itzá, and an essayist who promoted the work of contemporary artists in Mexico and a popular children’s book illustrator and author. He became an assistant to Rivera and was friends with Orozco and Siqueiros and with prominent artists who visited Mexico, including Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Isamu Noguchi. He wrote articles for both Mexican and American publications and served as editor from 1924 to 1926 of Mexican Folkways, one of the major magazines for Mexican art. He contributed to the development of the mural movement by re-introducing true fresco (painting on wet plaster) in Mexico for his first mural, The Massacre in the Main Temple (1922) at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Mexico City—a recipe which then became standard practice throughout the Mexican Mural

Renaissance and eventually was adopted for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Projects.

It was in 1931 and 1932, during the lean years of the early Great Depression, that Charlot began teaching drawing, painting, and fresco at the Art Students League, following an exhibition of his drawings there in 1930. He became friends with the Russian-born artist Morris Kantor and his wife, Martha Ryther, an artist who taught painting for twentyfive years at the Rockland Art Center in West Nyak, New York. Kantor, who had studied at the Art Students League and then taught there from 1936 through 1972, became well known for his landscape paintings. Kantor and Ryther helped Charlot and his mother find his first apartment in New York on Union Square, which was the second floor of the Kantors’

apartment.3 Kantor eventually became the monitor for Charlot’s fresco classes. Their Union Square neighborhood saw many demonstrations by Communist protesters and unemployed workers and artists. Political discussions could also be contentious in the League’s cafeteria at that time. Charlot, who was a Catholic and considered himself a liturgical artist as well as a humanist, never joined the Communist Party, even though many of his Mexican friends were Communists or sympathizers. Just as in his work, his teaching emphasized universal humanity and compassion.

Two aesthetic styles were being contested at the League at that time: realism (American Regionalism and Mexican Muralism) and abstraction (European Cubism). Charlot was fully in the realist camp. He viewed Cubism

Jean Charlot was sought out as the expert of the true fresco recipe.

as more of an intellectual exercise rather than a permanent disruption in artistic perceptions. Still, he valued the ability of artists to extract from nature those abstract elements that form the basis of an artistic vision. 4 No matter what Charlot’s personal evaluation, he welcomed artists of both persuasions to his fresco class.

I n 1939, Peter Ruta, a League student born in Germany who became a leading American artist of realist landscapes and cityscapes, received letters of introduction written by Jean Charlot for his six-month sojourn in Mexico. Ruta’s enthusiasm for fresco led him, to take Charlot’s fresco classes in the 1940s on his return to the United States. His excitement for fresco and the opportunity to capture current political events in this medium was conveyed in a letter to his mother. “Fresco is a proper medium for a man,” he wrote. “I’m working on a 108 square foot fresco with eight figures on it.” The subject of his mural was the assault on Walter Reuther during the Detroit auto workers strike of 1940.5

A rtists who favored abstract Cubism were well represented in Charlot’s classes. Suzie Frelinghuysen, an abstract painter and opera singer, took Charlot’s fresco class. Her husband, George L. K. Morris was an artist, writer, and editor of Partisan Review. He had studied with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant in Paris and dedicated his entire painting career to abstraction. Frelinghuysen and

Morris founded the American Abstract Artists (AAA) organization in New York in 1936 when Cubism specifically, and abstraction in general, were not favored by the American public, which preferred realistic, or American Scene painting along with those of social and political content. The AAA initially promoted abstract artists through exhibitions and has, over its almost ninety-year history, had a lasting influence on abstract art through exhibitions, lectures, and publications. T he true fresco medium was difficult but of great importance to learn for all the artists who aspired to receive a government mural commission through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. One thousand murals were painted in post offices and libraries throughout the country between 1933 and 1942. Jean Charlot was sought out as the expert of the true fresco recipe. Charlot taught many aspiring muralists at the Art Students League from 1932, and then from 1938 through 1941. It was not only students but also artist friends such as Ben Shahn who sought his assistance on their murals. Sections of trial frescoes have been recently excavated in the basement fresco studio at the League painted by Shahn. Shahn took Charlot’s fresco course in preparation for his 1940 New Deal commission, The Meaning of Social Security which is discussed in the essay by Laura Katzman in this publication.6 During World War II, there were gradually fewer men and more women

taking Charlot’s classes. Women are well represented in Fresco Class in Action, the instructional fresco that Charlot painted on the basement wall of his classroom in the 1940s. He carefully rendered portraits of each of his students to illustrate the process. One student leans over a paper, making a preliminary sketch for the wall. Another is shown with a triangle measuring tool leaning on a wire grid. A third holds a plumb line used to snap guidelines on the wall. The fourth, shown with a paintbrush on his ear, is mixing pigment. And the fifth is shown painting. The fresco fragments remained in the League basement until William S. (Sid) Stallings Jr. saved them. They are now in a private collection.7

I n the United States, Charlot was a teacher, an illustrator, a book illustrator, and a muralist as well as a promoter of contemporary Mexican artists. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Charlot donated hundreds of his own prints and books to New York museums and encouraged his artist friends to donate their works as well. He acted as an agent to purchase Mexican prints for the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art paid tribute to Jean Charlot’s gifts and purchased works in the exhibition Mexican Prints at the Vanguard (September 9, 2024–January 5, 2025). Curator Mark McDonald’s essay in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin

describes the history of the museum’s Mexican print collection. 8

Charlot was the major chronicler of the Mexican mural movement and later published a comprehensive history, The Mexican Mural Renaissance: 1920–1925, in 1963. He painted more than twenty-five murals in colleges, churches, and schools and taught mural painting at colleges throughout the United States, including Black Mountain College, at the invitation of Josef Albers, and at the University of Iowa, where he became friends with Grant Wood. In 1949, he was invited to paint a fresco in the foyer of the administration building at the University of Hawai i on the subject of ancient Hawaiian life. That was the beginning of his long pursuit of the history, culture, and religion of throughout his tenure as an art professor at the University of Hawai i. After his retirement, he continued to paint and write in Hawai i until his death in 1979.

LINDA DOWNS

1. Thomas Hart Benton, “Jose Clemente Orozco,” The League (Spring 1929): 1–3.

2. Alma M. Reed, José Clemente Orozco (New York: Delphic Studios, 1932): 108.

3. John Charlot, Transcription: Jean Charlot Diary 1928 . Jean Charlot Collection, University of Hawai i at Mānoa Library. (Many thanks to Malia Van Heukelem, Art Archivist Librarian, Jean Charlot and Archive of Hawai i Artists and Architects, University of Hawai i at Mānoa Library for her generous assistance.)

4. See Jean Charlot, “The Artist as Copyist,” The League (April 1940), 4. Many thanks to Stephanie Cassidy, Head of Research and Archives, Art Students League, for her assistance on Art Student League history.

5. Suzanne Ruta, “Peter Ruta: Nulla Dies Sine Linea,” Lines from the League (Winter 2012–13): 16–17.

6. See Laura Katzman’s entry on Ben Shahn in this volume.

7. The completed mural included the following individuals, left to right (the seven known existing fragments are identified with an asterisk): Barbara Lee-Munyan*, John Ormai, Peter Franke-Ruta*, Margaret Cumberland, David Hutchinson*, Ethel Woodward*, Patricia Gilmore*, Petion Savian*, and Jean Charlot*. Many thanks to Malia Van Heukelem, Art Archivist Librarian, Jean Charlot and Archive of Hawai i Artists & Architects University of Hawai i at Mānoa Library. Photo: Jean Charlot Collection, University of Hawai i at Mānoa Library.

8. Mark McDonald, “The Renaissance of Mexican Prints at the Met,” in “Mexican Prints in the Vanguard!,” special issue, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 82, no.1, 2024.

Erwine & Estelle Laverne

Alongside an Alexander Calder mobile and a Ruth Asawa sculpture were examples of Laverne-produced furniture, textiles, and wallpapers, including Marbalia , which garnered the firm early critical success and established them as wallcovering and textile producers.

Meeting while taking courses during the winter season of 1932–33 at the Art Students League—Estelle Lester (soon to be Laverne, 1915–1997) learned life drawing from Kimon Nicolaïdes, and Erwine Laverne (1909–2003) took classes with Homer Boss (beginning in the 1931–32 season), switching to Nicolaïdes in February of 1933. The early 1930s at the art school were buzzing with talent, as artists Thomas Hart Benton, Hans Hofmann, and William Zorach (among many others) taught at the League. The couple married in 1934, and began a design partnership, founding Laverne Originals in 1938. These artist-designers navigated a crowded terrain within the American design landscape of the mid-twentieth century by forging a unique design identity that embraced humor and fun within the American interior.

New York City furniture showrooms were big business, and when the Laverne Originals 57th Street headquarters opened in 1952, it exercised restraint, showing art and industrially produced design in equal measure within a gallery-like setting.1 Alongside an Alexander Calder mobile and a Ruth Asawa sculpture were examples of Laverne-produced furniture, textiles, and wallpapers, including Marbalia, which garnered the firm early critical success and established them as wallcovering

and textile producers. In fact, a similar approach—embracing fine art and design— was demonstrated in their Contempora series, to which non-textile designers, including Calder, Alvin Lustig, and Oscar Niemeyer, contributed designs.2 The Lavernes jointly designed one of their most famous fabric patterns, Fun to Run (1948)— demonstrating ongoing collaboration in this painterly print.3

I n addition to producing the work of other designers, most famously the three-legged chair (1952) designed by William Katavolos, Ross Littell, and

Douglas Kelley that was shown in MoMA’s Good Design exhibition (1953), the Lavernes also designed their own furniture. The so-called invisible chairs, with delightfully floral names like Buttercup, Lily, Daffodil, and Jonquil, were an important contribution to the field at a time when Americans were captivated by plastic. 4 It is probably not a coincidence that in 1948 the couple moved into the carriage house of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall estate, whose gardens may have provided tangible visual influence toward the creation of this furniture line.5 Estelle acknowledged that their work was indebted to the pedestal-based furniture designed by Eero Saarinen, but the Lavernes innovated by introducing transparency into their line of acrylic plastic chairs, visually reinforcing the idea of saving space.

D uring the 1960s, the Lavernes contributed to interior design projects, most notably a series of hotel lounges across the country showcasing various products, such as beaded tapestries, furnishings, and painted murals, including a whimsical example painted by Estelle for the Golliwog Lounge in the Sheraton Ritz (Minneapolis). These painted figures (and the Golliwog metal

sculptures with humorous faces that they also produced) were imaginative interventions during this era, which built upon an artistic DNA that was honed during their early years in the Art Students League and cemented their reputation for contributing levity to the American home.

MONICA OBNISKI

1. J.F. “The Levities of Laverne: A Showroom for More than Marbalia,” Interiors 111 (March 1952): 112–121.

2. This, and other Laverne projects, have been discussed in Monica Obniski, “Playful Domesticity,” in Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America , edited by Monica Obniski and Darrin Alfred (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2018), 42–46.

3. They are listed together in the American Textiles ’48 exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (digitized here: libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/ collection/p15324coll10/id/211645), as well as in “The New Fabrics,” Interiors 108 (September 1948): 135 (where it was called “Oh What Fun It is to Run”).

4. Rita Reif, “Invisible chairs among new whimsical pieces,” New York Times (June 13, 1959): 18.

5. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007).

Tony Smith

Tony Smith (1912–1980) was part of the Abstract Expressionist generation but became famous in the 1960s and ’70s for large, black, geometric steel sculptures. Like many of his peers, Smith’s artistic education began in the 1930s at the Art Students League. In January 1931, after high school graduation, he enrolled in his first class at the League, studying anatomical drawing with the eminent George B. Bridgman.

By 1935 Smith worked at his family’s waterworks factory, the A . P. Smith Manufacturing Company in East Orange, New Jersey, commuting to the Art Students League for evening classes with the German émigré George Grosz and Vaclav Vytlacil. He admired Grosz’s draftsmanship and was eager to learn from an artist of his stature. Sketchbooks and gouaches illuminate Grosz’s classroom lessons, which emphasized close visual observation of both small details of everyday life and art. Everything was worthy of close examination, including a rubbish pile, a tool, a tree knot, a chewing gum wrapper, greeting cards, comic strips, signs, newspaper and magazine photos, as well as people gathering in bars and cafes. Smith planned to combine many of these images into a project titled South State Street but never settled on a final

composition. Other drawings from the same period reflect assignments to meld portraits of friends with historically significant paintings by artists such as Francisco Goya, Frans Hals, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin.

Smith expected to embrace Grosz’s satirical urban realism but instead was captivated by Vytlacil’s lessons about abstraction, which were filtered through his early studies with Hans Hofmann in Munich and his recent tenure in Paris. Art Students League registration cards confirm that Smith took one drawing class with Grosz (September 1935 to April 1936) and six drawing classes with Vytlacil (1936–37), serving as his class monitor in 1937.

Vytlacil introduced Smith to the idea that negative space between solid objects could be accorded the same visual weight as the objects themselves. This approach reverberated through his artistic career. It is evident in the surface abstraction of numerous abstract two-dimensional works, in architectural theories he

developed in the mid-1950s, and ultimately in the large-scale sculpture. In 1966 Smith first articulated his belief that the world is united by a continuous, invisible space lattice made up of equally weighted solids and voids. In this system, the sculptures we see as solid were envisioned, paradoxically, as voids. His vision of interlocked forms was rooted in lessons absorbed decades earlier.

S ketches likely made in Vytlacil’s classes of the mid-1930s reveal Smith’s earliest experiments with threedimensional work. He designed intricate wooden relief constructions based on his own paintings and planned freestanding abstract sculptures, some emulating planar Russian Constructivist

works he had seen in 1936 by Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. The lessons of European modernism introduced by Vytlacil were amplified by artworks Smith saw at New York’s museums and galleries. The boundary between the classroom and Smith’s expanding experience of the art world was increasingly porous. The Art Students League provided Smith with an understanding of his artistic options. He chose to develop a career dedicated to abstraction from this time forward.

JOAN PACHNER

Vaclav Vytlacil introduced Smith to the idea that negative space between solid objects could be accorded the same visual weight as the objects themselves. This approach reverberated through his artistic career.

Dream Balls

The party started at the Waldorf, or the Hotel Astor, or the Commodore, or Webster Hall; it raged until dawn, or whenever the police arrived, whichever came last. Semi- and near-total nudity abounded, but additional costuming was provided by Bergdorf Goodman and Lord and Taylor; Rita Gam and Anita Ekberg were crowned the ball’s queens. Two bands were hired: one “cool,” one “hot;” and later, one jazz, one rock. In at least one case, the bandleader surrendered to federal prison shortly after the party—and he was the “cool” one. It was, in short, the wildest party in town, and in the year Queen Elizabeth took the throne, the society pages called the coronation the runner-up to the “it” event of the year. It , in 1953, being the Dream Ball, the League’s annual party.

It started as a spat over turf that just got out of hand—and it refuses to die.

W hen students at the National Academy established the Art Students League in 1875, it wasn’t with the intention of permanently splintering from the Academy. But by 1892, the League was ensconced in its present home, and a warm-hearted rivalry with its parent institution developed. The League’s sumptuous Vanderbilt Gallery—today divided up into two painting studios—hosted the Academy’s annual exhibitions. The League granted

no degrees or certificates, while the National Academy conferred the postnominal titles “ANA” and “ NA”—the closest an artist can come to feeling like a lawyer or a dentist. As far as credential culture was concerned, National Academicians were real artists. League artists would have to fake it.

S tarting in 1891, they did. Bryson Burroughs and a few other students founded the Order of the Fakirs— Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, James Montgomery Flagg, and Georgia O’Keeffe were members. The Order of (later, “Society of”) American Fakirs, mounted an annual exhibition of

“a mad, moist, marvelous, magical, magnificent, mammoth, meaty, massive, monstrous, muscular, muliebrous, Machiavellian, multimolecular masterpiece.”

paintings that satirized the pomp of the National Academy. The Society sendups were silly satires of J. G. Brown, Winslow Homer, and William Merritt Chase1 —and the proceeds of sales went to a scholarship fund.

Even the League’s secret society was a joke: the term “Fakir” mocked the

Orientalist stylings of secret societies like the Order of the Eastern Star and the Order of the Golden Dawn. The Fakirs were as secret as the League itself: one bulletin bragged that “the high standard of work now desired is shown by the fact that of the 27 students wishing to become members, only 26 were accepted.” 2

T he exhibition sprawled into a week of anarchic events; a lavish catalogue was produced, and Samuel T. Shaw, hotelier and collector, posted money for prizes: $50, paid in pennies, for the best fake; for the worst, a mincemeat pie baked by Zella de Milhau of Brooklyn.

O ver the years this week of chaos grew into a one-night costume ball.3 In the faking, participants now dressed themselves as paintings. The costume aspect allowed the revelers not only the opportunity to disrobe, but also to mask—a double license. 4

T he exhibition fell away in 1917, but the exploding popularity of the ball made its organizers wary. The New York

Society for the Suppression of Vice had been raiding the League to “disinfect” its “enchantments” 5 since 1906, 6 and remained an irritant for decades. An invitation cautioned, “there is only one costume which is absolutely verboten, banned and défendu: the costumes worn by Pietro Perugino’s Apollo and Marsyas” 7 —that is, total nudity.

T hat didn’t stop revelers from getting close, and nudity wasn’t the only vice on display: “Chorus girls had their clothes torn off. Somebody shattered the chandeliers in the Hotel Astor; next year the Fakirs rolled table tops down the Commodore stairway, injuring several passersby.” 8

By 1923, the Fakirs had trashed every hotel in town; hoteliers stopped renting their ballrooms. So in 1932, the organizers regrouped under a new name: the Dream Ball.9 The premise was the same: an art-themed costume ball offered social license to strip down and act out. That Prohibition was still in effect seems not to have restrained the raucous crowds, and as the Dream Ball continued into the 1950s, cross-dressing and non-conformist gender expressions were common, and well-documented in the pages of Look and Time. The “Naked City” photographer Weegee came to the shoot photos in his mobile darkroom like it was a crime scene. Even as property destruction at the Ball ebbed, it remained, as advertised, “a mad, moist, marvelous, magical, magnificent, mammoth, meaty, massive, monstrous, muscular, muliebrous, Machiavellian, multimolecular masterpiece.” Or, as the Times put it, succinctly, “Art Fakirs Frolic in Freak Costumes.”

T his second edition of the Ball ran through 1958, attracting movie stars, socialites, and just about everyone. But by the 1960s, the Ball lost its monopoly on wild, art-themed parties of broad social license. Anarchic frolic could be had at bars and clubs all over town—no mask necessary. 10

T he Dream Ball’s broad appeal was partly that it satisfied the hunger of its time. At the centennial of the League, the Dream Ball was rebooted at the Waldorf—while successful, it received

little notice from the Society pages or the Vice Squad. 11

To no one’s delight, the Art Students League won the turf war that inspired the ball: in 2015, the National Academy closed its school, selling its building and leaving the League as the oldest operating art school in the city. It had been generations since the Academicians had used the Beaux Arts League building for its annual shows, but nonetheless, when the Dream Ball was relaunched in 2023, the League was able to offer something it had never done before. The League hosted the Dream Ball within its own walls.

JONATHAN MILLER SPIES

1. Chase—himself a beloved League instructor—took his turn as a target personally. When he presented a portrait of his daughter in the Academy Annual, a Fakir suggested that the furniture in the painting was badly arranged. Chase took his painting back to his studio and painted over the offending furniture.

2. 17th Annual Soul Kiss, p. 16.

3. “Art Fakirs Frolic in Freak Costumes,” New York Times, April 9, 1915.

4. “The Fakirs Ball was even more appreciated by the public which quickly discovered that the Fakirs, in their anxiety for scholarships, had much more liberal ideas than the Beaux Arts Architects about the proper way to run a costume ball. There was no débutante-encumbered Pageant. Costumes could be anything at all, and very little of that.” (“Art: Fakirs Resurrected,” Time, May 9, 1932).

5. Comstock in 1887: “Art must either divest itself of this demoralizing influence or be suppressed” ( Morals Versus Art , J. S. Ogilivie & Co., 1887).

6. “Art Students’ League Raided by Comstock,” New York Times, Friday, August, 3, 1906, p. 1.

7. Art Students League News 6, no. 4 (April 1953), p. 4.

8. “Art Fakirs Frolic in Freak Costumes,” New York Times, April 9, 1915.

9. “Art: Fakirs Resurrected,” Time, May 9, 1932.

10. In 1964, a different group of art schools— RISD, Skowhegan, Parsons—launched a more staid but similarly-named fundraiser, The American Dream Ball, to coincide with the New York World’s Fair at the Plaza; it didn’t perform well enough to warrant a repeat effort the following year (“Several Groups Will Raise Funds At Gala in Plaza; American Dream Ball on April 20 to Cover Most of the Hotel,” New York Times, April 5, 1964, p. 91).

11. The band leader, Skitch Henderson, was the lone casualty. Skitch, of the Tonight Show, had just been convicted of fraud; he began his sentence in federal prison the next week.

Robert Beverly Hale

One evening during the late 1970s, while attending a class at the League, I noticed a poster advertising an anatomy lecture by Robert Beverly Hale (1901–1985). It was one of a series that were being held in the second-floor gallery. That evening and every evening after, the room was filled to capacity with art students. The gallery was buzzing with excitement, and I soon learned that some students had arrived hours earlier to get a good seat. Maintenance staff would spend the afternoon assembling a platform, a large drawing board, a skeleton, and an anatomical statue. They checked the microphone system many times throughout the day, and one man from maintenance remained during the first half of the evening lecture to make sure the microphone continued to work and that Mr. Hale had everything he needed.

A t the designated hour, Hale entered the gallery to a loud burst of applause. As he carefully climbed the few steps up onto the stage for support, he would grab the vertical metal pole of the stand that the skeleton was hanging from, causing the bones to move and shake. Everyone was spellbound as Hale made his way to the drawing board. As he began to speak of artists, life, anatomy, Michelangelo, and principles of figure drawing, he would make large drawings using a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a long stick. He spoke very precisely and intelligently about the drawing of the figure’s forms

while also explaining the important role of art and artists in society. As the lecture went on, he developed the drawings accurately, showing the skeletal and muscular structure of figures in proportion, perspective, and light and shade. H ale would explain that he was teaching anatomy for artists, which is very different from explanations of anatomy from the medical point of view. He would challenge his students by declaring, “You have to know how to draw the figure before you can come to draw from the figure” and “The most sophisticated figure drawings were done in periods of history when anatomy was taught and the worst drawings of the Renaissance were better than the best drawings of today.” Hale not only spoke about art of previous centuries; he also taught the basic elements of Western figure drawing from the past right up to the present, expounding on various masters from Botticelli to the thencontemporary artists of modernism.

There were no shortcuts or simplified methodologies in Hale’s teaching. His broad understanding of the traditional drawing of Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, as well as the innovations of contemporary artists, gave Hale’s students a thorough understanding and context of art and drawing with

the opportunity to create their own important and engaging artwork.

Hale knew and was friends with many of the contemporary artists of his time and as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was responsible for acquiring some of their now-iconic artworks for the museum, including Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950). The

One evening during the late 1970s, while attending a class at the League, I noticed a poster advertising an anatomy lecture by Robert Beverly Hale (1901–1985). It was one of a series that were being held in the second-floor gallery. That evening and every evening after, the room was filled to capacity with art students. The gallery was buzzing with excitement, and I soon learned that some students had arrived hours earlier to get a good seat. Maintenance staff would spend the afternoon assembling a platform, a large drawing board, a skeleton, and an anatomical statue. They checked the microphone system

many times throughout the day, and one man from maintenance remained during the first half of the evening lecture to make sure the microphone continued to work and that Mr. Hale had everything he needed.

A t the designated hour, Hale entered the gallery to a loud burst of applause. As he carefully climbed the few steps up onto the stage for support, he would grab the vertical metal pole of the stand that the skeleton was hanging from, causing the bones to move and shake. Everyone was spellbound as Hale made his way to the drawing board. As he began to speak of artists, life,

“The most sophisticated figure drawings were done in periods of history when anatomy was taught and the worst drawings of the Renaissance were better than the best drawings of today.” —Robert Beverly Hale

anatomy, Michelangelo, and principles of figure drawing, he would make large drawings using a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a long stick. He spoke very precisely and intelligently about the drawing of the figure’s forms while also explaining the important role of art and artists in society. As the lecture went on, he developed the drawings accurately, showing the skeletal and muscular structure of figures in proportion, perspective, and light and shade.

H ale would explain that he was teaching anatomy for artists, which is very different from explanations of anatomy from the medical point of view. He would challenge his students by declaring, “You have to know how to draw the figure before you can come to draw from the figure” and “The most sophisticated figure drawings were done in periods of history when anatomy was taught and the worst drawings of the Renaissance were better than the best drawings of today.” Hale not only spoke about art of previous centuries; he also taught the basic elements of Western figure drawing from the past right up to the present, expounding on various masters from Botticelli to the then-contemporary artists of modernism. There were no shortcuts or simplified methodologies in Hale’s teaching. His broad understanding of the traditional drawing of Renaissance

artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, as well as the innovations of contemporary artists, gave Hale’s students a thorough understanding and context of art and drawing with the opportunity to create their own important and engaging artwork.

Hale knew and was friends with many of the contemporary artists of his time and as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was responsible for acquiring some of their now-iconic artworks for the museum, including Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950). The connections of the traditional principles of art to contemporary work is interesting and perhaps sometimes controversial. Willem de Kooning in one conversation with Hale, expressed his opinion that Hale was ruining students by teaching them anatomy. True to his most polite and kind personality, Hale simply responded that he didn’t believe he was ruining anyone by the teaching of anatomy as part of the training of figure drawing. Years later, I related this story to Larry Campbell, then an editor at the League, who replied that de Kooning should have known better than to say that because he himself came out of the traditional training for artists in Europe.

With Hale’s expansive intellect and an incredible wealth of knowledge, delivered with wit, clarity, and some poetry, it was exhilarating to listen and absorb what he was giving, and to apply his teachings to your art. His ability to

Romare Bearden

“I like the language…to be as classical as possible.” 1 —Romare Bearden

Romare Howard Bearden (1911–1988) was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. Along with his intellectually astute, college-educated parents, as a young child Bearden moved to New York City. Part of the great migration north by African Americans, the Beardens eventually settled in Harlem in 1920. They frequently returned to Charlotte to visit family.

I n addition to myth, ritual, and religious practices, the places where Bearden lived and visited, including the island of St. Martin, provided sources for his paintings, watercolors, collages, and prints. The family of the artist’s dancer/ choreographer wife, Nanette Rohan Bearden, owned land in this Caribbean paradise, where he established a second studio in 1973. 2

B earden attended several universities: the historically Black Lincoln University in suburban Philadelphia, Boston University (BU), and New York University, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Education from the last in 1935. But the institution Bearden was most proud to have attended was the Art Students League (ASL), where he studied in night classes during the summer of 1933 and autumn of 1935. In both instances, he attended sessions led by the politically perspicacious German immigrant George Grosz. One of Grosz’s many contributions to Bearden’s education was the expansion of his awareness of international art history. The mass of visual information the young artist encountered this way provided subjects and formal inspiration that impacted his artistic practice during the rest of his life.3

A w riter as well as a visual artist throughout his career, starting during his years at BU, Bearden’s work reveals his political activism, for example, with a 1932 cover for Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life. In 1934, while studying at Columbia, he wrote an article for the same publication, “The Negro Artist and Modern Art.” Bearden also published a weekly political cartoon on the editorial page of the Baltimore Afro-American from September 1935 through March 1937, commenting on such trenchant, critically timely subjects as the relationship of war and human greed and the Ku Klux Klan. 4 George Grosz’s own history as a politically oriented artist in early twentieth-century Germany likely affirmed Bearden’s powerful social concerns.5

D uring this early period of his career, Bearden was earning a living by day as a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services. Although his work was well-exhibited in both solo and group shows from the early 1940s, and he also was represented by well-established commercial galleries and active in founding organizations supportive of Black artists, not until 1969 could Bearden support himself solely by making art. He subsequently was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, served on the New York State Council for the Arts, lectured widely across the United States, and received

several honorary doctoral degrees.

B earden is best known for piecedtogether images, for which he primarily used an immense variety of papers, including some cut from magazines and others that he printed or painted by hand. He generally referred to these images as collage-paintings, presumably in part because paintings were considered a higher form of art than works on paper. Among the earliest of these now muchadmired works is a 1964 group of collages that includes Mysteries, which measures approximately 11 × 14 inches.

the elder artist continued to discuss and highlight the immense importance to his life of George Grosz and classes at the Art Students League, where he had been elected an honorary life member.7

RUTH FINE

A s his career advanced, Bearden’s collages expanded greatly in size and feature several murals, one of which is the 1973 Berkeley—The City and Its People, for the city council chambers of Berkeley, California. 6

B earden enjoyed great successes in many fields, and a pantheon of artists, writers, filmmakers, and politicians, including Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (who awarded Bearden the National Medal of Arts), greatly impacted his career over the decades. Nevertheless, his assistant for his final thirteen years, photographer Frank Stewart, reports that

1. Henri Ghent’s June 1968 tape recorded interview of Bearden, a transcription of which is in the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, and is quoted in Ruth Fine, The Art of Romare Bearden , exh. cat. (Washington, DC : National Gallery of Art, 2003), 46, 53, and 259, note 135.

2. Nanette Rohan Bearden founded her dance company in 1976.

3. References to George Grosz and a few illustrations of his paintings are located throughout The Art of Romare Bearden . This volume includes an extensive chronology by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado and Sarah Kennel, with Carmenita Higginbotham; as well as the most highly developed Bearden bibliography to that date by Mary Lee Corlett, who personally examined almost every listing, correcting many previous errors.

4. Several of these cartoons are reproduced in Fine, 214–215.

5. Posthumously released, among Bearden’s most important publications, with historian Harry Henderson, is A History of African-American Artists: from 1972 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

6. The mural is reproduced in Fine, 66–67.

7. This was affirmed to the author by Stewart on September 16, 2024.

Bonnie Cashin

In her first major press release, Cashin characterized herself as bringing together “the talents of a painter coupled with the spirit of her generation for their extremely modern, avant garde thinking.”

A “bombshell” is how fashion designer Bonnie Cashin (1907–2000) described the midcentury debut of her eponymous label. Named the “toast of the fashion world” and “the most discussed young designer in America,” Cashin was applauded for her design rebellion. In an era of French fashion dominance, she criticized couturiers for embracing “the femme fatale in all her early Hollywood glory…the Victorian lady with her bruised ribs…the voluminous ton weight dress which couldn’t move… and set comfort back one hundred years.” 1  She scolded, “You can’t stuff a dress weighing twenty pounds into an overnight bag.” 2 As her opening salvo in 1950, she coined the term and introduced the concept of “layering” to high fashion, condemning contemporary taxonomies of event specific and highly restrictive attire. Award-winning and hailed as “prophetic,” her work presented dramatically modern yet wearable garments to suit wearer’s personalities as well as their social, professional, and physical environments. Any suggestion of fashion hyperbole has long been eclipsed by calculations of Cashin’s continued impact on contemporary culture. When she died in 2000, The Economist estimated that in terms of market value, her contributions are second only to that of denim.

A s late as the 1980s, journalists who asked where Cashin had studied fashion

were immediately corrected, “No. I came to New York and I went to Art Students League.” She never formally studied fashion (she was taught by her expertly skilled dressmaker mother), but she did spend the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s designing costumes for the most iconic dancers and theaters on both coasts, costuming over sixty films at Twentieth Century-Fox, and designing high-end ready-to-wear heavily featured in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar editorials. She patented hundreds of these designs, including concepts put to use when she was appointed to design uniforms to aid the war effort, all while studying “on the side” at both Los Angeles’s Chouinard Art Institute and New York’s Art Students League. Working until her retirement in 1985, to “become a painter,” she designed for Hermès, launched Coach handbags (and her iconic, signature brass turnlock closure), studied at the New School for Social Research, was invited by the Ford Foundation to advise India on its export textile trade, and launched her own nonprofit with Buckminster Fuller. That she singled out her study at the Art Students League illustrates her immense pride in having attended the school. It swiftly provided a means of framing her work as that of a serious artist and dedicated social critic working in what many considered a frivolous commercial milieu.

BONNIE CASHIN, SCOTTISH PLAID TWEED PONCHO, PANTS, AND JERSEY HOODED TOP, 1969. COURTESY THE BONNIE CASHIN ARCHIVE

BONNIE CASHIN, FAUX CHINCHILLA-LINED PARABOLA SKIRT, CASHMERE TIGHTS, AND SWEATER, 1969.

COURTESY THE BONNIE CASHIN ARCHIVE

T hese throughlines are starkly evident in her 1933 enrollment in John Steuart Curry’s Life Painting, Drawing, and Composition and George Grosz’s Life Drawing and Painting, followed by Rico Lebrun’s Life Drawing and Anatomy in 1935. Learning from artists who employed their socially conscious art to challenge the status quo furthered Cashin’s approach to design, arguably as much as honing her artistic skills contributed to her later success. She insisted that her clothing designs function as a means of creative expression and liberation for both designer and wearer.

I n her first major press release, Cashin characterized herself as bringing together “the talents of a painter coupled with the spirit of her generation for their extremely modern, avant garde thinking.” 3 The novel combination of, if not tension between, fashion world success and her identification as an artist, fiercely protective of her creative freedom and radical ideas, led one peer to summarize in the 1970s, “She could have been the wealthiest designer in America, but she was so bloody uncompromising.” For the first museum retrospective of her work in 1962, curator Robert Riley wrote, “There are few in the markets of fashion who can afford to disregard their commercial milieu…Bonnie Cashin is unique in that she cannot afford to recognize it.”4

D ecades of groundbreaking design and enduring fashion firsts earned her

the title of the mother of American sportswear, but she defiantly described herself as “Cashin not fashion.” Every aspect of her work, written, illustrated, and manufactured, was instantly recognizable as exuding a philosophy of not just dress but of modern identity that was uniquely hers. She decried the “utter mediocrity being dished up today in the name of ‘fashion’…the leveling of everything to one common look with calculated obsolescence built in…the predatory commercialism thinly veiled by pseudo-elegant attitudes…these are all making a great big mass bore of Western fashion.” As the New York Times summarized, “Bonnie Cashin is always a law unto herself.” 5

STEPHANIE LAKE

1. Bonnie Cashin, untitled memo. Author’s collection.

2.

3. Adler & Adler press release for Resort and Spring Collection 1950. Cashin File, Brooklyn Museum of Art.

4. Robert Riley, draft of article for American Fabrics, January 11, 1963.

Author’s Collection.

5. Bernadine Morris, “Springtime Is Playtime Along Seventh Avenue,” New York Times, November 11, 1975.

“Film Stylist Hits Paris.” Cashin’s Hollywood scrapbook. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

George Grosz

“Line does not exist in nature. It is an invention of man.” —George Grosz

O ne might think that this thought-provoking statement comes from the scientific community or possibly a seminar representing the universities of the world. Actually, it was one of many amazing observations that George Grosz (1893–1959) shared with me at the Art Students League that quite simply changed my life.

H ad I not been considered a “rebel” as a young student at the High School of Music & Art in the late ’50s, where I was expelled in my senior year for writing an essay challenging the mandatory duck-and-cover atom bomb drills, I likely would have never met George Grosz, who was hired by the League after being expelled from Hitler’s Germany for his anti-Nazi paintings and drawings in 1932. There is no other school on Earth where this could have taken place! A German artist exiled from Europe and a young student expelled from high school, both without a portfolio as it were. And neither needed a degree of any kind to teach or study art—just the desire.

T he League became the center of my universe: a universe that was about democracy and freedom! Because Grosz,

like all League instructors, was not told what to teach or how to teach. Freedom of thought and expression reigned supreme. I received all kinds of knowledge, not just about how to draw, but also about life— the two being totally interconnected. The Grosz class was an intense family with an atmosphere of sheer liberalization. No small talk; it was a sanctuary for learning. G rosz, unlike many instructors, willingly shared his knowledge with anyone who wanted to learn. His total confidence as an artist was something he wanted to instill in others. These were, in many ways, the best years of my life. I was saved from mediocrity!

There was never any reason to think those years could be relived, that is, until I received a call in 1988 from the iconic Executive Director Rosina Florio (who was sometimes referred to as a benevolent dictator). Rosina had been secretary to the great League Executive Director Stewart Klonis when I was a student before becoming executive director herself. She said: “This is Rosina from the League. I want to know if you would be willing to teach the

old Grosz drawing class starting tomorrow.” I didn’t know what to say. There was a silence. She then said, “Say yes”…and I did! Once again, the League changed my life. I was able to maintain a drawing class with all the same freedoms for the next thirty years. The atelier policy was still intact, as though I had never left.

L ike Grosz, I had never taught, but all I had to do was roll up my sleeves and follow in his footsteps. In deference to him, I made sure to wear a necktie as he did on his teaching days every Tuesday and Thursday. My aim then, as it is today, is to do everything I can to keep the mission of the League alive. The main goal is to support freedom and democracy. So, for those who cannot understand an art school that doesn’t give out “degrees,” mine appears on this page: a copy of a letter from George Grosz, infinitely more important than any degree.

ROBERT CENEDELLA

Russell Lee

Russell Lee (1903–1986) would not have become one of the twentieth century’s most significant documentary photographers without the Art Students League.

L ee was born in the small town of Ottawa, Illinois, and trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh University. By the mid-1920s he enjoyed a successful career, rapidly moving up the professional ladder at several plants in the Midwest. Inspired by his wife, American Scene painter Doris Lee, he took up painting on weekends and by the decade’s end had left chemical engineering to become an artist, transforming his life. The Lees moved to San Francisco, studied painting, and traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 1931 they found their way to New York, spending summers at the artist colony in

Woodstock and winters at a large studio in Greenwich Village, near Union Square, in a building full of other artists.

L ee first took classes at the League in 1933. He studied with John Steuart Curry, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan, and later recalled the lasting impact of Sloan’s instruction. Through lectures and studio courses, Sloan taught his League students perspective, composition, lighting, design, and color, all illustrated with the works of Western art masters including da Vinci, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and one of Sloan’s favorites, Honoré Daumier.

S loan admired Daumier’s humanistic approach, and in League lectures frequently invoked the way Daumier ennobled working-class Parisians and portrayed downtrodden

...he started considering the documentary capacity of photography— recognizing it as a powerful means of recording and interpreting the world before him—and quickly pivoted from painting to photography.

men and women with decency and respect. Daumier’s penetrating political and social satires remain timeless in their depiction of the human condition, and Lee, like many politically motivated, documentary artists of the thirties, looked to Daumier as a role model.

L ee also shared a kinship of sorts with Sloan—who had won renown portraying New York and its overlooked struggling classes, and who excelled at depicting scenes of the ordinary and everyday, from the backroom of McSorley’s saloon to a hairdresser’s window. Sloan taught his students the importance of diligent planning and careful execution, a meticulousness that Lee—as a chemical engineer— understood. In fact, Sloan called design and composition “an engineering problem.” 1

B ut Lee struggled with painting and found portraiture especially difficult, later admitting his subjects always “ended up with sort of a deadpan expression.” 2 Speculating that a camera might help, he bought a Contax in mid1935 and photographed in and around New York. Almost immediately he started considering the documentary capacity of photography—recognizing it as a powerful means of recording and interpreting the world before him— and quickly pivoted from painting to photography. Even in his earliest images, it is clear that Lee had developed a

painter’s eye and translated Sloan’s lessons to photography.

W ithin a year, Lee became an accomplished social documentary photographer. Known for his humanistic approach and technical excellence, he carried Sloan’s lessons with him over a thirty-year career, from his pioneering work on the landmark Farm Security Administration (FSA ) documentary project in the 1930s and 1940s to his own teaching tenure in the 1960s—at the University of Texas in Austin—where he established the University’s photography department and mentored a new generation of artists.

MARY JANE APPEL

Principles and Practise

1.

the Classroom and Studio (1939; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 70.

2. Oral history interview with Russell and Jean Lee by Richard Doud, June 2, 1964, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2.

John Sloan, Gist of Art:

Expounded in

Steve Wheeler

Wheeler’s rich immersion at the League and elsewhere into the global art of the past and present served as the wellspring for his art.

Regarded as the leading artist associated with the Indian Space Painters, Steve Wheeler (1912–1992) studied at the Art Students League from 1932 to 1935 with a variety of professional artists. There he found stimulation and engaging discussion in a school without prescribed courses or methods.

S eeking to find a teacher who would hold his interest, Wheeler studied with a range of teachers, including the famed life drawing, anatomy, and antique instructor George B. Bridgman. He also studied printmaking with Harry Sternberg. The most significant teacher for him, however, was the abstract painter Vaclav Vytlacil, who demonstrated the principles underlying the art of Cézanne and the Cubists. In the mid-twenties, Vytlacil had been among the earliest pupils of Hans Hofmann, the leading teacher of European modernist art in the United States, who opened his own school in New York in 1933.

A s elf-proclaimed Vytlacil booster, Wheeler nevertheless decided to leave his teacher and the League in 1935 to study with Hofmann directly. Wheeler had, however, established formative friendships with Robert Barrell, Peter Busa, and Will Barnet, all of whom he had met at the League. In their company, he frequented galleries and museums in New York, especially the Museum of Living Art at NYU and the Museum of Modern Art, where the young artists were immersed in the work of Picasso,

Klee, Miró, Arp, Masson, and many other modernists. Also seminal for them was the landmark exhibition held in 1941 at MoMA , Indian Art of the United States. Visiting other collections of Native American art at the Heye Foundation, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History, Wheeler also acquired many books on the subject. His interest had been reinforced by League teacher Barnet, who instructed his students to look at Indigenous American art to be inspired to eliminate illusionistic representation in favor of a formal approach giving equal attention to positive and negative space.

W heeler’s interests in Native American art and modernism were foundational for his first mature bodies of work in the 1940s. His friends Busa and Barrell shared this concern as members of the informal Indian Space Painters group, which in 1946 had its first and only exhibition, 8 and a Totem Pole, at the Galerie Neuf in New York. Although he declined to participate in this show, Wheeler is commonly considered to be a progenitor of the Indian Space style, the Native Americaninspired modernist integration of organic and geometric, pictographic forms within a flat, seamless space.

Laughing Boy (1949, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ) is a key example of how Wheeler assimilated elements from Cubism and Surrealism, as well as Inuit, Peruvian, and Northwest Coast Indian cultures to magically

transform the commonplace image of a boy rolling a hoop. Thus, Wheeler’s rich immersion at the League and elsewhere into the global art of the past and present served as the wellspring for his art. Furthermore, in winter 1947, he published an article in the Art Students League Quarterly which provided a platform for Wheeler’s assessment

of his multidimensional art as “a representation of things in the process of generation, corruption, and alteration… guided by my passions.”1

GAIL STAVITSKY

1. Steve Wheeler, “A Close-Up of ‘Hello Steve’,” Art Students League Quarterly (Winter 1947): 14–15.

STEVE WHEELER, LAUGHING BOY, 1949. OIL ON CANVAS, 24 × 20 1/8 IN. MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM, MUSEUM PURCHASE, ACQUISITION FUND, 1997.15

Worden Day

Worden Day (1912–1986) moved to New York City in 1934 just after graduating from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She had turned down a scholarship to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts because she believed New York City had a more vibrant arts community.1 While working a number of jobs—waitress, medical illustrator, packager of spices, and contract lithographer, among others—Day devoted herself to art studies at several local institutions. 2 Throughout her life, Day was introspective but extroverted and yearned to join communities of individuals with whom she could connect on a creative, intellectual, or spiritual level. In this way, the Art Students League’s bustling classrooms filled a void and formed the backbone of Day’s earliest social and professional network.

D ay was nearly always enrolled at the League across the six years she spent in the city before relocating in 1940 for a traveling fellowship. She took classes with a smattering of teachers, including life classes with Leon Kroll, William von Schlegell, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jean Charlot, and printmaking classes with Harry Sternberg and Will Barnet. In addition to the League, she enrolled in classes at the studio of the Latvianborn artist Maurice Sterne and recently emigrated German expressionist George Grosz (1934) and at the Florence Cane School of Art (1935–37). Day believed, however, that many of these experiences

failed to bring her into contact with a network of “serious art students.” 3 Her feeling of dissatisfaction changed in the fall of 1938 when Day enrolled in Vaclav Vytlacil’s class at the League. She not only discovered an inspiring teacher, but she also entered the vibrant community of young artists who congregated around “Vyt,” as they called him, and his mentor Hans Hofmann, who was at that point teaching downtown on Eighth Street. Among her closest colleagues from Vytlacil’s class were

Throughout her life, Day was introspective but extroverted and yearned to join communities of individuals with whom she could connect on a creative, intellectual, or spiritual level. In this way, the Art Students League’s bustling classrooms filled a void and formed the backbone of Day’s earliest social and professional network.

the painter Bessie Boris, Leo Garel, and Don Duncan. As Day said, they became “inseparable friends,” socializing at each other’s studios, imbibing and cooking dinner together, discussing poetry and one another’s paintings, shuttling back and forth between Vytlacil’s classroom

at the League and Hofmann’s studio on Eighth Street, and going to various summer art colonies.

A lthough Day’s career ultimately took her away from Vytlacil’s lessons on painting and towards printmaking and sculpture, she remained steadfastly loyal to his teachings and the connections she made in his classroom. In the early 1970s, she petitioned the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey to mount a retrospective exhibition for Vytlacil, which came to fruition in 1975. 4 On the occasion, she also collected letters from former students at the League and donated the group to the Archives of American Art.5

CHRISTINA WEYL

1. Worden Day, “Autobiographical Journey as an Artist,” reproduced in Una Johnson, Worden Day 40 Year Retrospective, 1946–1986: Drawings, Paintings, Prints and Sculpture, exh. cat. (Trenton, NJ: New Jersey State Museum, 1986), unpaginated.

2. Thomas C. Colt, Jr., Esther Worden Day, Virginia Artist Series, no. 16 (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1940).

3. Day, “Autobiographical Journey.”

4. Worden Day, letter to Ann Rogerson, June 12, 1972, reel 2016, grids 792–795, Vaclav Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. For the retrospective catalogue, see Lawrence Campbell, Vaclav Vytlacil: Paintings & Constructions from 1930, exh. cat. (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 1975).

5. Reel 2016, Vaclav Vytlacil Papers.

OPPOSITE: WORDEN DAY, ART STUDENT, TAKEN AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK (VYTLACIL’S CLASS), 1939.

ABOVE: LEO GAREL, BESSIE BORIS, AND WORDEN DAY AT BORIS’S STUDIO, 1939. BOTH PHOTOGRAPHS: BOX 2, FOLDER 2: PHOTOGRAPHS OF WORDEN DAY, C. 1930–51, WORDEN DAY PAPERS, 1926–92. ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION WASHINGTON, DC, 20560

Joseph Delaney

Joseph Delaney (1904–1991) was an extra ordinary man, an extraordinary artist, and a steadfast devotee of the Art Students League for over fifty years. One of ten children born at the turn of the twentieth century to a formerly enslaved mother and Methodist minister father in Knoxville, Tennessee, Delaney was swept up by the Great Migration, hopping around the Midwest and serving three years in the Eighth Illinois National Guard in the 1920s before landing in New York City in 1930. Despite periods of poverty, homelessness, and addiction that humbled him deeply, Delaney persevered, buoyed by the intermittent success his commissions, awards, teaching, and exhibitions, including a Federal Art Projects (FAP) mural at Hudson River Pier 72, a Julius Rosenwald grant for travel from the Works Project Administration (WPA), a residency at the Henry Street Settlement Houses through the Federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), and over thirty years as an exhibitor in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show.

Delaney’s official League record, which includes seven address changes, begins with a February 1934 afternoon life drawing class taught by Alexander Brook; yet, reputable sources, including the artist himself, cite him enrolling as early as 1931. Delaney engaged in art from a young

age, drawing pictures in Sunday school alongside Beauford, one of his siblings who also became a well-known artist. The League’s alternative model of art education represented a second chance for Delaney, who dropped out of school after the ninth grade. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, he took classes with Brook, Thomas Hart Benton, George B. Bridgman, and Ossip Zadkine, among others. They instilled in him an unflagging appreciation for anatomy and honed his ability to transfer what were quick observational sketches into dramatic genre scenes.

“Bridgman was a science mechanic… in every part of each bone and muscle… giving the full story of the body. Benton was more artistic, leaving [it] up to you to find something to add,” said Delaney

...Delaney, who, despite the many trials and tribulations of life, consistently recommitted himself to his artwork and the pursuit of artistic advancement as a lifelong student of the League and one of America’s most significant, if still yet underrecognized, artists.

of his instructors in a self-published treatise entitled Know What You See: Flesh and Bones, Simple Anatomy. Delaney was elected to League Membership in 1936 and became a life member in 1945. The latter status gave him the ability to attend free Friday open sketch sessions, which he did regularly until 1986, when he returned, like a prodigal son, to Knoxville, where he became affiliated with the University of Tennessee and died in 1991.

At the League during the 1930s and 1940s, Delaney was at the nexus of American art. As a student of Benton, he crossed paths with Jackson Pollock, whom he drew on more than one occasion. While he did not formally study with Reginald Marsh, Delaney’s figurative expressionist style is clearly influenced by the artist’s compositional structure marked by thickly outlined interlocking figures with doughy appendages and dramatic mannerisms. This somewhat crude approach to rendering allowed both Marsh and Delaney the ability to capture a lot of action in a little space, specifically in an urban setting. This dynamism characterizes Delaney’s two oil on canvas paintings set at the League: Art Students League Cafeteria (1941) and Lobby, Art Students League (1965), the latter of which is in the collection of the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. While far from realist in style, both works are exacting in

their detail—from the overhead lights and long wooden benches to the placement of Hermes, an iconic sculpture by Sabatino De Angelis in the League’s permanent collection, which stood at the center of its lobby for decades. Much like in life, Delaney’s point of view in his artworks is almost exclusively that of the observer, capturing a scene from its sideline. One exception to this approach is Model with a Hat, an oil on board painting dated to 1931, which was gifted to the League’s permanent collection in 2024. Likely painted from a model in one of the studios at the League, it depicts a young, smartlydressed woman wearing a pillbox hat and what looks to be a velvet-trimmed suit jacket. She sits in a black Windsor spindleback chair staring outward. Renowned Delaney scholar Frederick C. Moffatt quotes the artist as saying, “I spent many years there [at the League], and I suppose if you’re exposed to a certain atmosphere, sooner or later you become a part of it.”

Displaying Delaney’s skill as a portraitist, the sitter’s stone-cold focus mirrors that of Delaney, who, despite the many trials and tribulations of life, consistently recommitted himself to his artwork and the pursuit of artistic advancement as a lifelong student of the League and one of America’s most significant, if still yet underrecognized, artists.

KSENIA NOURIL

Peter Busa

The years that Peter Busa (1914–1985) spent at the Art Students League, attending as a student from 1933 to 1936 and again in 1941–42, positioned him within an emerging social and artistic network that would come to define the history of mid-century American modernism. His experience with the movements and characters swirling around the League began with his exposure to friends and peers such as Jackson Pollock, Steve Wheeler, Robert Barrell, and Will Barnet, whom he met in the classes of Thomas Hart Benton and Vaclav Vytlacil. Busa was introduced to Stuart Davis, another on-and-offagain instructor at the League, by Arshile Gorky. Davis’s modernist lexicon would prove a fundamental influence on Busa’s interest in finding a particular American brand of abstraction even as

he moved through avant-garde circles of New York.

I n 1941, Busa associated with a nascent group of artists experimenting with Surrealist automatism around Robert Matta, including William Baziotes, Pollock, and Robert Motherwell. Busa’s resulting strain of biomorphic Surrealism, linear work emerging out of such automatist experiments that verges on the abstract, would be featured in his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in the spring of 1946. W hile many from this circle of associates would famously coalesce into Abstract Expressionism, Busa instead became a central figure and founding member of the loosely affiliated group known as the Indian Space Painters. Inspired by the aesthetic forms of the

In 1941, Busa associated with a nascent group of artists experimenting with Surrealist automatism around Robert Matta, including William Baziotes, [Jackson] Pollock, and Robert Motherwell.

Indigenous arts of the Americas, the Indian Space Painters were a short-lived movement that sought a new form of American art departing from European precedent. While at the League, Busa frequented the American Museum of Natural History ( AMNH) with Wheeler and Barrell to view the Indigenous art, which he considered to be “on the same levels as examples of Western culture.” 1 At the AMNH , Museum of the American Indian, and Brooklyn Museum, these artists studied and closely emulated the visual lessons of Southwestern pottery, Northwest Coast painting and carving, Andean textiles, and Mesoamerican iconography. Busa and his colleagues owned copies of the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology and publications like Franz Boas’s anthropological treatise Primitive Art , all of which influenced their incorporation of Indigenous spatial forms, so-called “Indian Space,” into their all-over and abstract-geometric compositions. Speaking on his own painting, Busa characterized it “by a blatancy that is very close to all primitive expression, such as… the American Indians.” 2

I n the spring of 1946, the same year as his Art of This Century show, Busa featured in the only Indian Space Painting exhibition of its time. Titled Semeiology or 8 and a Totem Pole and organized by the poet-painter Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin at Gallery Neuf on 79th Street, the exhibition combined two

generations of artists who had formed the movement out of the milieu of the League. It featured Barrell and Busa alongside a younger generation that had largely met in Barnet’s classes at the League, including Gertrude Barrer, Oscar Collier, Ruth Lewin, Lillian Orloff, and Robert Smith. The exhibition announcement declared that the artists sought to subtend cultural differences to create a new contemporary American art, aesthetically and emotionally inspired by the forms and creativity of Indigenous art. In contrast to his contemporary biomorphic surrealist explorations, Busa’s typically hard-edged, graphic abstractions from this period combine Peruvian textile motifs with the geometric symbolism of Southwestern pottery and the compartmentalized and all-over spatial treatment of Northwest Coast art. While his abstract explorations would develop into a more expressionistic mode following his time in New York, Busa would continue to incorporate an Indian Space Painting ethos into his teaching at the University of Minnesota, where he taught from 1961 to 1982 alongside the Anishinaabe modernist George Morrison, another close friend from the League.3

CHRISTOPHER T. GREEN

1.

2.

3.

Oral history interview with Peter Busa, September 5, 1965. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Peter Busa, quoted in “Art in Buffalo,” Buffalo Evening News, February 16, 1955, 66.

Sandra Kraskin, personal communication with the author, May 24, 2023.

Perle Fine

In the 1930s, Perle Fine (1905–1988) attended the Art Students League and studied with Kimon Nicolaïdes, choosing him over Thomas Hart Benton because she believed he was the best teacher. He was also supportive of women students, writing “I do not care who you are, what you can do, or where you have studied, if you have studied at all. I am concerned only with showing you some things which

I believe will help you to draw.” One of the skills Fine learned from him was how to do quick sketches, what she called “almost scribbles” that “captured the spirit of the action.” 1 She also benefited from his focus on three-dimensionality.

F ine and her husband Maurice Berezov, who also studied at the League, frequently attended art exhibitions. For her, it was Matisse and Cézanne

who pointed the way to abstraction. “I looked at Matisse and loved him but I didn’t understand him,” Fine said. “But I did seem to understand Cézanne, and I loved Cézanne.” When she saw Picasso’s work, she wrote in a note “Great Picasso show. Went again and again. More students followed.” 2

B ecause it was the depth of the Depression, traveling to Europe was out of the question, even though such a trip was de rigueur for young artists in prior eras. This inability was one of the reasons Fine decided to study with Hans Hofmann, who had recently emigrated from Germany and was up to date on the European art world. Fine considered his focus on the two-dimensional picture plane to be catalytic, bringing about a change in art in America, although she herself was determined to follow her own course.

D uring the formative years of Abstract Expressionism, Fine helped set its direction with solo exhibitions at prestigious New York galleries including the Betty Parsons Gallery. She had paintings in all of the New York annuals and took part in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1950s, her Tenth Street studio was one of the epicenters of the Abstract Expressionist movement, with artists dropping in to exchange ideas, among them Willem de Kooning, Jackson

Pollock, and Lee Krasner.

D isturbed by the competitiveness and violent undercurrents in Abstract Expressionism, in 1954 Fine went into creative exile in the Springs, East Hampton, where fights were confined to the canvas. “I’m very suspicious of painting when it’s easy. There might be something lacking, and on the other hand, when I’m fighting it out with a canvas, substance is added to the appearance of the work, which makes it all the more convincing. I put it aside, and then when I look at it, that canvas has a lot more to it. Some unseen force or something that gets into it.” Eventually Fine forged back into the art world with works described by one critic as “gentle paintings of near unspeakable beauty.” 3

KATHLEEN L. HOUSLEY

“I’m very suspicious of painting when it’s easy. There might be something lacking, and on the other hand, when I’m fighting it out with a canvas, substance is added to the appearance of the work, which makes it all the more convincing.” —Perle Fine

1. Kathleen L. Housley, Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2005), 18 and 21.

2. Housley, Traquil Power, 23 and 28.

3. Housley, Tranquil Power, ix and 215.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass (1920–1996) was a major figure in design and film, nationally and internationally, who considered design as thinking made visible. 1 His sixty-year career began in 1936; he began work and enrolled in an evening class in commercial art (then beginning to be known as graphic design) at the Art Students League. 2 The teacher was Howard Trafton, a highly respected illustrator, advertising artist, and designer of type and hand-lettering who had already won three medals at the Art Directors Club of New York.3 Trafton’s designs were strongly influenced by modern artists including Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and often boldly colored. During four and a half years with Trafton, Bass received a thorough foundation in fine art and design as well as advertising for industry.

B orn in the Bronx, to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Bass showed an early talent at art and a thirst for knowledge. He won medals from New

York’s School Art League and earned money by creating display cards for local shop windows and stalls. He recalled an ASL scout spotting the cards and that leading to a scholarship for his first course at the League. Leaving school at sixteen, his aims were to work in advertising design and supplement the family income

Bass’s body of work is visually arresting and conceptually appropriate. Best-known for film title sequences, movie advertising, and corporate identity design, from 1954, he brought modern art and design sensibilities to the opening title sequence of Hollywood movies and advertising campaigns, revolutionizing the ways both were conceived and visualized.

during the Depression. His first job—with a label designer—mainly involved errands and sobering up his employer. His second was little better but, after several months with Trafton, an improved portfolio helped the highly motivated Bass find work in a small agency creating trade advertisements for movies.

Ba ss’s body of work is visually arresting and conceptually appropriate. Best-known for film title sequences, movie advertising, and corporate identity design, from 1954, he brought modern art and design sensibilities to the opening title sequence of Hollywood movies and advertising campaigns, revolutionizing the ways both were conceived and visualized. He took a problem-solving approach, always “looking for the simple idea”—one so powerful it could be condensed into a symbol representing an entire film or expanded out to posters and title sequences. From the late 1950s he applied this approach to Corporate Identity design for many companies, such as Bell Telephone, AT&T, Avery, United Airlines, and Minolta, and institutions, including Girl Scouts, United Way, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

T he first directors to trust him with opening their films were Otto Preminger (Carmen Jones, 1954; The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955; and many more), Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch, 1954), and

Alfred Hitchcock (including Vertigo, 1958; and Psycho, 1960.) From 1960 (Spartacus), the film openings were all created in collaboration with Elaine Bass, his wife and talented former assistant, and the directors working with them in the 1980s and 1990s included Martin Scorsese (from Goodfellas, 1990, to Casino, 1995.) Bass won an Oscar for the short film Why Man Creates (1968, Kaiser Aluminum) but his feature film, Phase IV (1974), an eco-sci-fi parable full of stunning visuals, flopped. It became a “cult classic” and will likely gain more fans now with its recent release featuring an ending as close as one can get to Bass’s original, which the studio ruthlessly cut. 4

PAT KIRKHAM

1. Most of the material for this entry comes from the book I wrote about his work, that includes his collaboration with his wife Elaine Bass. Their daughter Jennifer Bass not only designed the book beautifully but also talked through my ideas with me at every stage, and vice versa. My preface in the book discusses how I came to write about the work Saul and Elaine were doing for Martin Scorsese in the 1990s and got to know them in the process. See Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham, Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design (London: Lawrence King Publishing, London: 2011).

2. Art Student League enrollment records. I am grateful to Stephanie Cassidy, Head of Research and Archives, for searching these records for me for Saul Bass and Ray Eames several years ago. I dedicate this piece to her and to the ASL where my late husband, Andy Hoogenboom, took up printmaking after retiring from teaching drawing and sculpture at De Montfort University in England when I took a post at the Bard Graduate Center. He loved working there.

3. For Trafton, see ASL Commercial Art course catalogues, ASL Archive; “Howard Trafton,” Graphic Arts, Ephemera Collection, Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University; “Howard Traftoh [sic] Art Teacher, Dies: Instructor Also Designed Several Typefaces,” New York Times, September 29, 1964.

4. The film was rereleased in 2024 in 4K Ultra HD by Paramount Pictures. An excellent pamphlet written by Sean Savage (a Senior Film Archivist at the Academy Film Archive), “A Mountain Out of an Anthill: Phase IV from Inception to Consequent Mutations,” sets out the long story from the ending being cut to the new version. Savage notes that his work was first published as “Phase IV: Saul Bass’s Sci-fi Vision Lost and Regained,” in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 14, no. 2 (Fall 2024).

Louise Bourgeois

“As

soon as I got here, I became a student of [Vytlacil], who was […] very good and who said to me, but Louise, why are you so tense? Why do you want to prove things? Why do you want to put on a show of strength […]? And why don’t you allow yourself to be the rather shy person that you are? And this was a revelation to me, and it was the start of my being, I hope, just what I am.” —Louise Bourgeois

In the summer of 1938, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) took over a section of her father’s tapestry gallery on Blvd. SaintGermain in Paris and began selling prints and drawings by a range of artists. In August, the American art historian Robert Goldwater happened by the small gallery; he bought a Picasso print and asked Bourgeois to lunch. Three weeks later the two married. Bourgeois arrived in New York City on October 12 and moved into Goldwater’s studio apartment at 63 Park Avenue. Yet despite their love and her artistic ambition, homesickness and guilt began to shadow her days. She was disoriented by New York’s crowded streets, which were “scintillating and loud,” and she couldn’t tell if the city was “an evocation of heaven or hell.” 1 Loneliness was exacerbated by Goldwater’s teaching commitments. She later recalled: “[…] within a week of my arrival here, I told Robert that the evenings are very long […]. He was correcting papers and such and I, I couldn’t see myself, you know. So I said […] if you don’t mind I will go to the Art Students League at night and I did.” 2

In November, Bourgeois enrolled in a life drawing course with Vaclav Vytlacil. She took to the Art Students League “like

a fish to water,” 3 and often cited Vytlacil, whom she called “Vyt,” as one of her favorite teachers. Modeled in a style similar to the various art schools and académies Bourgeois had attended in Paris, the League provided familiarity, security, and a space to establish her artistic identity as she assimilated to her new city. In June 1939, Bourgeois wrote to a friend: “I think I could talk to you for days on end about the things I’ve learned. I have a much deeper understanding now, far calmer and more assured…I’m not anxious now, as I used to be, and it shows in my work.”4

B ourgeois also studied with Will Barnet, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Harry Sternberg. For the next seven years, in varying intensities, the League continued to offer a stable presence as she developed the iconography that would define her paintings and, eventually, her entire oeuvre. Her earliest drawings and prints from this period include figures in ambiguous, mostly domestic settings, the compositions often reworked in several iterations. Concerned with the body in relation to architecture and space, Bourgeois ultimately abandoned painting for the three-dimensional. This shift to sculpture coincided with her final years at the League; her last dues covered

1945–46, around the time she began her first carved wood pieces, known as the Personages.

T hough she was no longer a student, Bourgeois mentioned the League in her diaries until at least 1971; she also stayed in touch with Vytlacil. In a 1979 interview, she reflected:

“As soon as I got here, I became a student of [Vytlacil], who was […] very good and who said to me, but Louise, why are you so tense? Why do you want to prove things? Why do you want to put on a show of strength […]? And why don’t you allow yourself to be the rather shy person that you are? And this was a revelation to me, and it was the start of my being, I hope, just what I am.” 5

MAGGIE WRIGHT

1. Louise Bourgeois, letter to Louis Bourgeois, October 28, 1938; LB-1006 (Louise Bourgeois Archive/The Easton Foundation).

2. Louise Bourgeois, quoted in an interview with Kay Larson, February 1, 1982 (Louise Bourgeois Archive/The Easton Foundation).

3. Ibid.

4. Louise Bourgeois, letter to Colette Richarme, June 11, 1939; published in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews 1923–1997, eds. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette Editions, 1998), 34. Bourgeois doesn’t mention the Art Students League specifically in this context but is reporting more generally on her artistic growth in New York, which was certainly supported by her classes at the League.

5. Interview with Kay Larson. ABOVE, LEFT: LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S ART STUDENTS LEAGUE LIBRARY CARD, 1939. 2 1/2 × 4 IN. COLLECTION LOUISE BOURGEOIS ARCHIVE, THE EASTON FOUNDATION, NEW YORK ABOVE, RIGHT: LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S ART STUDENTS LEAGUE MEMBERSHIP CARD, 1945. 2 5/8 × 3 3/4 IN. COLLECTION LOUISE BOURGEOIS ARCHIVE, THE EASTON FOUNDATION, NEW YORK BELOW: LOUISE BOURGEOIS IN NEW YORK CITY, 1939. PHOTO. ALL IMAGES © 2025 THE EASTON FOUNDATION / LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

Frank Mason

For eleven years of my life, I was privileged to study painting at the Art Students League of New York with the great Frank Mason (1921–2009).

T here was always a waiting list for the class, which met weekday afternoons under the silvery skylight of Studio 7. There were usually two nude or portrait models set up on stands on either side of the classroom. Densely packed easels were allocated on Mondays, and sometimes your spot would be in the back of the room near the genuine human skeleton and the plaster cast of Donatello’s David, looking

backwards at the model against the light. The class was conducted in complete silence, except for the mumbling of pigeons in the airshaft and the low voice of the class monitor telling the models when it was time for them to rest.

Frank Mason came in on Mondays and Thursdays. You could sense that he had arrived by a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the room as he quietly entered the studio, tying the belt of his black artist’s smock and putting on a pair of latex gloves. Everyone in the room would immediately stop painting and maneuver into the hushed crowd

behind Frank to watch him teach. By the time I joined his class in the early 1980s, Mason had been at the League for four decades, a legendary figure with a following of fiercely loyal students who stayed with him for years. Mason was legendary because of his exceptional painting ability, his profound knowledge, and his extraordinary teaching style. He taught by demonstration, giving a student a critique by working directly on the student’s canvas. He moved among the easels, sometimes passing numerous pieces without comment, selecting one or another to receive his attention. Whatever he did to a painting, it was always just right. It was a glorious thing when Frank chose to give you a “crit.”

Depending on his mood he might spend a couple of seconds or a couple of

hours on a given student’s piece. He might work in silence, occasionally murmuring an explanatory comment, or he might be in a mood to illustrate his lessons with a story. Students never spoke, except to thank him for his help. One never asked Mason a question. He doled out technical knowledge to specific students as they seemed ready. We loved him.

T he culture of the class was one of devotion and respect. Mason’s students read art books for entertainment.

We spoke of little else. We worked at menial jobs so that we could paint.

Mason encouraged our fascination with the alchemy of our art materials, and we shared among ourselves the best kinds of rabbit skin glue, recipes for homemade gesso, how to thicken drying oils, where to get the best mastic tears from Chios, how to grind one’s own paint. We inhabited a community of the obsessed. We were chary of new students until they demonstrated sufficient commitment to the ethos of the class.

Once they showed that they got it, they, too, were folded into the extended family. Over the course of his fantastic teaching career, Frank Mason taught hundreds, if not thousands of students. We all share his priceless legacy and cherish his memory. We are all forever Mason Students.

JENNIFER

LI

“By the time I joined his class in the early 1980s, Mason had been at the League for four decades, a legendary figure with a following of fiercely loyal students who stayed with him for years.” —Jennifer Li

Sonja Sekula

Swiss artist Sonja Sekula (1918–1963) worked on the borders of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism in the United States from 1936 to 1955. She was included in major shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, and she enjoyed five solo shows at Betty Parsons’s.1 Sekula’s education at the Art Students League (1940–42) was formative. 2 A perceptive fellow student, Cicely Aikman, was able to discern critical aspects of Sekula’s artistic approach in the short essay she wrote for The League (“An Artist Speaks: Sonja Sekula”) in 1946.3

A ikman notes that Sekula flourished under the tutelage of Morris Kantor, with whom she studied almost exclusively from October 1940 to May 1942 (she studied for one month with Raphael Soyer in 1941). 4 Kantor was neither doctrinaire, nor did Sekula follow him slavishly. As Aikman quotes Sekula, “I am not old and wise but young and apt to changes. I change consciously from day to day, according to the daily new sphere that surrounds me. Its flux changes continuously.” 5

Admittedly, Kantor became frustrated with some of this flux, but he admired Sekula greatly, writing, “I had a great respect for her and she for me…She painted all the time, and her work was highly changeable. It’s too bad she didn’t pin herself down, but that’s the way she was. No matter what she did it was of great interest compared with the other students.” 6 As Aikman correctly reports, “Since being in Kantor’s class five years ago, Sonia has been working alone.

She turned out an enormous amount of canvases, going from expressionism through abstractions, [I]ndian designs to a pictorial imagery all of her own.” 7 If Kantor had been tried by Sekula’s multiple directions, he had also nurtured them. Further, Aikman suggests where some of Sekula’s confidence to pursue so many paths came from: her nascent feminism. Aikman opens her piece with these lines by the artist: “The Twentieth Century—what a wonderful time to live in, to paint in! It is the women’s era[,] too[;] they are at last coming forward, painting pictures of sensitivity, emotion, worth…Women are doing creative work that is completely accepted by the public as good art.” 8 Sekula may have overestimated the public’s openness to work by women, but it is important that she herself believed in it. Finally, Aikman also quotes Sekula asserting that she has been most influenced by a woman artist, Alice [Rahon] Paalen: “Alice Paalen was a medium through which I could see. She taught me how light can be transformed to inventive creation, to look and observe always.” The Art Students League gave Sonja Sekula the skills to become a medium through which many others could see.

JENNY ANGER

1. See Jenny Anger, “Sonja Sekula and ‘Art of the Mentally Ill,’” American Art 35, no. 1 (2021): 94–113.

2. Sonja Sekula, Student Registration Record, Art Students League, New York.

3. Cicely Aikman, “An Artist Speaks: Sonja Sekula,” The League (1946): 2.

4. Sekula, Student Record.

5. Sekula, quoted in Aikman, “An Artist Speaks.”

“I am not old and wise but young and apt to changes. I change consciously from day to day, according to the daily new sphere that surrounds me. Its flux changes continuously.” —Sonja Sekula

PAPER,

6. Morris Kantor, quoted in Nancy Foote, “Who Was Sonja Sekula?” Art in America 59, no. 5 (1971): 79.

7. Aiken, “An Artist Speaks.”

8. Sekula, quoted in Aikman, “An Artist Speaks.”

9. Sekula, quoted in Aikmen, “An Artist Speaks.”

SONJA SEKULA, UNTITLED, 1946. INK, GOUACHE ON

14 × 19 IN. COLLECTION OF GRINNELL COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART, MARIE-LOUISE AND SAMUEL R. ROSENTHAL FUND, COURTESY PETER BLUM GALLERY

Terry Haass

Terry Goldmannová (1923–2016) began her studies at the Art Students League at age seventeen in September 1941, after a year and a half of unimaginable tumult and upheaval. Together with her mother and half-brother, Goldmannová had fled her home in Mohelnice, Czechoslovakia, in March 1939 just before the Nazis occupied the country. Her passport records the family’s movements from Prague through Switzerland and into Paris, where they stayed for several months before fleeing again to Canet-en-Roussillon on the Mediterranean. 1 Smuggled through Andorra, they managed not only to reach Portugal but also to obtain visas for entry to the United States under the Czech quota.

A rriving in New York in April 1941, Goldmannová adjusted quickly, settling into an apartment with her family, learning English, and enrolling at the

League. She also married Walter Haass, a German national who had similarly just arrived in New York. 2 Henceforth, she became Terry Haass, personally and professionally.3 During the relative stability of her time in Paris, she had pursued art studies at the Académie de la

A striking representation of a captive young Black man holding onto the bars of his jail cell must have been a painful reminder of the internment camps Haass saw while waiting to escape Vichy France.

Grande Chaumière, and this brief introduction must have inspired her desire to continue in New York. 4 At the League, Haass began two months with George B. Bridgman, followed by five in Alexander Abels’s foundational class on painting materials, model study, and museum copying.5 The graphic arts, however, became the major focus of her remaining time at the League. After enrolling in Harry Sternberg’s serigraphy class in March 1942, she almost exclusively worked with Sternberg or Will Barnet, with whom she learned etching, lithography, and woodcut. This early focus on printmaking foretells Haass’s lifelong engagement at Atelier 17 in New York and Atelier LacourièreFrelaut in Paris.

T he prints Haass created at the League between 1942 and 1944 reflect the challenges of her young adulthood and the stability of her new life in America. Many of them bear witness to the devastating events of her dislocation: women and children exiting a bomb

shelter, soldiers driving away while families weep, and people stoically reading the latest news headlines. A striking representation of a captive young Black man holding onto the bars of his jail cell must have been a painful reminder of the internment camps Haass saw while waiting to escape Vichy France. Interspersed, Haass created many cityscapes of New York featuring automobiles crossing Central Park’s transverses, visitors to the zoo, and park walkways and trees. As she gained confidence in rendering the human form, she executed portraits of friends and family, including several of her brother Ferdinand and fellow League classmates, such as Helen DeMott. She even put her job as evening gallery attendant to good use, capturing in a charming etching the scene of students and instructors using the League’s second-floor exhibition space. 6

CHRISTINA WEYL

1. Terezie Goldmannová passport, collection of Emily and Ferdinand Scharf.

2. Terry Goldmannová first encountered Walter Haass on the beach near Canet-enRoussillon after he had escaped from Camp de Rivesaltes. They never spoke at that time. Though some kind of cosmic coincidence, the two ended up living in the same apartment building at 144 West Seventy-Sixth Street. Ferdinand Scharf, email to author, March 1, 2024.

3. Haass’s student registration card was difficult to find because she never used her given surname after her marriage. Her registration card, however, was alphabetized under “Goldman.”

4. According to Haass’s half-brother, Ferdinand Scharf, she studied with “Madame Zucker.”

5. 1941–42, Art Students League course catalogue.

6. Haass held this work-study scholarship in winter 1942–43. She is listed as “Terry Goldman” in meeting minutes for the Board of Directors, Art Students League of New York, May 1942.

OPPOSITE: TERRY HAASS, PRISONER , 1943. LITHOGRAPH, 12 1/2 × 9 1/2 IN. COURTESY DOLAN/MAXWELL, PHILADELPHIA

ABOVE: TERRY HAASS, LEAGUE , 1943. ETCHING, 4 3/8 × 5 7/8 IN. PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, 102237

Seong Moy

The late 1940s mark a pivotal moment in Moy’s career, due in large part to his presence at the League, but also because of the artist’s renewed interest in studying Chinese literature and theater following his two trips abroad. His color woodcuts from this phase, which lasted through the mid-1950s, are often lauded as adaptations of Chinese historical and literary subjects in an abstract idiom and would go on to be some of his most critically acclaimed works.

Born in Taishan, China, Seong Moy (1921–2013) began his training in art shortly after immigrating to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1931. Moy first encountered painting and printmaking in 1934 at the WPA Federal Art Project School in St. Paul. His aptitude in printmaking was cultivated by Clement Haupers, director of the Minnesota FAP, who encouraged the young Moy to also make use of the printmaking facilities at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (at that time the Walker Art Gallery, operating with the support of the WPA ).

Moy continued his education at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of Art), where he studied with Cameron Booth. 1 Returning to Minnesota after studying with Hans Hofmann in Munich, Booth opened the door to European modernism to Moy.

M oy was encouraged by Booth to move to New York in 1941 to study at the Hofmann School of Art or the Art Students League. He studied with both Hofmann at his eponymous school and Vaclav Vytlacil at the League throughout the year. His first phase in New York was interrupted, however, by his enlistment in the Army Reserve Corps in 1942 and

deployment to the China–Burma–India theater from the fall of 1944 until the end of the war. Moy returned to New York in late 1945, where he continued to study at the League, traveling to China again for leisure and study during the second half of 1947. 2

T he late 1940s mark a pivotal moment in Moy’s career, due in large part to his presence at the League, but also because of the artist’s renewed interest in studying Chinese literature and theater following his two trips abroad. His color woodcuts from this phase, which lasted through the mid-1950s, are often lauded as adaptations of Chinese historical and literary subjects in an abstract idiom and would go on to be some of his most critically acclaimed works.

I n 1947, Moy was welcomed by Stanley William Hayter to join Atelier 17 (located in New York from 1940 through 1955), where he worked and studied until the end of the decade. Moy left New York in 1950, returning to the Midwest for his first teaching position as a visiting artist and lecturer at the University of Minnesota. He lived and taught throughout the Midwest and New England until 1955, when

he returned to New York to teach at Cooper Union. Moy also returned to the League as an instructor in 1963, where he taught printmaking.3

D uring the 1960s, Moy’s style shifted from semi-figural, biomorphic abstraction to geometric, pseudocollaged panoramas utilizing collagraph printmaking techniques. This change testifies to the artist’s engagement with the League’s interdisciplinary culture and opportunities for multimedia experimentation. Moy continued to live and work in New York, exhibiting his work nationally and abroad for the next six decades. He taught at the League until

1987. His final solo exhibition, The Prints of Seong Moy, was held at the Syracuse University Art Galleries in 2011. 4

ASIA ADOMANIS

1. Paul Cummings, Oral history interview with Seong Moy, Jan. 18–28, 1971, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2, 5–9.

2. Frances Harvey, “You Draw with Brush or Pencil—Style is a Way of Thinking…” Print: The Magazine for the Graphic Arts 4, no. 1 (June–July 1954): 39–40.

3. Cummings, Oral history interview with Seong Moy, 14–15; Robert L. Crump, Minnesota Prints and Printmakers, 1900–1945 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009), 143.

4. Domenic Iacono and Seong Moy, The Prints of Seong Moy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Art Galleries, 2011).

Carmen Herrera

It was the midst of World War II, and Carmen Herrera (1915–2022) had recently arrived in New York from her native Cuba. She enrolled in the Art Students League. It was, after all, the most distinguished and best-known art school in the city. She had heard of the many illustrious teachers that she admired and who were teaching there, including Thomas Hart Benton and her own neighbor and friend Barnett Newman.

C armen was particularly curious about the work of the WPA artists whose murals adorned post offices, railroad stations, airports, and other government buildings and found out that many of them had trained or taught at the League. The classes were not overly crowded, as most young men were doing military service. It was, therefore, mostly women students, and Carmen recalls, with a sigh of relief, a place that women had to themselves.

W hile there, she was a student of Jon Corbino. His teaching method, she recalls, allowed for freedom and was not strict on figuration. She always claimed Corbino was one of the most important teachers and mentors she had ever had. It was Corbino who told her after a couple of years, that it was time for her to “fly solo,” as she would later recount about her time at the League.

A t 103, she would love to recount those days, which were important to

It was [instructor Jon] Corbino who told [Herrera] after a couple of years, that it was time for her to “fly solo,” as she would later recount about her time at the League. At 103, she would love to recount those days, which were important to her formation and development as an artist.

her formation and development as an artist. The ASL has been instrumental to the art of the twentieth century in the United States and played a key role in the life and art of Carmen Herrera. The Art Students League honored her at a gala

in 2021, when she was 106, and she was truly moved and grateful for the award.

TONY BECHARA

George Tooker

When I visited George Tooker (1920–2011) in 2007, among the few works of art hanging in his Vermont home was a gorgeous ink drawing by Reginald Marsh. Marsh gave it to Tooker when he was a student at the Art Students League. Its presence illuminated their enduring bond and represented a critical moment for Tooker. They met in 1943 when Tooker enrolled in the first of six life classes with Marsh. He became Marsh’s teaching assistant and an enriching friendship grew. Never outgoing, Tooker appreciated Marsh’s quiet method of teaching by example. Marsh guided students through difficult drawing exercises or challenging passages by sitting alongside them to draw those troublesome forms or transitions. Students watched Marsh’s choices and method in process and understood. Tooker found this more helpful than words.

Tooker started at the League at the age of 22. It is where he met and observed working artists, fine-tuned his craft, and developed his own egg tempera technique. Initially trained in oil and capable of working fluidly, it was when Tooker tightened up his brushwork, slowed down, and concentrated on warmly illuminated forms that he found his voice. Marsh noticed the difference and advised Tooker to move away from oil; his work in egg tempera showed individuality, his unique character. For a young artist this was critical feedback that he never forgot. The League is also where Tooker met artists who became his closest friends, including

Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Bridget Bate Tichenor. Tooker charmed these older artists who enrolled in Marsh’s life classes while he was the drawing monitor. Through them he entered queer cultural circles in New York and beyond. Cadmus marveled late in life, that they had all influenced one another in different ways, but Tooker had “mysterious qualities that I can’t emulate.” 1

W hile Marsh’s voice remained prominent, Tooker also studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Harry Sternberg. Sternberg likely provided an important example of an artist painting his beliefs with courage and conviction. Responding to questions about his imagery in 1967, Tooker said, “An oyster makes a pearl around an irritant inside a shell and I think that my pictures come frequently from irritants. I hope they’re pearls…”2 One of the memorable phrases he recalled from Miller was “a hole in a composition is as serious as a hole in a teakettle,” something that Tooker internalized throughout his career with innovative designs that unify abstraction and representation.3

Coney Island (1947–48), made after Tooker completed courses at the League, shows a young artist honoring his mentors while ambitiously reimagining a familiar subject as his own. Cadmus and Marsh loved Coney Island beach’s raucous mass of humanity. In contrast to their swirling, grotesque, noisy, and hilariously salacious versions, Tooker’s Coney Island emanates a slow, quiet glow.

“An oyster makes a pearl around an irritant inside a shell and I think that my pictures come frequently from irritants. I hope they’re pearls…” —George Tooker

Figures dive from a pier and play games in the sand but their activities are solemn and mysterious. Bodies appear to levitate slightly, as though gravity’s pull was lessened on the beach. In the foreground, a group of figures gather around a sleeping man, an ensemble that has tone of a religious revelation. This focus on human connection, care, and compassion, and finding the miraculous in the everyday would guide Tooker’s future work. It all

began in critical relationships formed at the League.

ROBERT COZZOLINO

1. Oral history interview with Paul Cadmus, March 22–May 5, 1988. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Grace George Alexander and George Kay, interview for “Artists in New York— George Tooker,” WNYC FM radio program, 1967, typescript, p. 7. George Tooker Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

3. Justin Spring, “An Interview with George Tooker,” American Art 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 65.

TOOKER, CONEY ISLAND, 1947–48. EGG TEMPERA ON PANEL,

MYRON KUNIN COLLECTION OF AMERICAN ART, MINNEAPOLIS, MN. PHOTO: MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART, © ESTATE OF GEORGE TOOKER, COURTESY OF DC MOORE GALLERY, NEW YORK

George Morrison

John George Morrison (Wah-wahta-ga-nah-gah-boo and Gwe-ki-genah-gah-boo, 1919–2000) was born at home in Chippewa City, Minnesota, a remote Native American village on

the northern shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. Morrison overcame innumerable challenges—poverty, a life-threatening childhood illness that left him permanently disfigured, and

Technically trained in figure drawing, portraiture, landscape, and graphic arts, Morrison made a strategic shift to abstract approaches, specifically automatism, propelling his unique visual language that fused interest in the subconscious with Ojibwe aesthetic sensibilities and ties to his homelands.

social isolation—to become a leading contributor to the New York School and the American Abstract Expressionist movement. Morrison was the only Native American painter among his New York colleagues, who included Cecily Aikman, Peter Busa, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, and Jackson Pollock.

Morrison’s engagement with Abstract Expressionism began in 1943 when, after winning an Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Traveling Scholarship, he traveled from rural Minnesota to New York City to study at the Art Students League where he worked with Morris Kantor, among others. Arriving in New York by train with one suitcase and his art supplies, Morrison began attending life drawing and painting classes, made personal and professional connections, and quickly discovered his love of urban scenes, jazz, and literature, while steadfastly creating art. In numerous group exhibitions across the city, Morrison stood out among his peers, and his work was consistently noted by New York Times art critics. A 1953 Fulbright Scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and Aix-Marseilles Université in France—followed by a John Jay Whitney Fellowship the same year— earned him international recognition.

Technically trained in figure drawing, portraiture, landscape, and graphic arts, Morrison made a strategic shift to abstract

approaches, specifically automatism, propelling his unique visual language that fused interest in the subconscious with Ojibwe aesthetic sensibilities and ties to his homelands. The artist’s involvement with the nascent development of Abstract Expressionism underlined its broader “American” context—according to an American Indigenous perspective.

Morrison’s Ojibwe identity was a highly coveted lineage, one that, in addition to his visually compelling work, gave him strong standing and a sense of respect among his New York colleagues. Between 1943 and 1970, Morrison lived and worked in the city and consistently exhibited in galleries and museums, including the Ashby Gallery, Grand Central Art Galleries, Grand Central Moderns, National Academy of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

M orrison’s prolific career lasted until 2000, long after his return to Minnesota from New York. It culminated with his famous Horizon series, a suite of small-scale oil and acrylic paintings that synthesized his technical skill, Abstract Expressionist innovations, and creative imagination, along with his love for his home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation.

KIKI BARNES AND PATRICIA MARROQUIN NORBY

Betty Parsons

More than most, [Parsons] understood the importance of an art community such as the League. It is no accident that she would soon found one of the most artist-centric galleries of the twentieth century, “a place where,” as Clement Greenberg famously wrote, “art goes on and is not just shown and sold.”

When these words were being written, [Betty Parsons’s] card in the League’s file of former students had been displaced….

S o wrote the author of an article about Betty Parsons (1900–1982) in the January 1973 edition of the Art Students League News. The occasion for the story was an exhibition at the renowned Betty Parsons Gallery titled Ray Johnson’s History of Betty Parsons Gallery, featuring collages by the notorious League alumus. The unnamed author noted that Parsons, too, had studied at the League, under longtime teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller, though “the dates were impossible to determine,” given that her file was missing. 1

It is still missing today.

P arsons regularly shared that she had attended the League early on in her development. Toward the end of her life, as she and a biographer looked through old drawings, she identified a nude made with a grease pencil as something she may have done at the League. 2 It is plausible that Parsons would have studied with Miller, a League stalwart, during the late 1910s, after completing finishing school and before her brief marriage to Schuyler Livingston Parsons in 1920, when she was twenty years old. During that period, Miller led life drawing classes for men and women, as well as a painting and composition class.

According to an oft-cited profile of Parsons published in The New Yorker in 1975, during the 1918–19 season, she studied with the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, best known as the architect of Mount Rushmore.3 Borglum, however, had not taught at the League since 1906, when Parsons was a child. She often recalled to interviewers that Borglum compelled her to copy bones out of his “bone book,” rather than sketch them from life. 4 When Borglum taught at the League, he ran the modeling course, as one would expect of an artist known almost exclusively for his sculpture. George B. Bridgman, on the other hand, a League perennial who shares Borglum’s initials, taught Life Drawing for Women during the years when Parsons is most likely to have attended. An anatomy lecturer and the author of numerous illustrated books on the subject, Bridgman seems more likely than Borglum (or Miller, for that matter), to have instructed students to copy bones from his own book.5

I f questions surround the identity of the instructor(s) with whom Parsons studied at the League, the significance of this moment in her burgeoning career is certain. Longing, against her family’s expectations, to become an artist, Parsons’s attendance at the League was a vital introduction to the life of the artist, and her first exposure to a community

of artists. She went on to study with the sculptor Mary Lawrence Tonetti— another alumna, as well as a former League instructor—before continuing her art education in Paris.

By the time Parsons returned to the League as an enrolled student in the spring of 1943, she was an exhibiting artist at the Midtown Galleries, as well as an increasingly important art dealer: in March and April of that year she exhibited Alfonso Ossorio and Saul Steinberg at the Wakefield Gallery, which she directed. It was an exceedingly difficult period for the Art Students League, which saw its enrollment dwindle as a result of the wartime draft. The twiceweekly evening drafting class that Parsons attended was a late addition to the schedule, and may have been a technical course related to the war effort. The League actively encouraged alumni to help shore up the school’s finances by enrolling in its courses, and Parsons—a lifelong learner who dropped into the League periodically to draw from models—heeded the call. More than most, she understood the importance of an art community such as the League. It is no accident that she would soon found one of the most artist-centric galleries of the twentieth century, “a place where,” as Clement Greenberg famously wrote, “art goes on and is not just shown and sold.” 6

RACHEL FEDERMAN

1. “Ray Johnson Celebrates the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Betty Parsons Gallery,” Art Students League News 26, no. 1 (January 1973). 1973 was, in fact, the twenty-seventh year of the Betty Parsons Gallery, which opened in 1946.

2. Betty Parsons, interview by Lee Hall (ca. 1981), transcript, Lee Hall papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

3. Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles: A Keeper of the Treasure,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1975, 47.

4. See, for example, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Betty Parsons: An Interview (1975; b&w video, 45:07, Video Data Bank); Betty Parsons, interview by Lee Hall.

5. There is a possibility that in addition to her studies at the League, Parsons attended the School of American Sculpture, run not by Gutzon Borglum, but by his brother, Solon. She gave Solon’s name in a 1975 interview rather than Gutzon’s. Notably, Solon used his book Sound Construction (posthumously published in 1923), which contained technical drawings of bones, as a teaching aid. However, his school opened in 1920, after Parsons was married, and during a period when she was studying sculpture with Mary Tonetti. Blumenthal and Horsfield, Betty Parsons: An Interview

6. Clement Greenberg, brochure note, “Betty Parsons Gallery: Ten Years Anniversary Show,” Dec. 19, 1955–Jan. 14, 1956.

Emilio Sanchez

Over three decades, [Sanchez] became a master of bold, clean, brightly colored depictions of houses, buildings, and other manmade structures that appear nearly abstract because they are entirely devoid of human presence.

The yellowed student registration record for Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999) tells an epic story—or, more accurately, several important chapters of the story—of how a country boy from Cuba became the urbane painter of stripped-down, brightly lit, architecturally inspired geometric compositions. Years after his original artworks entered the collections of museums such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sanchez’s iconic images were commemorated as stamps by the US Postal Service in 2021.

B orn in 1921 to significant privilege in Camagüey Province, but far from Havana and oceans away from the twin seats of global culture that were Paris and New York, the young Sanchez was forced to travel far from his birthplace to receive a proper arts education. As a teenager, he attended prestigious boarding schools in Miami and Connecticut; after he turned eighteen, he spent a year at Yale and two years at the University of Virginia. The bulk of Sanchez’s artistic education, though, took place inside the creative hothouse that was the Big Apple in the 1940s and ’50s. His Aristotelian lyceum, much as it was for

thousands of other New York artists, was the Art Students League.

Urged to enroll in the ASL by his stepfather, the Peruvian painter Felipe Cossio del Pomar, Sanchez did so intermittently between 1944 and 1977. According to his school registration, the young Cuban studied with Robert Beverly Hale, Frank Vincent DuMond, Robert Brackman, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The faded index card ascribed to student “Emilio Bernabe Sanchez” also records the following in handwritten black and blue ink: the budding artist was formally “Admitted Dec. 3, 1944; “Dropped Dec. 1, 1952”; “Reinstated” on “Nov. 1960”; “Dropped Dec. 2, 1965”; and “Reinstated” once again on “2–17–77.”

W hat took place during those thirty-three years? Nothing less than the maturation of an artist. Sanchez began as a pupil of figurative ASL instructors like Yasuo Kuniyoshi and the influential Reginald Marsh, making paintings of

Manhattan street life, society ladies, and men and women in drag. Over three decades, he became a master of bold, clean, brightly colored depictions of houses, buildings, and other manmade structures that appear nearly abstract because they are entirely devoid of human presence.

“I got my first really serious work done at the Art Students League,” Sanchez told critic and publisher Ronald Christ in a 1973 interview that was published in the legendary magazine Review. 1 “I realized right away that I wanted to do my own work. I went a lot to the sketching class because it was a wonderful drill. Some of the students were my friends and we used to work together; and that was, of course, the best training. I did study with just about everybody there from A to Z but I can’t think of anybody who had much of an effect on me, except myself. I don’t mean to be difficult—it was chiefly the whole environment that mattered, and it would be easier to mention some of the students than to name teachers.”

told Christ. For the Cuban artist, ASL remained the pivot of that global center—as witnessed by the fact that he maintained a lifelong connection with the League and not infrequently dropped by for classes.

“New York then was definitely the center of the art world,” Sanchez

CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNÉ

1. Ronald Christ, “The Accidental Architecture of Light: An Interview with Emilio Sanchez,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 7, no. 8 (1973): 52–59.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Among the most prominent Iranian artists of the twentieth and twentyfirst century, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019) was a pioneer in the development of abstract art, participating in a global dialogue and mixing traditional Persian cultural elements with contemporary experimentation in

both themes and forms. In Farsi, Monir means “luminous,” a word that describes this celebrated artist and her work—intelligent, enlightened, and radiant. Monir’s first celebrated mirrormosaic constructions date from 1969. They juxtapose simplicity versus complexity, and address

the relationship of the ephemeral to the eternal.1 The transcendental, contemplative, and spiritual aspirations of her geometric designs reflect ourselves and our universe.

Monir’s passion for art and aptitude for drawing were recognized by her teachers at an early age.2 She moved from Gazvin to Tehran with her family at the age of seven and subsequently studied with a private tutor who was educated in Europe. She learned to paint and draw by copying postcards of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. During the occupation of Iran by the Allied forces in 1944, Monir attended the College of Fine Arts at Tehran University. She wanted to study in Paris but travel in wartime was unpredictable.

After three months aboard two American military ships with her brother, fiancé, and his friend, she disembarked in Los Angeles in February of 1945. They eventually traveled to the New York metropolitan area by train. Monir took an intensive English course at a private high school in New Jersey before enrolling in the art department summer session at Cornell

University, where her landscape studies were praised. In the autumn of 1945, while living at International House for foreign students, she entered Parsons School of Design, where she studied fashion illustration. Her teachers noted her distinctive color palette and appreciation for Iranian culture. She sketched nude models, dancers in motion, and zoo animals in addition to conducting research at numerous libraries and museums. She always considered drawing to be a meditative process that helped her to see and define the essence of an object or living being.

Monir received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Parsons in 1949. Concurrently, she met Abraham Chanin, a renowned lecturer in the Education department of the Museum of Modern Art. Through their chance meeting, a friendship developed that became a gateway into the New York art world. Chanin introduced her to Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, and many other denizens of the legendary Cedar Tavern. Through him, she also encountered influential curators, collectors, and dealers, including Alexander Liberman, Leo Castelli, and Bernard and Rebecca Reis.

In concert with studies at Parsons, Monir took classes at the Art Students League of New York. The GI Bill and the continuing influx of foreign students during the second half of the 1940s created an exciting environment at the League. Because it wasn’t a degree-

granting institution, the League focused on innovation and offered its students a unique atmosphere of creative fellowship. The Latin motto of the League—Nulla dies sine linea, meaning “no day without a line,” emphasizes the importance of students practicing their craft on a daily basis, which inspired Monir’s lifelong devotion to her art and especially to drawing.3

In 1945, she signed up for a morning class taught by John Carroll, a figurative painter known for his portraits of women. She studied life drawing, painting, and composition under his direction. Carroll was a member of the renowned Woodstock artist’s colony, where Monir and her first husband, Manoucher Yektai, honeymooned and subsequently rented a house in the early 1950s. Woodstock became an important locus for Monir. She established deep friendships with her neighbors, especially artists Sally Michel and Milton Avery, who taught her how to make monotypes, which became an essential medium in her subsequent work.

A fter a hiatus of three years, she enrolled in daytime classes again at the League, where she studied drawing and painting with Nahum Tschacbasov. This Russian-born expressionist was a founding member of “The Ten” along with Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. Monir also studied fashion illustration with Danish artist Dagmar Freuchen and well-known commercial artist Ann Schabbehar.

Monir had strong entrepreneurial instincts and made every effort to use her artistic talents to support herself. In

1946, she joined with a Swedish friend from Parsons and International House to produce knitwear under the brand name “Design by Katja and Monir.” In 1949, she was hired as a window dresser for Stern Brothers Department Store, and subsequently created designs for bed linens, textiles, clothing, rugs, and tapestries. Monir’s first commission as a freelance fashion illustrator was a group of pen-and-ink drawings of brassieres for Glamour, a Condé Nast publication.

A drawing of Iranian violets she sold to an agent became the iconic insignia for Bonwit Teller, appearing on their shopping bags and advertisements for generations. Its success led to a full-time job at the department store, where she designed advertisements in collaboration with coworker and friend Andy Warhol. Monir returned to Tehran in February 1957 to marry her beloved and supportive second husband, Prince Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, whom she met through his sister Leila, Monir’s Tehran schoolmate who was also studying at the Art Students League. In time, Monir secured a place in her homeland as an artist and champion of Iranian traditional arts and crafts. 4 She won many prizes and commissions and was included in the 1958 and 1966 Venice Biennales as well as other international exhibitions at museums and galleries.5

A lthough Monir does not have any works in the collection of the Art Students League, she was a lifelong member and her work has been shown in important historical exhibitions of women artists

Farmanfarmaian was a pioneer in the development of abstract art, participating in a global dialogue and mixing traditional Persian cultural elements with contemporary experimentation in both themes and forms. In Farsi, Monir means “luminous,” a word that describes this celebrated artist and her work—intelligent, enlightened, and radiant.

affiliated with the school including Women in the Making of Art History, an exhibition that coincided with the National Women’s Caucus for Art convention in 1982. The exhibit also included work by Louise Nevelson, a longtime friend, as well as two of her former teachers Dagmar Freuchen and Ann Schabbehar. In 2016, she was also selected to be one of five women artists from the Art Students League as part of “#5WomenArtistsChallenge” in honor of Women’s History Month at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC . At the time of the Islamic Revolution in January 1979, Monir was with her husband and two daughters in New York City, an exile that would last for twentyfive years. In 2004, widowed but still energized by artmaking, she was propelled by a commission for a major mosaic and reverse-glass construction from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to devote herself to her art and moved back to Tehran to be among family and a few close friends. At the age of eighty-two, Monir started over once again. She located craftspeople skilled in mirror mosaic and set up a studio to bring into being works based on ideas that had remained unrealized during her years in New York, relying on instinct and intuition rather than theory, which she had assimilated.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was a mature artist who appeared on the international scene with dazzling artworks that propelled her fame. Living and working in her native country, among artisans who could execute her ideas and expand her artistic vocabulary, she fully realized her goals. In December 2017, at the age of 95, she opened the Monir Museum, the first museum dedicated to the artwork of a female artist in Iran. Located in a new section of the historic Negarestan Museum Park Gardens of the University of Tehran on the grounds of the Golestan Palace, fifty-one works chart her artistic development and extraordinary contribution to the history of art in Iran and around the world.

DONNA STEIN

1. Faryar Javaherian, “A Reflection,” in Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Karen Marta (Bologna, Italy: Damiani/ Dubai, United Arab Emirates: The Third Line, 2011), 97.

2. In collaboration with Zara Houshmand, Farmanfarmaian wrote a well-received and engaging memoir, A Mirror Garden: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2007).

3. See “An Illustrated Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Etel Adnan, and Frank Stella,” in Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Works on Paper, ed. Karen Marta (Zurich: LUMA Foundation, 2015).

4. See Donna Stein, “Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Empowered by American Art, An Artist’s Journey,” Woman’s Art Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012): 3–9; and Donna Stein, “Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, In Her Words (1985),” Woman’s Art Journal 44, no. 1 ( Spring/Summer 2023), 16–25, Pl. 5–8.

5. For a detailed timeline, see “A Timeline by Maria Ramos and Sofia Romualdo” in Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Infinite Possibility: Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974–2014 , exh. cat., ed. Suzanne Cotter (Porto, Portugal: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015), 163–180.

Harvey Dinnerstein

To Harvey, the expression of an authentic, personal point of view was the heart and soul of painting.

In a quiet storage facility on West 55th Street I stood, searching into a threadbare suitcase of personal papers that Harvey Dinnerstein (1928–2022) had bequeathed to the League in his final days. Coming upon a handwritten essay, I lowered into a chair to fully absorb his thoughts. As I read his words, I felt a surge of astonished recognition. His young writer’s voice revealed the seeds of the mature visual artist into whom he would grow.

I n 1942, 14-year-old Harvey submitted his essay, “Subway to Brooklyn,” to his freshman English class at the High School of Music & Art. He described being “crammed into an overcrowded subway car” and the “smells from the stench of overworked bodies.”

His senses are assaulted by a “fat, redfaced man (who) smothers me against the door. He smells of stale mackerel.”

Harvey feels as though the ride would never end. “How much longer? How much longer?” When he finally arrives at his stop and walks along the neighborhood grocers towards home, he inhales the aromas of his ancestral foods: corned beef, pastrami, sauerkraut, gefilte fish.

“ Subway to Brooklyn” could have been titled Underground Together, as was his landmark 1996 painting created over fifty years later. In the painting, as in his essay, he places himself in a subway car populated by a diverse group of New

Yorkers, recording his observations in his ever-present sketchbook. In both essay and painting, he is at once observer and congregant. But while his youthful essay is a litany of sensory violations, his painting is a celebration of his beloved community. To Harvey, the expression of an authentic, personal point of view was the heart and soul of painting.

D rawing from life fueled Harvey’s creativity. It was this passion that first brought him to the League while in high school. He attended the Open Sketch classes, in which students draw from the model. When he left New York for college, he discovered that academia offered few life drawing opportunities. Disillusioned, Harvey dropped out of Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art. He returned to New York and the League’s Open Sketch classes, where he could feed his passion. His connection to the League was cemented.

I n the coming decades, Harvey hungrily painted his neighbors, family, friends, self-portraits, and works that famously portrayed the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. He was a vessel for the nobility of ordinary people.

H arvey had become renowned among figurative artists when he joined the League faculty in 1972. I began to study with him in earnest in 1994. He exuded the intensity of his convictions. When he walked into our studio, he brought with him the artists

who had invigorated his own study: Degas, Daumier, Kollwitz, Eakins, Delacroix, Ingres, and further back in time, Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael. It meant everything to him to uphold their legacies. We students revered him for his clear-eyed and unwavering vision.

H arvey was a very private person. He rarely spoke of personal matters, but he always wanted to know about me. When I returned from exhibiting in China in 2012, he asked me to lunch. He

wanted to hear all about the experience “before you get all talked out about it to everyone else.”

T hat he left his personal papers to the League speaks volumes about his gratitude and respect. I return that gratitude and respect to him, and am thrilled to have met the authentic young writer in the treasure chest that is his suitcase.

ELLEN EAGLE

Joe Eula

Fashion illustrator Joe Eula (1925–2004) was considered the fastest pencil in the field during the golden period of illustration, securing an insider perch in the world of fashion and New York society. His illustrations were distinctive—distilling the essence of a look in a few short charcoal strokes or directly brushed in unabashed watercolor. He believed “If you could do it with one line, why put down 50?” 1

Joseph Benedict Eula was born in South Norwalk, Connecticut, and raised by his widowed mother, whom he adored. His extraordinary eye was noticeable from childhood, as was his fascination for his sister’s dolls. 2 In 1942, a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the army and became part of the fabled WWII 10th Mountain Division, chasing Nazis on skis. During this time, he captured wartime memories through sketching.3 He saw heavy action, which awarded him a Bronze Star, attributing it to “dumb luck” that he wasn’t killed. He later said the best elements of the uniform were “the boots, the skis, and the parkas.”4

Upon returning to Connecticut after the war, the enactment of the GI Bill allowed Eula to continue his education at the Art Students League in New York City. Veterans were admitted by a Letter of Eligibility from the government, giving $500 credit for one school year, with an additional monthly credit of $7.50 for art supplies. This gave Eula a crash course beginning in 1946,

though records show he took classes there occasionally through 1953.5

S uccess in the fashion world came quickly for Eula, with Town & Country magazine and Saks Fifth Avenue buying his illustrations while he was still enrolled in school. He later went to South America and then on to Europe. By the late 1940s, Bazaar sent him to cover the Paris collections. In the mid-’50s, he was a regular illustrator for Eugenia Sheppard’s influential column Inside Fashion , which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and was syndicated to more than eighty newspapers. He was swept up into a world of glamour, celebrity, and decadent partying. Andy Warhol once called Eula “the most important person” in New York. 6

Eula’s diverse talents placed him in his own category as an artist, an unclassifiable career. He served as creative director of Halston throughout its 1970s heyday, shaping the label’s signature look. He contributed numerous illustrations for American Vogue, had long associations with Italian and French Harper’s Bazaar, and worked as a house artist for Chanel, Givenchy, Versace, and Karl Lagerfeld. He also created album covers and concert posters for Miles Davis, Liza Minnelli, the Supremes, and dabbled in costume and set design.

T hrough the end of his career, he continued to sketch at fashion shows, the live palette now nearly a mere curiosity. By the 1980s, he settled in Hudson Valley

[Eula] was swept up into a world of glamour, celebrity, and decadent partying. Andy Warhol once called [him] “the most important person” in New York.

where he designed a line of china for Tiffany. In August 2004, he drew a series of fall coats for the New York Times—his last published illustrations.

SARAH GOETHE-JONES

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Cathy Horyn, Joe Eula: Master of Twentieth-Century Fashion Illustration (New York: Harper, 2014), 17.

Nick Eula, interviewed by Sarah Goethe-Jones, April 14, 2024.

Nick Eula, interviewed by Sarah Goethe-Jones, April 14, 2024.

Horyn, Joe Eula, 40.

150 Stories Research Base, Art Students League of New York

Horyn, Joe Eula, 9.

JOSEPH EULA SKETCHES ON A RENTED HOUSEBOAT MOORED IN THE SEINE, PARIS. LIFE , AUGUST 22, 1949.

Dagmar Freuchen

When Dagmar Freuchen (1907–1991) began teaching at the Art Students League in 1946, her instructor’s entry in the course catalogue included one of its shortest bios, accompanying an illustration of a slim woman drawn with slim lines. 1 Despite her diminutive frame, Freuchen’s figure, with her extended leg and over the shoulder gaze, fills the page.

F reuchen’s 1946 biography lists simply that the artist was Danish-born, studied in Europe, and arrived to New York in 1938. She writes that fashion illustration, the class she taught at the League until 1970, centers the “young healthy woman,” taking an “active part in life.”

2

T his same season, Freuchen’s work in fashion illustration quietly made history. She drew the April 1947 Vogue cover: a woman in a blue dress creating an exaggerated hourglass figure, a style today considered emblematic of mid-century American fashion. In postwar New York, however, this image represented a major material culture shift. This issue of Vogue introduced Christian Dior and the “New Look,” soon to become the prolific new standard in women’s dress. Freuchen’s illustration marked this turning point.3

L ike the bathing women in the 1946 catalogue, Freuchen’s “New Look” illustration shows a signature markmaking style. Freuchen maintained that “every line and every mark should directly contribute to the desired

effect.”4 Like the bathing woman’s leg, rendered in just four fluid lines, the “New Look” figure has barely one hand, barely one foot, barely a face. Still, she is complete; petite but pressing to the edge of the page, this time with a dramatic contrapposto posture and a “Madame X” arm leaning on an unseen surface.

T hese two artworks exemplify Freuchen’s as a story that is unique to the League. She was, first and foremost, a working artist. Like many mid-century League contemporaries, Freuchen chose drawing and line to communicate. With that choice she helped define an aesthetic still studied by art historians, unaware that her “young, healthy” women would continue to define an aspirational femininity in fashion for decades to come.

B eyond unexpectedly making history, Freuchen marks herself as “League” in her embrace of philosophies that distinguish the institution’s pedagogical approach at the time. Foundation begins with the figure. From that mastery of anatomy comes the expressive potential of line. Her recognizable touch is a trait she shared with fellow instructors George Grosz, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Vaclav Vytlacil, who invited her to attend his class in 1954.5 An attentive instructor, 6 she encouraged students to cultivate the fundamentals of figure drawing first, and then pursue individual style.7

L ike her illustrations, Freuchen was petite and dressed in black.

Remembering her as elegant and intimidating, 1961 student Helen A. Harrison recalls Freuchen striding through easels, smoking Balkan Sobranie black cigarettes, to Harrison, the very portrait of “chic” at the time. 8

Freuchen’s influence in the classroom was like her influence in American art: subtle, often unnamed, yet signature and lasting. In few words, and in few lines, Freuchen worked and taught, direct and simple in her approach. 9

Freuchen maintained that “every line and every mark should directly contribute to the desired effect.”

Like her drawings, slight in stature, but filling the space.

ALLISON GREEN

1. Art Students League of New York, Course Catalogue 1946–47, 28.

2. Art Students League of New York, Course Catalogue, 1946–47, 28.

3. “From The Archives: Dior’s New Look in Vogue ,” Vogue , September 28 2012, image, vogue.com.

4. Art Students League of New York, Course Catalogue, 1956–57, 28.

5. Art Students League of New York, Registration Record for Dagmar Freuchen-Gale, 1954–1972.

6. Helen Harrison, “Author Talk: Helen Harrison’s Art of Murder Mystery, The Artful Corpse,” The Art Students League of New York (online author talk, April 2021).

7. Art Students League of New York, Course Catalogue 1969–70, 37.

8. Helen Harrison, “Author Talk: Helen Harrison’s Art of Murder Mystery.”

9. Art Students League of New York, Course Catalogue 1948–49, 40.

Alice Brill

Alice Brill (1920–2013) enrolled in classes at the Art Students League on September 2, 1947. Ten days later she wrote to her fiancé Juljan Czapski, “Here there are people, intellectuals and artists who think and feel as I do, who fight for human ideals, against hunger and materialism. Here I am home. I cannot, I don’t want to, live any other way. I can’t bear the selfishness and stupidity of the brutish majority any more, who live only for personal comfort... Life now has meaning, only now.” The daughter of Jewish refugees—a journalist mother and an artist father—Brill was predisposed towards liberal political ideals. Even so, her experience at the Art Students League helped to catalyze a career centered on intimate and deeply empathetic depictions of São Paulo’s middle and working classes in both paintings and photography.

Brill’s chosen curriculum at the Art Students League focused on life drawing via classes taught by Will Barnet, Adams Wirt Garrett, Louis Bouché, and Sidney Laufman. Throughout her life Brill privileged depicting human subjects in relation to their environment. As a young woman in São Paulo, where she had arrived in 1934 at the age of thirteen after fleeing Nazi Germany, Brill affiliated herself with the Grupo Santa Helena, a loose association of artists working in downtown São Paulo. The Santelenistas were known for their proletarianism: many were tradesmen whose workingclass backgrounds were reflected in the

content of their production.

Brill’s artistic influences expanded in 1946, when, at the age of twenty-five, she was awarded a scholarship from the Fundação Hillel para Refugiados to study art in the United States. Prior to this, Brill’s single mother had been unable to finance any artistic or higher education for her daughter. In the US, Brill enrolled in courses at the University of New Mexico for the 1946–47 academic year. Then, driven by her desire to study art, she traveled to New York City in July 1947. Financial hardship forced Brill to return to Brazil in in January 1948, but just before she left she wrote home, “I believe that the era of pure individualism has passed. I don’t see any sense in an artist who produces alone, for no one. Who will use their art? The rich man in his salon? A museum after [the artist’s] death? There has to be an art for all: a collaboration of all the arts to create a more beautiful world that serves everyone.”

T he photographic oeuvre that Brill produced upon her return to Brazil reflected her commitment to artistic democracy. While many local photographers preferred heroic scenes of a city on the verge of its 450th anniversary, Brill captured the lives of marginalized Afro-Paulistanos, child laborers, and unhoused persons. Because these subjects were not in favor with the country’s conservative leadership, Brill’s work was largely ignored and unpublished during her lifetime. The rediscovery of Brill’s archive in the early

“There has to be an art for all: a collaboration of all the arts to create a more beautiful world that serves everyone.” —Alice Brill

2000s has led to a widespread critical appreciation of her progressive vision cultivated in New York, especially at the Art Students League.

DANIELLE STEWART

Maurice Sendak

Nineteen-year-old Maurice Bernard Sendak (1928–2012) began his studies at the Art Students League on November 25, 1947, enrolling in a two-month-long weekly life-drawing class taught by American Scene painter Jon Corbino. He had graduated from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School the previous year, found a job at Manhattan’s Timely Service window display company, and was living on and off with his parents. He had decided by then to forgo college, not join his father’s tailoring business, and instead to pursue an art career any way he could manage. Honing his skills at the Art Students League would soon become a part of the plan.

I n later years, Sendak routinely portrayed himself as a self-taught artist, and he seems never to have commented for the record on his studies with Corbino or another faculty mainstay, Robert Ward Johnson, in whose sixmonth life-drawing class he topped off his League training on May 27, 1949.

But John Groth, with whom Sendak took three courses in illustration and drawing between February and October of 1948, was another story. In an interview with historian Steven Heller, Sendak freely acknowledged Groth’s influence as a “generous” mentor he could “relax with…and…trust” and who, he had decided, was “really like me.”

He had enjoyed Groth’s challenging exercises and salty delivery (“Go home [and] do the rape scene from A Streetcar Named Desire…Stanley screwing Vivien

Leigh in the style of Goya or Daumier”) and taken seriously his directive to carry a sketchbook everywhere. 1 And at a formative time when Sendak’s own art experiments ranged widely from toy design to portraiture, the forceful case Groth had made for illustration as a worthy calling left a lasting impression, as did his irony-laced exhortations to forget about school and get realworld work experience at the earliest opportunity. It was during his months with Groth that Sendak accepted a coveted job in the display department of New York’s fabled toy emporium FAO Schwarz, where exposure to the store’s extraordinary book department deepened his historical knowledge of illustration and where, in the course of things, he met the two influential bookworld professionals who would launch his career: Caldecott medalist Leonard Weisgard and Harper’s visionary publisher of books for children and teens, Ursula Nordstrom. The sketchbooks Sendak kept for Groth’s classes may well have been the ones that first attracted their attention.

S endak also recalled Groth for biographer Selma G. Lanes: “[He] was important to me,” the creator of Where the Wild Things Are (1963) reported, because “he communicated a sense of the enormous potential for motion, for aliveness in illustration.” 2 Groth had made his greatest mark in art as a peripatetic battlefield illustrator-journalist. It was Sendak’s genius to realize that much

…Sendak accepted a coveted job in the display department of New York’s fabled toy emporium FAO Schwarz, where exposure to the store’s extraordinary book department deepened his historical knowledge of illustration…

about Groth’s fearless, kinetic approach to capturing the heat and intensity of war on the page might apply just as well to the brave new world in which all young children find their way.

LEONARD S. MARCUS

MAURICE SENDAK, SELF PORTRAIT, 1949. COLOR PENCIL ON PAPER, 23 3/4 × 18 3/4 IN. COPYRIGHT © THE MAURICE SENDAK FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION OF THE WYLIE AGENCY LLC

1. Steven Heller, “Maurice Sendak,” in Innovators of American Illustration (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986), 70–81.

2. Selma G. Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Abrams, 1980), 35. In “Randolph Caldecott,” a 1978 essay reprinted in Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), Sendak praised the innovative Victorian picture-book artist in nearly identical terms.

Robert Remsen Vickrey

Impresario Lincoln Kirstein spotted Vickrey in York’s class and invited him to join his landmark Symbolic Realism exhibit of April 1950. At this moment Vickrey joined the elite ranks of the Magic Realists: Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, and Andrew Wyeth.

Reminiscing about his pivotal year at the Art Students League—November 1947 through October 1948—Robert Remsen Vickrey (1926–2011) expressed gratitude for this brief career interlude.1 Bob also often chuckled about “carrying still-wet oil canvases and messy drawing portfolios onto the subway after classes.” 2 Apparently the small student lockers offered insufficient storage for his messily arranged portfolio.

Taking refuge from the brokenness of his divorced parents, he was sent off to the Pomfret School in the early 1940s. With a spirited resiliency, he began imitating Disneyesque cartoons of the Axis leaders after Pearl Harbor. The art instructor at Pomfret who most encouraged his talent was League graduate Victoria Hutson Huntley. Acclaimed as one of America’s most gifted lithographers, she passed onto Vickrey many of the fundamental drawing methods she acquired as a pupil of George B. Bridgman, George Luks, and John Sloan.

Earning his bachelor’s degree in Yale’s class of 1947, Vickrey was uniformed with the Navy’s war years ROTC program. He then anxiously moved to Manhattan, determined to “study figurative art.” There wasn’t a scintilla of curiosity in his artistic consciousness about jumping onto the abstractionist bandwagon, or illegible iconography. An athletically framed Adonis (and club-champion level tennis player into his senior years), Vickrey might easily be

mistaken as a doppelganger for Hollywood hunk William Holden.

C onsciously selecting the League’s “art for art’s sake” reputation instilled by generations of Robert Henri’s acolytes, he steered away from the National Academy of Design’s conservative formalism. “The League had real artists as instructors,” he noted. Vickrey was attracted to the open-enrollment policy allowing self-guidance for class offerings within the League’s curriculum.

Vickrey was already gaining attention as an artistic prodigy by the time he entered the life classes taught by Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller. These widely admired giants of the “Fourteenth Street School” were enamored with the gritty realism of Union Square’s urban theatricality. Both artists delighted in their visual explorations, transforming sweaty construction workers, ambitious office girls wearing new garments off the discounted racks at Orbach’s, and hawking street vendors. Their canvases became a Gotham-inspired version of wiggling, writhing figures in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling.

Speaking affectionately about these esteemed mentors, Vickrey shared with me how Marsh would repeatedly say that human forms needed to be “strong, simple, and real.” Critiquing his drawings, Marsh warned Vickrey not to make his figures “too flat” but insisted: “don’t worry

about composition— just keep drawing.”

In contrast, Miller’s instruction sought the clarity of Renaissancemannered bel disegno. He favored depicting forms with a basrelief subtlety. “Glum, almost silently, Miller taught us to imagine a plate on a wall. Is it flat or does it stick out like a basketball; what really breaks the picture plane?”

Empowered with these indispensable fundamentals, Vickrey would then return to Yale, earning his BFA in 1950. Fortunately, he found himself in the now legendary “eggs and plaster”—the demanding egg yolk tempera course.3

Lewis E. York had resurrected Cennino Cennini’s Florentine workshop methods published in 1490 as the guide Il Libro dell’Arte. Impresario Lincoln Kirstein spotted Vickrey in York’s class and invited him to join his landmark Symbolic Realism exhibition of April 1950. At this moment Vickrey joined the elite ranks of the Magic Realists: Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, and Andrew Wyeth. 4 New York Times critic John Canaday would eventually assess Vickrey’s wizardry, extolling his precision: (he) “must surely be the world’s most proficient craftsman in egg tempera painting.” 5

Vickrey earned much critical

recognition for his iconic scenes of wandering adolescents, immaculately gowned nuns, or gnarly-faced circus clowns, all methodically depicted with an Eyckian, hyper-realist accuracy. Although his sojourn at the League was but one crucial year, he remained eternally grateful to Marsh and Miller for their challenging pedagogical inspiration.

PHILIP I. ELIASOPH

1. The basis of the biographical information here represents an uninterrupted span of time in conversations, formal interviews, and general correspondence between the author and artist between 1980 and 2011. Reliable access to Vickrey’s outlook, thematic interests, and public exhibition record was shaped from gallery visits, exhibition curation, and archival research on his life and exhibition career.

2. Direct quotes herein are found in: Philip I. Eliasoph, Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2009), in conjunction with the 2008 exhibition presented at the Fairfield University Art Museum, Connecticut.

3. A widely adapted practical approach guidebook reveals his mastery: New Techniques in Egg Tempera, ed. Diane Cochrane and Robert Vickrey (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1973).

4. An award-winning documentary film, presented nationwide on PBS , is available through the artist’s estate at robertvickrey.com. In its exploration of the artist’s methods, is a finely executed demonstration of Vickrey’s mastery of the Renaissanceinspired egg yolk tempera technique.

5. John Canaday, “Art: An Enlarged Detail as a Picture,” exhibition review, The New York Times, December 9, 1972.

Woodstock School

“This was, I thought, an artist’s wonderland. Indeed, I came to Woodstock for the summer and am still here, almost sixty years later.”

—Paula Nelson

THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK’S WOODSTOCK SUMMER SCHOOL, 1947–79

I put little stock in such things, but was taken aback when I saw the date 6-6-66 on the registration card for my first enrollment in Woodstock. I had already been a student at the League in New York for almost two years but wasn’t prepared for what lay ahead.

Several weeks before summer classes began, my roommate and I took the twohour bus trip north to Woodstock in search of an apartment. Almost immediately we found one on Tinker Street with two bedrooms for $70 per month. Perfect—$35 a month each, plus about $6 a month for gas and electricity. And I could walk to class, a little over a mile away.

T here were five instructors teaching that summer, and because I was fortunate to have a Ford Foundation scholarship, I had my choice and saved the $52 per month tuition.

Robert Angeloch and Arnold Blanch were the only instructors teaching in June. Angeloch offered a landscape class, while Blanch taught a studio class. In July and August, classes taught by Walter “Bud” Plate, Fletcher Martin, and Bruce Dorfman were added. Angeloch was the only landscape instructor, so it made sense to paint outdoors with him, here in the countryside.

W hen I entered the office at the far end of the gallery, I met the registrar, Jean Wrolsen, standing behind a wooden slab counter which spanned the sunlit room. The far end of the counter was designated as the art supply store, where pads and paper were neatly laid out with other artists’ paraphernalia. The cavernous room boasted soaring ceilings supported by rough-hewn beams, painted white.

I was puzzled to see Robert Angeloch behind the counter. Later, I learned he was not only an instructor but also in charge of maintenance, mowing lawns, overseeing the office and gallery, and performing winter duty as the security guy who picked up mail. I was surprised again to learn the school rented bikes to students for a modest monthly fee. They had a motley fleet of some thirty sturdy single-speed blue Schwinns.

With class admission slip in hand, I followed the path past pine trees and a long, rough, wood building that housed

Studios One and Two; I entered a sturdy stone building boasting a huge Palladian window. This was Studio Three—Angeloch’s studio. Inside, students jostled easels around a model stand. Heavy floorto-ceiling doors swung open in the rear, framing a fresh woodland scene, while more students prepared to leave campus to paint en plein air.

T his was, I thought, an artist’s wonderland. Indeed, I came to Woodstock for the summer and am still here, almost sixty years later. By 1968 I was working part-time, assisting the registrar in the office while I continued taking classes with Angeloch. I lived in a tiny cabin a few feet from the office and slept there in a loft built by Angeloch, accessible by a ladder. I used a borrowed ice box and washed up at the sink and showers in Studio One. It was during this time I learned the history of some of the school’s registrars.

In addition to being Rosina Florio’s secretary at the New York League from 1941 to 1989, Emily Vaupel Smith, whom I had known in New York, was also registrar at the Woodstock League from about 1948 to 1950, living in another little cabin hidden in the woods on the League

grounds. She regarded her time there so dearly that she directed her ashes to be scattered on the site of her cabin. I have been told that Emily trained Barbara Fite as the next ASL registrar. Barbara, in turn, trained her neighbor, Jean Wrolsen, who subsequently trained me.

Here’s some of the history I learned along the way. An important factor in the League’s return to Woodstock in 1947 was the existence of a group of nearly new, vacant buildings in a wooded area near town. The buildings, dating from 1939, had been built by the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program for vocational training in the crafts of working in wood, wool, stone, and iron. World War II brought the program to an end and the buildings faced possible demolition. The buildings and thirty-eight

OPPOSITE: WOODSTOCK ART CONFERENCE AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE’S WOODSTOCK SUMMER SCHOOL, SUMMER 1947. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: EDWARD MILLMAN (INSTRUCTOR), SIDNEY LAUFMAN (INSTRUCTOR), FRANCES HENRY TAYLOR (DIRECTOR OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM), HUDSON WALKER (ART CRITIC AND DEALER), AND YASUO KUNIYOSHI (INSTRUCTOR). PHOTO: ADRIAN SIEGEL, ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK ABOVE: INSTRUCTORS AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE SUMMER SCHOOL GALLERY IN WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK, 1969. THIS HISTORIC GALLERY BUILDING IS NOW PART OF THE WOODSTOCK SCHOOL OF ART. ON THE LEFT IS BRUCE DORFMAN—WHO STILL TEACHES AT THE ASL IN NEW YORK CITY—TALKING TO HIS FRIEND ROBERT ANGELOCH, FOUNDER OF THE WSA. NEXT TO THEM ARE LEAGUE INSTRUCTORS RICHARD MAYHEW, WALTER “BUD” PLATE, AND WILLIAM PACHNER. OPEN FROM JUNE THROUGH AUGUST, THE WOODSTOCK SUMMER SCHOOL ATTRACTED STUDENTS FROM ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, CROWDING THE STUDIOS WITH AS MANY AS FIFTY STUDENTS IN A CLASS. AFTER THE LEAGUE LEFT TOWN IN 1979, THE WSA PROVIDED A PLACE FOR SERIOUS STUDY YEARROUND IN WOODSTOCK WITH DEDICATED ARTISTS LIKE THESE. COLLECTION OF THE AUTHOR

acres of land were owned by the City of Kingston Water Department. The League was able to purchase the buildings but leased the land. Kingston promised to sell them the land within a year; a promise with unforeseen consequences.

T he conversion of the buildings from a site for vocational training to studios for art instruction was relatively clear-cut, as was the construction of large northfacing skylights in the painting studios. An existing nineteenth-century barn was converted to a residence where Stewart Klonis and his family stayed on weekends, during which time Stewart practiced his flair for planting flower and vegetable gardens on the campus.

T he return of the League’s Summer School to Woodstock successfully attracted a significant number of students, many on the GI Bill. The season offered classes mornings and afternoons five days per week, usually from June through August, taught by both local artists like Arnold Blanch, Paul Fiene, and Fletcher Martin, and city artists Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Paul Burlin. As years went by, other notables

such as Philip Guston, Nathaniel Kaz, and Karl Fortess were added to a fluid and changing roster.

Robert Angeloch’s career paralleled the League’s return to Woodstock. In 1947 he became a League student on the GI Bill in the city, and came to Woodstock the following year as Kuniyoshi’s monitor. Angeloch played the protagonist in a US Government promotional film encouraging GIs to study at the ASL . It is noteworthy that his career at the League coincides with the League’s thirty-twoyear presence in Woodstock. Angeloch progressed from student to office manager, and finally, instructor. His singular dedication to the League in Woodstock spurred him to create an off-season alternative school for League students to receive art instruction during the months when the Summer School was closed.

Remarkably, Angeloch forged the way for the Woodstock School of Art to provide an educational experience based on the values of the Art Students League. I was fortunate to work with him and other dedicated supporters in this endeavor, which began in 1968 and flourishes today.

T hroughout these years, new generations of artists became part of the fabric of the town. The artists’ presence overlapped with the League and the Woodstock Artists Association, giving rise to animated parties and events shared by all. There was the annual Costume Ball held in the League’s grand studios. Gallery exhibition receptions celebrating

Woodstock artists associated with the League featured punch bowls filled with martinis and Manhattans accompanied by smaller bowls of Ritz crackers. At the end of each season, Klonis hosted a cocktail party at the barn for instructors, models, staff, and friends. Woodstock artists both worked and played hard. Housing for students was relatively simple because Woodstock residents were accustomed to earning additional income by renting outbuildings and extra rooms. There had always been tourists visiting the Catskills, and before motels, this was a usual practice. The League office provided a list of inexpensive housing for students, but as time went by, registrations fell off at the League. Class offerings dropped in number and length, until by 1979, classes were held only in the mornings in July and August, taught by Franklin Alexander, Robert Angeloch, and Bernard Steffen.

At the end of August that year, Stewart Klonis took Bob and me to lunch, where he announced the League was closing its doors in Woodstock. He cited the reason was the lack of student housing coupled with the League’s inability to purchase land from Kingston. It was crucial, he said, to own the land in order to

build student dormitories. And Kingston would not budge.

A ngeloch gathered a group of local artists and businessmen to convince the League to remain in Woodstock, but despite all efforts, the League packed up everything, including its light bulbs, and abandoned the buildings. Angeloch was determined to save the buildings, and with the support of his ad hoc committee, had the Woodstock School of Art designated a not-for-profit organization, secured a lease from Kingston, and raised money to begin classes in the old League buildings. The Woodstock community rallied, and with time and hard work, a school based on the League’s principles of independence and individuality emerged and remains in the buildings today.

Jean Wrolsen, a painter, poet, and writer in her own right, along with my instructor, Robert Angeloch, became lifelong friends and companions. Jean trained me in all things regarding the League office, and Bob taught me painting and printmaking and how to be an artist. They both taught me about dedication and how to live wisely and well.

PAULA NELSON

Harold Cousins

Cousins did not spend long at the League, but his story suggests how it served as a transformative social space in the late 1940s.

Harold Cousins (1916–1992) lived the first thirty years of his life in a segregated African American neighborhood in Washington, DC 1 During World War II

Cousins enlisted in the Coast Guard, military service that dramatically opened his access to education. The GI Bill, or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, funded a range of benefits, including schooling, for veterans to ease their return to civilian life. Cousins attended the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts and the King-Smith School of Creative Arts, both small schools newly organized with GI Bill funding in the hopes of dispelling Washington’s reputation as an artistic backwater.

In 1948, Cousins moved to New York, enrolling in the Art Students League from September to May 1949. That year the school boasted “a near-capacity number of 2,479 students” from across the United States and thirteen foreign countries.2 Nearly half these students were GIs, part of a cooperation with the Veterans Administration (VA) launched in 1945 that enabled art instruction to fit uneasily into bureaucratic structures.3 No one kept demographic records of these students, but, as curator Jillian Russo notes, “it was predominantly white male artists who were able to launch renowned careers.”4 Cousins gave his first address as 394 Putnam Avenue, Brooklyn, locating himself in Bedford–Stuyvesant, a hub for African Americans moving from overcrowded Harlem. He changed his

address twice more during his time at the League, eventually moving to a space he shared with other artists in Lower Manhattan. These relocations suggest Cousins’s growing network among his mostly white classmates, while also hinting at his daily experience of segregation still legally sanctioned in the 1940s.

Cousins left for Paris in October 1949 with Peggy Thomas, who would soon become his wife. The two likely met attending William Zorach’s sculpture class. Thomas, born to a White American mother and a Czech father in Prague, fled to New York after the Nazi occupation in 1938. The couple’s move abroad certainly related to the fact that marriage between Whites and Blacks was not uniformly legal across the United States until 1967. In Paris, Cousins continued his studies, enrolling with other former ASL students under Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine, whose atelier-style instruction was approved by the VA , possibly through connections he made as a refugee in New York and ASL instructor during the war. Cousins did not write about his time in New York and never returned to live in the US, but his archive includes sketches from his life drawing class with Reginald Marsh in 1948. One depicts a female model, whose facial features, hair, and heavily shaded skin suggest she may be African American. Posing with one hand on hip, she stares into the distance. Another notes a time limit above quick sketches of a woman in various poses,

short heavy graphite lines tracing the bodies’ edges with lighter lines at knee or across the torso for alignment. The highly abstract, metal Plaiton sculptures Cousins began in the late 1950s little resemble these sketches, but the faceting and breaking down of anatomical forms suggests a foundational way of seeing geometrically.

Cousins did not spend long at the League, but his story suggests how it served as a transformative social space in the late 1940s. Existing within a segregated America before the Civil Rights era, its open enrollment policies and international reputation allowed artists to share space, opening possible life-changing networks alongside bureaucratic and racist ones.

LAUREN KROIZ

1. For Harold Cousins’s biography and archives see: Lauren Kroiz, “Harold Cousins’s Plaiton Sculpture,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art no. 51 (November 2022): 6–20.

2. “Registration World Wide as Winter Term Opens September 15,” Art Students League News 1, no. 5 (September 15, 1948).

3. “GI Art Student,” Art Students League News 2, no. 3 (February 1, 1949). For more on the impact of the GI Bill on the ASL see Stephanie Cassidy, “Staying Power,” LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of NY, July 9, 2015, asllinea.org/staying-powerart-students-league/.

4. Jillian Russo, On the Front Lines: Military Veterans at The Art Students League of New York (New York: The Art Students League of New York, June 19–July 29, 2015). Because the ASL did not collect student demographic information, it remains unclear how many artists of color enrolled. Charles Alston became the first Black instructor when he joined the faculty in 1950.

Donald Judd

In September 1952, Donald Judd (1928–1994) took home the top prize at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit for a lithograph called The League Stairwell . 1 Almost certainly created at the League, the print depicts the school’s physical space. The League Stairwell is one of a handful of drawings and prints Judd made of League interiors that focus on zones of transition, such as partially opened doors and windows. 2 Later, the building itself would undergo a transition: Judd’s print documents an original 1892 staircase in the American Fine Arts Society building that was demolished and replaced with a bank of elevators in 1958. 3

D uring his military service in Korea from 1946 to 1947, Judd’s assignment to himself had been “to decide between being an architect or an artist.”4 By 1948, when he first enrolled in life drawing and painting classes at the League

on the GI Bill, he had chosen art over architecture, though his proclivity for the latter would endure.5 But in The League Stairwell he splits the difference, bisecting the composition almost exactly where the feet of the figure stand on the darkened landing, rendered as a stacked, receding trapezoid.

J udd’s paintings and drawings

DONALD JUDD, UNTITLED, 1951–52. LITHOGRAPH ON BASINGWERK PARCHMENT, 19 3/4 × 12 3/4 IN. DONALD JUDD ART © 2025 JUDD FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

An artist stands poised at the nexus of art and architecture, flatness and three dimensions, embarking on a careerlong investigation of the nature of space.

from this period include haunting figure studies, strange rooms, and unremarkable landscapes. 6 Inspired in part by League alumni Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Judd soon moved toward abstraction and eventually away from painting altogether, writing in 1964, “The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall.” 7 Despite his dissatisfaction with two-dimensionality, however, Judd continued to make prints for the rest of his career, acknowledging that “it is a little contradictory for me to do prints, but I like doing them.” 8 In retrospect, Judd’s attention to the steps in The League Stairwell seems to presage later works, from a series of woodblock prints featuring variations on an internally subdivided parallelogram (1961–63), to early sculpture such as the “bleachers” piece (1963) and wellknown ten-unit wall pieces nicknamed “stacks” (1968–1990s), to his stair-filled design for an administrative building at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which remained unexecuted at the time of his death in 1994. 9

Ma riette Josephus Jitta has suggested that Judd’s parallelogram prints express his interest in “form without…illusion…it is a shape that we know from drawings in perspective,”

but, when presented as pure form, refuse that association. 10 The titular trapezoidal form in The League Stairwell finds Judd not quite ready to abandon perspective and illusionism but concerned nevertheless with structure, seriality, and the specificity of site. An artist stands poised at the nexus of art and architecture, flatness and three dimensions, embarking on a careerlong investigation of the nature of space.

JANA LA BRASCA

1. Jeffrey Kopie, “Chronology,” in Nicholas Serota, ed. Donald Judd , exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 247.

2. Jörg Schellmann and Mariette Josephus Jitta, Donald Judd: Prints and Works in Editions (Munich and New York: Editions Schellmann, 1996), 49–50. Thanks to Andrea Walsh and Ellie Meyer for their research assistance on Judd’s other work of this period.

3. Stephanie Cassidy, e-mail to the author, January 31, 2024.

4. Judd Foundation, “Donald Judd Chronology,” Last modified November 2022.  juddfoundation.org/chronology.

5. See Donald Judd: Architektur (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1989).

6. Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd: Early Work (New York: DAP, 2002).

7. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook  8 (1965): 74–7.

8. Quoted in Jitta, “On Series,” in Donald Judd: Prints and Works in Editions , 26.

9. Julian Rose, “There is No Neutral Space: The Architecture of Donald Judd, Part 2,” Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2022. gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/08/15/essaythere-is-no-neutral-space-the-architecture-of-donald-judd-part-2/. I thank Tim Johnson for this reference. For examples of some of the works described, see Judd Foundation, “Art,” juddfoundation.org/artist/art/.

10. Jitta, “On Series,” 27.

Olga Albizu

Olga Albizu (1924–2005) left Puerto Rico in 1948, at the age of twenty-four, to pursue her vocation as an artist in New York. Against the will of her family but with support from an early teacher, the Spanishborn abstractionist Esteban Vicente, and a four-year, postgraduate fellowship for study abroad from the University of Puerto

Rico, she determinedly “flew the coop forever.”1 Taking a room at International House on Riverside Drive, she initially studied at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts downtown, coming into the orbit of the emergent New York School and the artists most closely associated with Abstract Expressionism. Albizu

OLGA ALBIZU, RADIANTE , 1967. OIL ON CANVAS,

...Albizu continued to develop an exuberant, painterly practice of abstraction through the 1970s, her work—characteristically lyrical and incandescent, as in the superb Radiante (1967)—constituting an authentic contribution to American and Puerto Rican art history.

matriculated at the Art Students League in June 1949 and over the next two years enrolled in Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition classes with Will Barnet, Cameron Booth, Morris Kantor, and Carl Holty; she also studied Commercial Art, Illustration, and Cartooning with Louis Priscilla. Although ASL records do not indicate classes with Vaclav Vytlacil, Albizu regularly cited him as a signal influence. In Vytlacil, a committed modernist and early disciple of Hofmann, she would have found a model for how to combine compressed, post-Cubist space with expressionistic color, working betwixt and between abstraction and representation. Albizu spent the final year of her fellowship abroad, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. She returned to New York in 1952, her formal education complete, and steadily made her way as an artist while supporting herself with odd jobs; she held her first solo exhibition at Panoras Gallery in midtown Manhattan in December 1956.

“I began painting apples and bottles, just like everyone else,” Albizu reminisced, and her classic midcentury education— from Puerto Rico to New York to Europe— provided the foundation for her shift from still lifes and landscapes toward non-objective, gestural abstraction in the early 1950s.2 Few drawings and paintings survive from her student years, but early

watercolors show a proclivity toward the graphic blocking and flattening of color, probing the push-pull dictum of the Hofmann School through the creation and contraction of space. Albizu remains perhaps best-known for the numerous Verve and RCA album covers of the late 1950s and early 1960s that feature her paintings—not least the acclaimed bossa nova record Getz/Gilberto (1964), whose front cover reproduces her canvas Alla Africa, a syncopation of dense, pulsating color. By all accounts she revered her teachers, and their legacy, from Kantor’s syncretic geometries to Holty’s interest in Gestalt theory, endured in her painting and in her abiding belief in “art for art’s sake…in eternal art and eternal values.” 3

Although long occluded from period accounts of Abstract Expressionism, Albizu continued to develop an exuberant, painterly practice of abstraction through the 1970s, her work—characteristically lyrical and incandescent, as in the superb Radiante (1967)—constituting an authentic contribution to American and Puerto Rican art history.

ABIGAIL MCEWEN

1.

2.

3.

Olga Albizu to Carmen Vivas Pietri, June 1997, Olga Albizu Archives.

“Olga Albizu,” Qué Pasa! (January–February 1999): 64.

Albizu, quoted in Robert Friedman, “City Side,” San Juan Star (November 25, 1969).

Bruce Dorfman

THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, PLACE OF CHOICES

What you are about to read is replete with bias, passion, devotion, and love. It is the ongoing result of more than a romance or a decades-long affair. It is the bonding of dream to reality. It is about choices and a place.

T he place is the League. The Art Students League of New York has always been, as a school of art, the place of choice. And choice, central to the core of creativity and a life in art, has always permeated every aspect of the League, the place, and all those who are there and have been there.

A rguably, it is from within the clear expression of distinctive choices that the personality of art emerges. If so, then a context or environment imbued with the emotion of choice, and the need for making choices in order to learn and create would have to exist. The League, more completely than any other school of art on this Earth, has provided such a context and has done so openly. It will forever continue to do so. There should be no looking backward with nostalgia.

O n one’s own, the student chooses the League; one does not apply to be chosen. The instructor, the direction of one’s effort, the time frames, attendance—are all open to choice. The artist/instructor approaches students and the studio in whatever ways he or she may grow from responsible choices. The League family of

students, instructors, members, and administration is self-governing through choice. As for the artists/instructors, there was no application to teach.

Teaching at the League has always been by invitation.

T he mixing of a color, use of canvas or plexiglass, making a line, mark, or brushstroke, using a palette of glass, wood, or none at all, however driven by intuitive and informed feeling, requires the willingness to risk choices. No creative choices are without risks, risks of every kind. Whatever else, art is not possible without the risks of choice. At the League, choices are created, embraced, and acted on...even the time chosen to depart the place.

T he storied history of the League is widely known, with its 150 years of democratic contribution to the best of the world’s art, through its remarkable international alumni of superb artists who have been at the League as students or instructors, and sometimes both. The place is, with all of its forgivable and changeable faults, the envy of the world. Even its naysayers cannot help loving it. A fellow artist, and colleague recently confided to me about when he was asked to teach at the League. Agreeing immediately, he took his class over on the following day. After class, the thendirector mentioned the matter of my colleague’s monthly paycheck, which led

Along with existing traditions and approaches, the Art Students League must, and will, continue to provide the place for new generations of young artists with new ideas about art and fresh, inventive ways for getting it created. It is and will always be—simply—the place of choices.

to this response: “You mean I get paid to be here?” The League had made a choice. The choice was reciprocal.

T he location of the place, the League, is an architecturally stunning landmark building on West 57th street. Through excruciatingly careful and sensitive choices, it continues to undergo some tender revisions; this, to better accommodate itself to its students’ creative requirements. But the League also knows that the greatness and the appeal of the place does not finally depend on the facility itself. It is a matter of what is transpiring within the place and what students are gaining from it.

In a world that lays siege to art and artists through the institutionalized pressures of commercialism, conformity, correctness, and non-judgmental value, the League successfully maintains and enhances the possibilities of the individual expression of choice. As the League continues on, its importance, meaning, and contribution to art and the study of art everywhere is, and will be, profound. Its student body is truly global

and—as always—contains and foments genius within itself. Along with existing traditions and approaches, the Art Students League must, and will, continue to provide the place for new generations of young artists with new ideas about art and fresh, inventive ways for getting it created. It is and will always be— simply—the place of choices.

—BRUCE DORFMAN

BRUCE DORFMAN AT HIS MANHATTAN STUDIO, NOVEMBER 19, 2023. PHOTO: STEPHANIE CASSIDY

Held

AlDuring his two years of study at the Art Students League from 1949 to 1951, Al Held (1928–2005) joined a community of peers that would sustain him for decades. League students of Held’s generation including Rocco Armento, Seymour Boardman, Ed Clark, Louis Finkelstein, Julius Hatofsky, Donald Judd, Alfred Leslie, Knox Martin, and Sal Romano—all born in the 1920s— became friends, studio mates, co-op gallery members, critics, and in the case of Sylvia Stone, a partner of twentyfive years. The long days and nights at the League ushered Held into the inner sanctum of ongoing debates about art and society. “My introduction to art history was in the cafeteria just sitting around listening or participating in conversations about this painting or that painting or this man or that man. That’s how it all began—how I got started. I think it’s a very good way to get into painting,” he recalled of this formative period before he pioneered spatial abstraction and became an influential teacher himself, at the Yale School of Art. 1

B orn in Brooklyn to immigrant working-class parents, Held took a roundabout route to art. A chance encounter with Bronx neighbor Nicholas Krushenick introduced him to the leftwing youth culture group Folksay in Greenwich Village. Intoxicated by Krushenick’s faith in the power of social realist painting to transform public consciousness, Held abandoned

plans to become a social worker and followed him to the League, enrolling in a life drawing class with Robert Ward Johnson. The vibe must have been to his liking, and next semester Held invoked his precious GI Bill benefits, earned from a previous two-year stint in the Navy, to cover tuition. He enrolled in Robert Beverly Hale’s morning course in anatomy and Harry Sternberg’s evening course in composition and began taking himself seriously as a diligent yet naive artist. Initially an aspiring social realist, Held took three courses overall with Sternberg in painting and lithography. His early experiments at the League in social content and massive scale were inspired by the imagery of Sternberg and Sternberg’s friends Charles White and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

R egrettably, Held destroyed all his paintings and retained very few drawings from these early days. He moved to Paris in 1951 and within a year rejected figurative art and social realist aesthetics, embracing the painterly verve of Abstract Expressionism and the philosophy of existentialism in the attempt to balance the subjectivity of Pollock and the objectivity of Mondrian. After participating in the moveable feast from the League to Paris to Tenth Street co-ops, Held devoted the remainder of his career to his uniquely dimensional approach to abstract painting. Increasingly complex, by the 1990s his geometrical abstractions plumbed string theory and Renaissance space.

“My introduction to art history was in the cafeteria just sitting around listening or participating in conversations about this painting or that painting or this man or that man. That’s how it all began—how I got started. I think it’s a very good way to get into painting.” —Al Held

The journey to epic-scaled paintings of deep social concern, such as the 15 × 20 foot Genesis II (2001–03), began at the League.

DANIEL BELASCO

1. Paul Cummings, “Oral History Interview with Al Held,” 1975–76, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/oral-history-interview-al-held-12773.

Knox Martin

Attending meetings of the Club, the Abstract Expressionist discussion group that gathered weekly in a loft on 8th Street, [Knox Martin] met de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock. In 1954, Kline nominated Martin for inclusion in Stable Gallery’s prestigious annual exhibition.

A celebrated New York School painter, Knox Martin (1923–2022) had a career that defies categorization within postwar artistic movements. In 1965, art historian Irving Sandler used the term Concrete Expressionism to describe Martin’s work, which combines brightly colored, hard-edged geometric forms, a reverence for Old Master painting, and energetic Abstract Expressionist brushwork. 1 Martin’s career-long involvement with the Art Students League, both as a student and as an instructor, shaped his development as an artist and influenced generations of abstract painters.

M artin was born in Barranquilla, Columbia, in 1923. After serving in World War II, he studied at the League on the GI Bill from 1945 to 1950. It was a time of expansive cross-pollination at the League, as the student body and faculty grew to accommodate an influx of students utilizing the GI Bill, and the Abstract Expressionist movement began to coalesce. Martin studied with Will Barnet, Morris Kantor, Harry Sternberg, and Vaclav Vytlacil. His classmates included Al Held,

Paul Jenkins, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly.

I n 1948, Martin attended Willem de Kooning’s first solo exhibition at Egan Gallery, which introduced his black-andwhite series, including Painting (1948, now in M o MA’s collection). Inspired by de Kooning’s monochrome palette and Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica , Martin created his own black-and-white series. Attending meetings of the Club, the Abstract Expressionist discussion group that gathered weekly in a loft on 8th Street, he met de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock. In 1954, Kline nominated Martin for inclusion in Stable Gallery’s prestigious annual exhibition. That same year Martin was featured in a solo exhibition at Egan Gallery. The show received a

positive review in the New York Times, which praised Martin’s “rhythmically leaping shapes in violently contrasting black and whites.” 2

T hroughout the 1960s, Martin engaged with the major trends in postwar art, including aspects of hardedge, color-field painting, and Pop Art. In the 1970s, he explored the ancient subject of the female nude as a symbol of the creative process, whimsically breaking apart and rearranging forms to create primary-colored, collage-like abstractions. These series were presented at Rose Fried Gallery in 1962, Fischbach Gallery from 1963–65, and Bonino Gallery in 1972. The women paintings lead to the creation of the public murals

Woman with Bicycle (1979) at West Houston and MacDougal Street, and Venus (1970), at 19th Street and the West Side Highway, which is still partially visible today.

M artin taught at the League for forty-five years, developing a popular master class that was instrumental in introducing the principles of abstraction to aspiring painters. Describing his teaching philosophy, and the fluidity in his studio, Martin remarked, “I wanted

to be free…. When I felt the call, I would give a talk.” 3 Among his students were conceptual artist Ai Weiwei and painter Ezra Cohen.

JILLIAN RUSSO

1. Ruth Gurin and Irving Sandler, Concrete Expressionism, exh. cat. (New York: New York University, 1965) and Jillian Russo, Knox Martin: Radical Structures, exh. cat. (New York: Hollis Taggart Gallery, 2019).

2. Stuart Preston, “Knox Martin Impresses in First One-Man Show,” New York Times, September 16, 1954.

3. Oral history interview with Knox Martin by James McElhinney, May 14–July 23, 2014. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-knox-martin-16190.

OPPOSITE: KNOX MARTIN SHAKING HANDS WITH STEWART KLONIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, AT THE OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE OPERATION REHAB EXHIBITION, AUGUST 1949. THE EXHIBITION FEATURED WORK BY 200 OF THE 1,000 MEN AND WOMEN VETERANS STUDYING AT THE LEAGUE UNDER THE GI BILL. PHOTO: SEYMOUR FOX, ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK ABOVE: KNOX MARTIN, UNDATED. PHOTO: N.J. STANIECKI, ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

Karl Parboosingh

The Jamaican artist Karl Parboosingh (né Karl Coy, 1923–1975) is best understood as a product of the global cultural moment in which he lived, with all its contradictions and tensions. It was a time of armed conflicts and revolutions, decolonization and social change movements, mass migration, and increased global mobility. Artistically, it was the heyday of abstraction and the New York School, but also of an unprecedented politicization of art, especially in the Global South, where the arts were mobilized as a tool for social transformation.

Parboosingh was born in rural Jamaica and followed his mother, a dress designer, to New York City when he was nineteen years old. He was drafted into the US Army and served in Panama from 1944 to 1948. He first registered at the Art Students League in 1949 and took several painting and drawing courses with George Grosz and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, among others, under the provisions of the GI Bill of Rights. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he took classes at the Centre d’Art Sacré and studied with George Rouault and Fernand Léger. He also studied mural painting at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City, where he moved in late 1951. He briefly returned to the Art Students League in late 1952, taking a course with William Charles McNulty.

Instead of committing to a structured program, Parboosingh approached his artistic formation on his own terms, picking and choosing from what was available in those global art centers that were of interest to him. He gleaned as much from dwelling in the bohemian cultural milieus of the West Village, Montmartre, and Mexico City as he did from the formal tuition he received. A 1951 self-portrait, painted in Paris, depicts him standing in front of a canvas, with a cigarette casually in hand. It is a picture of youthful self-assuredness, of one who was perfectly at home in the cosmopolitan art worlds he inhabited and conversant with the visual vocabularies of modernism. Parboosingh returned permanently to Jamaica in 1956 and became one of the most influential figures of the emerging Jamaican art world. He cited Grosz and Kuniyoshi as artists he had studied with, but the influence of Rouault and the Mexican muralists is arguably more obvious in his work. He however credited his New York experiences for his belief that the progress of Jamaican (and Caribbean) art depended on fostering a community of artists and modeled the Coyaba artists’ colony he tried to establish near Kingston after what he had experienced in the West Village. Parboosingh was subsequently one of the founders of the Contemporary Jamaican Artist Association (CJAA , 1964–74), along

The Rastafarian movement, which asserted African rather than Jamaican identities, was still very controversial in Jamaica at that time, and Parboosingh was one of the first mainstream artists to celebrate its subversive decolonial potential.

with two other exponents of the Independence generation in Jamaica, Barrington Watson and Eugene Hyde. The CJAA was instrumental in broadening the conversation about art in Jamaica, and its members insisted that they were artists first and Jamaican artists second, and should be allowed to make their artistic choices independently rather than conforming to prescribed models such as those of the nationalist school. The CJAA offered the sort of creative community Parboosingh wanted to see in Jamaica, with frequent well-attended exhibitions, informal salon gatherings, and organized discussions.

W hile he also produced abstract paintings, Parboosingh’s subject matter was often iconically Jamaican and almost always focused on the human figure. Such works were not substantially different in tone from those of the previous generation of nationalist artists in Jamaica but reinterpreted the oftennostalgic national themes using the more experimental formal language of mid-century modernism. His most compelling works were, however, those where he challenged social and cultural norms, including his provocative, powerfully expressionist series portraying Rastafarians in the early ’70s. The

Rastafarian movement, which asserted African rather than Jamaican identities, was still very controversial in Jamaica at that time, and Parboosingh was one of the first mainstream artists to celebrate its subversive decolonial potential. It is in those works that Parboosingh’s local and cosmopolitan sensibilities, and the socially transformative moment of which he was a part, found their most potent and original resolution.

VEERLE POUPEYE

“The Fine Arts, Discussed by: Edna Manley, Karl Parboosingh, and Robert Verity,” Caribbean Quarterly 14, nos. 1&2 (1968): 63–76. Claudia Hucke, Picturing the Postcolonial Nation: (Inter)Nationalism in the Art of Jamaica, 1962–1975 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2013).

----. “‘Forget Paris?’—Transnationalism in the Spiritual Works of Karl Parboosingh,” in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, ed. Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 144–66.

----. “A Jamaican Artist in Paris—Karl Parboosingh’s Explorations of the Avantgarde and a New Caribbean Modernism,” in Passages à Paris: Artistes étrangers à Paris, de la fin du XIX e siècle à nos jours, ed. Alain Bonet and Fanny Drugeon (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2024), 117–27.

Robert Rauschenberg

With lessons from the Académie Julian, Paris (summer 1948) and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (fall 1948–spring 1949) under his belt, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) enrolled in the Art Students League of New York on September 16, 1949. On the GI Bill, he took morning and afternoon sessions of Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition led by painters Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor. The League furnished the aspiring artist with a catbird seat in the city’s artscape. Fall 1949

offered an especially propitious burst of exhibitions. In October, all within a four-block radius, one could see textiles at the Museum of Modern Art by Anni Albers (whose course on the medium Rauschenberg took at Black Mountain College), a Piet Mondrian retrospective at Sidney Janis, collages by Robert Motherwell at Samuel M. Kootz, new paintings by Jack Tworkov at Charles Egan, and a group exhibition of abstract art at Betty Parsons. The latter featured works by Barnett Newman, Mark

“What Rauschenberg had as curiosity was fascinating, e.g., he’d put a large piece of butcher paper just in front of the door by which students came and went, and would leave it there for a day or so, and then examine it intently, to see the nature of pattern and imprint that occurred.” —Robert Creeley

Rothko, Sonia Sekula, Hedda Sterne, and Clyfford Still, as well as Ad Reinhardt and Jackson Pollock, who would headline the next two presentations at Parsons, respectively. In late spring 1951, Betty Parsons Gallery would host Rauschenberg’s New York solo debut. Ever restless, probing and seeking beyond standard curricula, Rauschenberg valued above formal instruction the milieu of students and artists as well as the materials and space to make work. Susan Weil, a native New Yorker, whom he had met in Paris and followed to Black Mountain College, helped Rauschenberg move to the city and shared the same League schedule: in class from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with a half hour break, Monday through Friday. They befriended Knox Martin, lauded as a standout student, whose work would be reproduced in the 1950–51 League catalogue. Martin’s studio would become the site where Rauschenberg photographed Ceiling + Light Bulb (c. 1951).

T he League provided an environment where Rauschenberg could experiment and where he encountered alternate doses of resistance and encouragement, the proverbial push-pull that molded his artistic sensibility. Disapproval and

approbation affording different kinds of nourishment. He persevered as the wayward student: “I tried to do the work that was prescribed in class. Sometimes I just forgot about it and didn’t look at the fat models with those dirty, dusty purple grapes behind them and the wax fruit in front of them. I just stood in the back of the room and did my own things. Often I upset the rest of the class by doing this. I really didn’t have the ego to support it, to go against something. I didn’t have the intellect even to decide what form my nonconformity would take.” 1 R auschenberg’s painting 22 The Lily White (c. 1950), made in Kantor’s class, stoked ire among his cohort: a predominantly white canvas with quasi-geometric scaffolding inscribed in graphite, peppered with seemingly nonsensical scrawled numbers.

While Kantor did not especially like Rauschenberg’s work and thought that Weil had better technique, he defended his student’s right to make it. Rauschenberg remembered, “It wasn’t his sort of thing, but his attitude was, ‘Well, why not?’ I was tremendously encouraged by that. In those days I was touched by the slightest evidence of toleration.” 2 22 The Lily White would be

included in Rauschenberg’s 1951 Parsons Gallery exhibition.

A nother work Rauschenberg made at the League has passed into the present solely through hearsay, preserved as anecdote for over two decades before spilling from poet Robert Creeley’s pen: “what Rauschenberg had as curiosity was fascinating, e.g., he’d put a large piece of butcher paper just in front of the door by which students came and went, and would leave it there for a day or so, and then examine it intently, to see the nature of pattern and imprint that occurred.” 3 This exploration provides an evocative hinge between his prior blueprint collaborations with Weil, begun in the summer of 1949, and his future involvement in performance. 4

Following a ten-month break from the League during which he and Weil married, Rauschenberg resumed attendance on February 1, 1951. He met Cy Twombly in Kantor’s afternoon class, forging one of the most important relationships of his personal and artistic life.5 Shortly thereafter, Rauschenberg and Weil, then pregnant, carried some half dozen of his paintings from the League two blocks east on Fifty-Seventh Street to elicit feedback from Betty Parsons. He characterized his motivation: “All I wanted was a confrontation. I wanted reassurance.” 6

To Rauschenberg’s amazement, Parsons offered him a slot in the smaller of her two gallery spaces from May 14 through June 2, 1951. After visiting the exhibition, Tworkov and art dealer Leo Castelli invited

Rauschenberg to participate in the now legendary Ninth Street Show (May 24–June 10, 1951). He pulled 22 The Lily White early from Parsons Gallery to hang in the downtown presentation. Rauschenberg demonstrated how at the League location and chutzpah meant everything.

HELEN HSU

1. Quoted in Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 41.

2. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), 47.

3. Robert Creeley, “On the Road: Notes on Artists and Poets 1950–1965,” in Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950–1965 , exh. cat. (Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1974), 63. In addition, fellow student John Hultberg remembered in 1968 Rauschenberg’s exceptional innovativeness in the context of the League, which he otherwise characterized as “retrograde.” He recalled that Rauschenberg “was using flour sacks,” without further detail regarding how or in what way; they may have been used as grounds for paintings. Quoted in Paul Cummings, “The Art Students League: Part II,” Archives of American Art Journal 13, no. 2 (1973), 16. Hultberg overlapped with Rauschenberg and Twombly in Kantor’s afternoon class in 1951.

4. In summer 1952 Rauschenberg participated in John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College, going on to design costumes, sets, and later lighting for Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor from 1954 forward. In fall 1960 he joined a group that became known as the Judson Dance Theater in 1963, the year he choreographed his first performance, Pelican

5. Over the next year Rauschenberg welcomed the birth of his son Christopher, his marriage ended in divorce, and his relationship with Twombly intensified.

6. Quoted in Rose, 44.

OPPOSITE: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, 22 THE LILY WHITE , C. 1950. OIL AND GRAPHITE ON CANVAS, 39 1/2 × 23 3/4 IN. COLLECTION OF NANCY GANZ WRIGHT ABOVE: CY TWOMBLY WITH AN UNIDENTIFIED PAINTING OUTSIDE OF ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG AND SUSAN WEIL’S WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET APARTMENT, NEW YORK, 1951. PHOTO BY ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG. COURTESY ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION, BOTH IMAGES © 2025 ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION / LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

Harold Stevenson

“My darling, you must understand. I absolutely had to win that scholarship. It was my only way out of Oklahoma. I had to get to New York City.” 1 The eighty-three-year-old Harold Stevenson (1929–2018) leaned forward and grasped my hand. He was enthusiastically regaling his first days at Art Students League of New York. In his mind, he was still the nineteen-year-old kid on a train bound for his mecca, the art capitol of the world. It was September 1949. One of his cohorts was Robert Rauschenberg.

T he scholarship covered Stevenson’s instruction costs with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Bernard Klonis. Stevenson would later take private instruction with Kuniyoshi, and they were included in group exhibitions together. Food and housing were not covered. He found work designing CBS television stage sets, window dressings for the fashionable New York shops, creating illustrations for Charm magazine, and helping David Mann at the Bodley Book Shop. The Bodley was located above the Hugo Gallery. It was here

“My darling, you must understand. I absolutely had to win that scholarship. It was my only way out of Oklahoma. I had to get to New York City.” —Harold Stevenson

that Stevenson befriended the Greek art dealer Alexander Iolas, who would become his agent for decades.

Back in Oklahoma, Stevenson had been horrified by the newsreels of World War II. As a teenager he painted atomic bombs. The political upheaval after the war heavily influenced the global art scene. New York became the center of art just as Stevenson was arriving to participate in those changes. Iolas introduced Stevenson to the European artists emigrating to New York. “Many didn’t know what happened to their family. They abandoned their art, their paints, everything.” 2 Stevenson spent the rest of his career painting the stories of the oppressed, the poor, and the other in society.

I n 1959, he moved to Paris, where he was represented by Iris Clert in the 1962 and 1964 Venice Biennale peripheral exhibitions. Stevenson’s most daring portrait was the gigantic odalisque nude tribute to his devotee, Lord Timothy Willoughby de Eresby. American actor Sal Mineo modeled for the painting while he was living with Stevenson in his Paris apartment most of that summer. Commissioned for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Six Painters and the Object exhibition, The New Adam was called a “magnificent” painting by curator Laurence Alloway. Yet Alloway banned Stevenson from the exhibition, claiming all the world’s attention would be on Stevenson, and that was not the direction he intended for the group show. Fifty years later, Guggenheim director Lisa Dennison accepted The New Adam to

be included in the institution’s permanent collection. It has since been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. The ethereal front panel graces the cover of Jonathan Weinberg’s book Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art. S cholarships matter. Stevenson enjoyed a seventy-year art career and his works are held in private collections throughout the world. The opportunity to attend the Art Students League was a pivotal, albeit short, period in Stevenson’s career.

DIAN JORDAN

1. Harold Stevenson, conversation with the author, January 24, 2012.

2. Harold Stevenson, conversation with the author, January 24, 2012.

3. Jonathan Weinberg, Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).

C. Wang

C....Wang pushed the limits of his tradition through persistent experimentation with materials, chance, and abstraction, all while maintaining a steady practice of emulating old-master brushwork and teaching the foundations of traditional brushwork to students.

Born to a family of literati (Chinese scholar-officials) at the end of the Qing dynasty, C. C. Wang (Wang Chi-ch’ien 王己千, 1907–2003) mastered traditional ink and brush techniques in Republican Shanghai before immigrating to New York City in 1949. There, Wang’s worldclass collection of classical Chinese paintings and keen connoisseurial eye gained renown among scholars and collectors. 1 Yet his own inventive artistic practice, which continued well into his nineties, has only begun to receive due attention. 2 A particularly underarticulated aspect of Wang’s pursuit as a diasporic painter is his twenty-five years of study at the Art Students League of New York. Situating his time at the ASL within a career that spanned seven decades, this essay considers Wang’s engagement with Western academic art as formative to his pursuit of the literati ideal, rather than a diversion from it.

Wang arrived in New York in his early forties as an already distinguished artist.3 Like literati painters before him, Wang adhered to the practice of copying and emulation as a necessary foundation for developing one’s own “singing voice”— his favorite analogy to the literati notion of expressive brushwork (as opposed to likeness and representation)—and as a means of dialogue with a lineage of past

painters. 4 Works like Landscape after Wang Meng exemplifies Wang’s virtuosity. He drew from the upper and lower sections of two original paintings by the fourteenth-century landscape painter Wang Meng 王蒙 (c. 1308–1385)—works that only the most privileged individuals at the time had access to before the advent of public museums in China—in a self-conscious play with recombining and recomposing the images. But the New York art scene in 1950s was unequipped with a framework to understand this deeply referential work in the revered genre of Chinese landscape painting, nor could it appreciate Wang’s mastery of Wang Meng’s tense and agitated brushwork.5 Consequently, during the first decade of his arrival in New York, Wang resorted to painting flowers and bamboo on oriental lamp shades and wallpaper for interior design companies—a sphere of the decorative that was the only market for Chinese immigrant artists at the time.6 I mmediately upon his arrival in New York, Wang also enrolled at the ASL , and continued taking classes until 1974.7 Wang’s registration records of forty courses at the ASL reveal a steady focus on life drawing and anatomy—a pictorial mode that couldn’t seem more antithetical to his formation as a landscape painter and the literati aesthetics of expressive

OPPOSITE: C. C. WANG, LANDSCAPE AFTER WANG MENG , UNDATED (C. 1940S). HANGING SCROLL, INK AND COLOR ON PAPER. IMAGE: 42 × 19 5/8 IN. COLLECTION OF MR. & MRS. ARNOLD CHANG

brushwork, not to mention the radically different materials to that of Chinese ink monochrome. 8 Yet a fascinating synthesis of these disparate modes is visible in a recently surfaced painting from the 1950s in oil on canvas, Wang’s only known work in the medium. In this still life, vessels seem to morph into hills, and geometric forms and shapes evoke distant views of mountains. The vase with roses closer to the foreground and the teapot in the center all contain thin washes of color made with visible traces of the brush, suggesting explorative crossovers of his practice in traditional Chinese brushwork.

Wang’s only other known work in the Western academic tradition, Still

Life from 1956, is in casein on canvas, the primary medium for his classes at the ASL . 9 In both still lifes, the loose brushwork, unlined forms, and layered painting application reveal Wang’s long-held admiration for Cézanne, Matisse, Braque, and other forebears of Western modernist painting. Wang did not pursue the genre of still life or the media of oil or casein on canvas beyond his study, but he drew from his studies of Western art with a similar spirit of emulation as he approached Chinese artists of each period and specialty to identify their distinct achievements. They reflect a pursuit of the “fundamentals” of the Western tradition from a mindset that was not so different

C.C. WANG, STILL LIFE , C. 1950S. OIL ON CANVAS, 24 × 36 IN. COURTESY PRIVATE COLLECTION, OAKLAND, CA

from his pedagogical insistence that Chinese painting must be taught and studied through copying old masters. Wang credited his study at the ASL with teaching him about elements of design and composition that were absent in his classical training. 10

From the 1970s until his death in 2003, Wang pushed the limits of his tradition through persistent experimentation with materials, chance, and abstraction, 11 all while maintaining a steady practice of emulating oldmaster brushwork and teaching the foundations of traditional brushwork to students. 12 His early engagement with figure drawing and anatomy seems to come full circle in the last two year of his life, when Wang became more confined to his home. At the age of ninety-five, Wang turned for inspiration to his collection of scholar’s rocks—natural formations that have been prized in Chinese cultures as accoutrements of the scholar’s study or garden. 13 Just as human bodies are used as models in Western painting traditions, Wang noted, Chinese landscape painters prefer rocks as models to understand “the bones and frame” of nature. For rocks, he continued, “like paintings, are not restricted by years or given cultures, nor are they confined to the West or the East. They can serve as a bridge that transcends time, space, and culture.” 14 No figure drawings by the Chinese literati landscape painter survive,

but they are clearly parts of a whole, informing his synthesis and integration of traditions to arrive at something new.

WEN-SHING CHOU

1. On Wang’s impact in the field of Chinese art, See Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, “C. C. Wang and Chinese Painting Studies in the West,” in Wen-shing Chou and Daniel M. Greenberg, eds., C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction (München, New York: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 117–128; for major publications on Wang’s collecting and connoisseurship that includes Wang’s journals and interviews, see Kathleen Yang, ed., Through a Chinese Connoisseur’s Eye: Private Notes of C. C. Wang (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010); Joan Stanley-Baker [Xu Xiaohu 徐小虎], Hua yu lu: Wang Jiqian jiao ni kan dong Zhongguo shuhua 畫語錄 : 王季遷教你看懂中國書畫 (C. C. Wang reflects on painting) (Taipei: Diancang yishu jiating gufen youxian gongsi, 2013); Wang Jiqian, Wang Jiqian shu hua guo yan lu 王季迁书画过眼录 (Works of painting and calligraphy seen by C. C. Wang) (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2021); Tian Hong 田洪 ed., Wang Jiqian cang hua ji 王季遷藏畫集 (Tianjin Shi : Tianjin ren min mei shu chu ban she, 2018).

2. C. C. Wang’s own artistic experimentations is most recently the subject of an exhibition at Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery and publication, C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), co-curated and co-authored by Wen-shing Chou and Daniel M. Greenberg. For other major publications on C. C. Wang’s own art, see Jerome Silbergeld, Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery and University of Washington, 1987); Meredith Weatherby, ed., Mountains of the Mind: The Landscape Painting of Wang Chi-ch’ien (New York: Weatherhill, 1970); James Cahill, C. C. Wang: Landscape Paintings (Seattle: Xi An Tang, 1986); Arnold Chang, “C. C. Wang at Ninety: A Kaikodo Celebration,” Kaikodo Journal 3 (Spring 1997): 10–17; and Ming Hua, “Bridging the Tradition to the Modern, the East to the West: C. C. Wang and His Life in Art” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2014).

3. See Wen-shing Chou, “C. C. Wang’s Art of Kinesthetic Knowing,” in Chou and Greenberg, C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction, 8–32. Wang said, “Brushwork is like a voice. The painting is like the story which provides the narrative, the message. Those who don’t understand go to the opera in order to ‘watch’ the battles and the love scenes. But those who know, the aficionados, go with their eyes closed, to hear the singer and follow the voice. We go to ‘listen’ to Mei Lanfang, not to ‘watch’ acrobatics.” Quoted in Joan Stanley-Baker, “Calligraphy in China,” in The Living Brush: Four Masters of Contemporary Chinese Calligraphy; C. C. Wang, Wang Fangyu, Tseng Yuho, Grace Tong, exh. cat., Pacific Heritage Museum (San Francisco: American Asian Cultural Exchange Pacific, 1997), 19.

4. Both paintings by Wang Meng had been owned by C. C. Wang’s friend Zhang Congyu 張蔥玉. After acquiring at least one of them, Wang successfully sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. See the object description on the website of the Art Institute of Chicago, artic.edu/artworks/61483/quiet-life-in-a-woodedglen. Wang sold the work for $12,000. His address on the invoice is cited as the Hotel Salisbury, 123 W. 57th Street, New York. This transaction must have been carried out while he was on his visit abroad to Japan and then to the United States in 1947.

5. See Margaret Liu Clinton, “Transforming Tradition: C. C. Wang’s First Two Decades in the United States”, in Chou and Greenberg, C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction, 99–108.

6. Silbergeld, Mind Landscapes, 23.

7. One of the main reasons behind Wang’s decision to move to the US was to broaden his artistic training. ASL’s flexible schedule, availability of studio spaces, and young artists and students, proved ideal for Wang as he juggled the various demands of his new life. See Silbergeld, Mind Landscapes, 26.

8. Other courses on “commercial illustration,” “painting composition” and “fashion illustration” display Wang’s wide-ranging exploration.

9. See Chou and Greenberg, Lines of Abstraction, 17–18, 42–43, pl. 3.

10. Silbergeld, Mind Landscapes, 29.

11. For the various experimentations, see Chou, “C. C. Wang’s Art of Kinesthetic Knowing.”

12. For a recollection of Wang’s teaching and mentorship, see Arnold Chang, “Remembering the Master,” in Chou and Greenberg, C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction, 129–136.

13. John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China House Gallery, 1985).

14. C. C. Wang, “Rare Rocks Are God’s Creations,” in The Spirit of Gongshi: Chinese Scholar’s Rocks, ed. Keming Hu (Newton, MA : L. H., 1999), 16.

Charles Alston

Charles Alston (1907–1977), a painter, muralist, and sculptor known for using a variety of styles, taught at the Art Students League between 1950 and 1971.

Alston’s career as an artist and teacher began in Harlem years before his arrival at the League. After earning a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1929, he cofounded the Harlem Artists Guild and the Work Progress Administration-era Harlem Arts Workshop, both important artistic

and intellectual hubs. He also taught in community art centers, where his students included Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, who went on to teach and study at the League, respectively.

Alston’s reputation grew in 1934 when he became the first Black supervisor on the Federal Art Project, an appointment which allowed him to create two murals at Harlem Hospital. During these early years, Alston maintained a successful commercial art career as well, and by the

CHARLES ALSTON CLASS, 1959. PHOTO: LAWRENCE CAMPBELL, ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

late 1940s, his illustrations had appeared in publications such as Fortune, New Yorker, and Collier’s.

A s the League’s first Black instructor, Alston’s appointment represented an evolution in institutional culture resulting from a successful instance of student activism. In early January 1950, an interracial group of students met with Stewart Klonis, the League’s Executive Director, and with the Board of Control to petition for the immediate hiring of a Black teacher. In a letter sent to administrative leaders, student organizers argued that they felt the “democratic traditions of the Art Students League are not being carried out to the fullest possible extent by the absence of a Negroe [sic] from the staff of instructors.” Officials responded by issuing a statement in the March 1950 student newspaper explaining “the League has never consciously discriminated against anyone” and that officials “agreed to make sincere efforts to add a qualified Negro instructor to its staff….” 1 Alston was hired soon after and offered his first course, Life Painting and Composition, in the fall of 1950.

A lston’s appointment at the League aligned with important developments in his career. Around 1950, he abandoned commercial art to prioritize his career as a fine artist and teacher. His work also demonstrated a greater interest in stylistic experimentation. Though

his postwar work was often abstract, Alston continued to produce murals, sculptures, and smaller works on canvas that demonstrated his continued interest in both naturalism and expressionism. Alston’s experimental practice proved difficult for critics to categorize but was one that contributed to a productive classroom experience. Students at the League noted that “the first thing one notices in the Alston class is that everybody is working in an individual way—some abstractly, others realistically.” Students remembered Alston as a “thoroughly informal person” who “likes to sit and chat with the students about life in general and art in particular.” 2 Not surprisingly, his students at the League, including a young Robert Rauschenberg, used a variety of styles that mirrored Alston’s eclectic aesthetic interests. Nevertheless, Alston remained focused on his own artmaking, recounting, “I’d like to maintain the feeling that I’m a painter who incidentally teaches rather than a teacher who incidentally paints.” 3

AUSTIN PORTER

1. Black students were not allowed entry into all classes at the League until 1929, when the instructor Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951) facilitated a change to this policy. For more on associated student activists, see Werner and Yetta Groshans papers, 1928–97. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, aaa.si.edu/collections/ werner-and-yetta-groshans-papers-10971.

2. Art Student League News 7, no. 3 (March 1954), 3.

3. Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, October 19, 1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-charles-henry-alston-11460.

“I’d

like to maintain the feeling that I’m a painter who incidentally teaches rather than a teacher who incidentally paints.” —Charles Alston

CyIn his final report letter dated April 30, 1951, Cy Twombly (1928–2011) thanked the Fellowship Committee of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts ( VMFA) in Richmond, whose out-of-state grant had made possible “one of the most exciting and constructive periods in my life.” 1 The VMFA funding had allowed Twombly “to take full advantage of this scholarship” 2 at the Art Students League that began on September 18, 1950, for “the full 1950–51 term of eight and one-half months.” 3

A lthough Twombly’s application and other documents, including details of the artworks he submitted for an exhibition at the ASL , have been lost, 4 his letters to the VMFA and previously unpublished documents concerning his application to Black Mountain College (BMC) offer details of his time at the ASL . One previously unknown letter from the ASL to BMC dated May 18, 1951, notes that Twombly is attending courses given by Will Barnet and Morris Kantor, explicitly stating that: “Mr. Twombly is a recipient of our out-of-town scholarship and was selected as one of ten of among 200 contestants.”

Twombly himself wrote about the ASL: “Barnet and Kantor are both sensitive and sound teachers—and I feel [that] they were a good choice. I draw from the model for an hour each morning—then paint the rest of the period and afternoon. At nite I usually work on small abstract tempera compositions.” 5 And: “The League is full of diverse talent—and I learn as much from watching the students work as I do from the instruction.” 6

D uring the second semester at the ASL , Twombly met Robert Rauschenberg, who became a lifelong friend. At Rauschenberg’s suggestion, Twombly applied to BMC . In his letter of recommendation, Rauschenberg wrote: “Si [sic] Twombly as a friend has always been sensitive, thoughtful, reliable and considerate. As a painter he is stimulating, active and sincere.” 7

H is second recommendation for BMC , which Twombly attended together with Rauschenberg in 1951–52, came from Einstein student and Princeton graduate Peter Putnam, later an important patron of the arts. His description of Twombly’s art and personality during his time at the ASL is similarly touching, with the notion of “rebel energy” remaining apposite far beyond this period:8

“I have known Mr. Twombly as a friend and room-mate for the last year while pursuing graduate studies. […]

I n character he is remarkably even tempered and friendly, possessing a naive energy and candor which is rare nowadays when most persons are lost in words. He makes friends easily for his rebel energy is most attractive.

It is impossible to have a set maturity and promise at the same time. But if he lacks a cold business-like calculation and can be so easily imposed on through his affections (as in money and time) he has the promise and sincerity of artistic genius—whose honesty of feeling and self-conscious involvement delay their reaching set patterns of

“The League is full of diverse talent—and I learn as much from watching the students work as I do from the instruction.” —Cy Twombly

emotional maturity. He is wonderfully constant in friendship and steady in his own artistic purpose—working long hours each day on his painting, poems and journals.” 9

THIERRY GREUB

Many thanks to Nicholas Grindell for assistance with German to English translation.

1. VMFA , Virginia Museum Fellowship: Twombly, Edwin Parker, Jr., 1950–51, Director’s Correspondence, VMFA–33863, Box: 68, Folder: 43, Item: RG 01.01.1.3212.021 (p. 2). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Archives, Richmond, Virginia, final report letter, April 30, 1951.

2. Ibid., Item: RG 01.01.1.3212.001001 (p. 2) application for Virginia Museum Fellowship, May 12, 1950.

3. “$4,000 in Out-of-Town Scholarships Awarded,” Art Students League News, vol. 3, no. 9, May 1, 1950, unpaginated (p. 2).

4. See Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 55, footnote 25, letter to Leslie Cheek, Jr., Director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, March 27, 1951; the exhibition included two pictures by Cy Twombly in the weekly Student Concours from April 2–7, the group show was organized by students of Morris Kantor, Byron Browne, and Nathaniel Dirk and held at the ASL’s League Gallery (cf. Art Students League News, vol. 4, no. 4, April 1951, p. 4); on the state of research, see Varnedoe, p. 12–13.

5. Ibid., p. 54, footnote 21, letter to Leslie Cheek, Jr., September 27, 1950, additions by the author based on original MS (letter to Leslie Cheek, Jr., Director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Item: RG 01.01.1.3212.012, [p. 1–2].

6. Ibid. (p. 1).

7. Western Regional Archives, Asheville (NC), Folder “Twombly, Edwin P., Jr.,” letter of recommendation from Robert Rauschenberg, May 7, 1951.

8. On Twombly’s art as a transfer of energy, see Greub 2022, vol. I, p. 199–245.

9. Western Regional Archives, Asheville (NC), Folder “Twombly, Edwin P., Jr.,” letter of recommendation from Peter Putnam, May 8, 1951.

Marisol

“Marisol requires no introduction. She is the queen of the art world and is represented by the lordly Janis Gallery. She made her fame with successive shows at the Castelli and the Stable Gallery. At the League she studied with Kuniyoshi.” —ASL News

In the December/January 1964–65 Art Students League ( ASL) newsletter, a note reads “Marisol requires no introduction. She is the queen of the art world and is represented by the lordly Janis Gallery. She made her fame with successive shows at the Castelli and the Stable Gallery. At the League she studied with Kuniyoshi.” Marisol Escobar (1930–2016) is listed twice in this newsletter: one for her inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s then annual exhibition and the Pittsburgh (now Carnegie) International. ASL would continue to track Marisol’s activities through the ’60s and ’70s, well after she left the League. They record her inclusion in a range of critical shows at renowned institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, 1 exhibitions with celebrated artists like Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and David Smith, 2 as well as acquisitions of her work by museums such as the Whitney Museum.3 These archival newsletters trace her heyday and document the sensation that was Marisol, presaging the renewed critical attention and reexamination she will receive decades later.

W hile still living in Los Angeles, Marisol explained “somebody told me that I ought to come to New York and study with that Japanese teacher, Kuniyoshi, who was teaching at the Art Students League.”4 Like many

artists before her willing to explore the unknown filled with uncertain potential, she moved to New York in 1950 and enrolled at the ASL in February 1951, taking Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition.5 She would also attend summer classes at ASL’s Woodstock campus and sporadically take classes at the ASL until 1963. 6 As a young artist, still finding her way, she may have felt the need to directly adopt her instructor’s artistic language, Marisol recalled initially adopting Kuniyoshi’s style.7 Dore Ashton speculates that he “taught her the value of the sinuous and carefully modulated line. I can see his precision in Marisol’s drawings in which the final outline is carefully flanged and sometimes feathered ever so slightly.” 8 However, whether consciously or not, she instinctually knew she needed to move in a different direction, which would lead to her reign as “the queen of the art world.”

R eflecting on her time at the ASL , Marisol expressed that “Kuniyoshi was never very interested in me or in what I was doing. I didn’t make any friends and, after a while, I decided to leave.” 9 Before leaving, she had a critical encounter with Howard Kanovitz at the ASL’s Woodstock campus, who suggested she study with Hans Hofmann. 10 Upon enrolling at Hofmann’s school,

it opened something in her; “I just felt everything.” 11 Formative experiences can include encountering people who compel and inspire you; it can also include engaging with people you disagree and are at odds with in order to find your own voice, perspective, and framework. While Marisol may not have had the most welcoming experience at the ASL , it provided a space for her to investigate aesthetic, material, and intellectual possibilities to forge her own artistic path.

JESSICA S. HONG

1. MoMA’s annual exhibition of paintings and sculptures listed in Art Students League News 16, no. 2 (February 1963); MoMA’s exhibition Americans 1963 listed in Art Students League News 16, no. 6 (June 1963).

2. Art Students League News 20, no. 7 (October 1967).

3. Art Students League News 18, no. 4 (May 1965).

4. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now: Reminiscences of the Fifties—New York’s Artists, Writers, Musicians, and their Friends (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 201.

5. Marisol’s Art Students League course listing from ASL’s archive; 1950–51 ASL course catalogue.

6. Marina Pacini, “A Biographical Sketch,” in Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper, exh.cat., ed. Marina Pacini (Memphis, TN: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 2014), 13.

7. Gruen, The Party’s Over Now, 201.

8. Dore Ashton, “Musings About Marisol,” in Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper, 162.

9. Gruen, The Party’s Over Now, 201.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

MARISOL, THE PARTY, 1965–66. ASSEMBLAGE OF 15 FREESTANDING, LIFE-SIZE FIGURES AND THREE WALL PANELS, WITH PAINTED WOOD AND CARVED WOOD, MIRRORS, PLASTIC, TELEVISION SET, CLOTHES, SHOES, GLASSES, AND OTHER ACCESSORIES. MUSEUM PURCHASE FUND, BY EXCHANGE, 2005.42A–P, TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART © 2025 ESTATE OF MARISOL / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Takako Saito

Takako Saito (b. 1929) moved from Tokyo to New York in 1963 to challenge herself. Though she was born to a major landlord in Fukui prefecture, she loved making things with her hands from early on and learned woodworking from a house carpenter. When she became a junior high school teacher, she took part in the Sōzō Biiku Undō (Creative Art Education Movement; abbreviated as Sōbi), which was comprised mainly of teachers. Another member, Ay-O, had moved to the United States in 1958 and sent reports on the New York art scene to Sōbi members; these reports inspired Saito to come to New York. 1 She was able to obtain a work visa through a textile company whose owner was a family friend and was on her way.

to a table saw, Saito started making her signature wooden cubes, which would lead to the various versions of the Flux Chess sets.

N ot long after coming to New York, Saito met George Maciunas and began participating in Fluxus, a performancebased art movement, which he had just inaugurated in Europe. By moving into a loft on Canal Street and gaining access

W hen her working visa expired in a year, she switched to a student visa by enrolling herself at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1964 to 1966. Since she often worked independently instead of being engaged in classes, she was told to leave the school. In 1966, she turned to

the Art Students League for visa support and kept her enrollment until 1968.

S aito took various artmaking courses during those years, including etching, and produced a series of prints. In one of these series, we find a crafted paper cube containing twenty-seven smaller cubes. Each box was made of a unique figurative image printed in

etching on paper. The images ranged from portrait and landscape, to small motifs such as a feather, a heart, and a leaf. Although Saito had learned etching at the Sōbi workshop in Japan, she honed her craft in New York, achieving delicate lines and shading. Saito taped different objects within the small boxes, which would produce various sounds when dropped. Like many other artworks Saito created in New York, this series was made as a small edition and given to her close friends. The one reproduced here was given to Mieko Shiomi before she returned to Japan. Another one dedicated to Shigeko Kubota is still in the collection of the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation.

T he Etching Boxes anticipated the cube-based works Saito would later develop after moving to Europe in 1968 and up through the present day. In the 1970s, she made countless paper cubes and performed with them while inviting audience members to interact.

Boxes were like game pieces and reflected Saito’s view of art as a medium to stimulate creativity and expand participants’ imaginations.

MIDORI YOSHIMOTO

Boxes were like game pieces and reflected Saito’s view of art as a medium to stimulate creativity and expand participants’ imaginations.

1. Takako Saito, telephone interview with the author, March 8, 2002. For more on Saito, see Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

Lee Bontecou

“My most persistently recurring thought is to work in a scope as far reaching as possible; to express a feeling of freedom in all its necessary ramifications—its awe, beauty, magnitude, horror and baseness.” —Lee Bontecou

Mollifying her parents’ minor misgivings about her choice to study art by promising, disingenuously, to pursue a commercial art career, Lee Bontecou (1931–2022) moved to New York City in 1952 to study at the Art Students League. Early courses utilized former Art Students League instructor Kimon Nicolaïdes’s drawing methodology, which emphasized “physical contact with all sorts of objects through the senses,” including touch and smell. Nicolaïdes’s signal instruction, “Look not at art history and art theory for inspiration but out into the world,” 1 was right up Bontecou’s alley: she spent the summers of her youth with her maternal grandmother on the island of Cape Forchu, Nova Scotia, and often identified this landscape where she swam, fished, and played—its mudflats and tide pools, its roaming chickens and cattle—as a formative influence.

A fter a year of drawing and painting courses, Bontecou tried her hand at sculpture and discovered her métier : “And then, one day, I said, ‘I’ll just take a look down in the sculpture department.’ And I went down. It was in the dungeon, we used to call it. And I just thought, ‘This is for me.’ …So the next month I changed, and went down, and then never came up again, you know?” 2 From January 1954 to

May 1956, she studied under William Zorach, the modernist figurative sculptor known for direct carving. Bontecou modeled freestanding animal sculptures in plaster, clay, and cement.3 No documentation of such student work survives, but this much we know: Bontecou would develop a practice by 1959 in which she scavenged for canvas, muslin, and burlap, then patched the found materials over a large welded metal framework; she used twists of rusty and copper wires to sew the pieces of fabric around sections of steel rod; a central, circular cavity, or sometimes multiple cavities, built up from the rectangular frame of the metal skeleton opened onto the blackness of a layer of velvet and offered an illusion of endless depth. Immediately garnering critical praise, institutional recognition, and commercial success, these abstract metal and fabric wall reliefs catapulted Bontecou to art world fame. She was widely recognized throughout the 1960s as one of the leading artists of her generation precisely because her work could be claimed by Assemblage, Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Surrealism, Minimalism, and Feminist art, yet defied all these categories. And in turn, Bontecou refused to position herself or her work’s meaning in relation to other artists or practices, demanding

“total freedom”: “My most persistently recurring thought is to work in a scope as far reaching as possible; to express a feeling of freedom in all its necessary ramifications—its awe, beauty, magnitude, horror and baseness.”4

I n a 2003 interview with Dore Ashton, Bontecou recalled of the Art Students League that you could pay “by the month. And you could change by the month…. And there were no grades.... No credit, and no one told you—.” She is cut off here. Ashton interjects, “That’s the way an art school should be,” and Bontecou agrees (it was “terrific”).5 No one told you what to do

ANNA KATZ

1. See Michelle White, “Lee Bontecou’s Drawn Worlds,” in Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press with Menil Collection, Houston, 2014), 10.

2. Bontecou, as quoted in oral history interview with Lee Bontecou, January 10, 2009. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

3. Elizabeth A. T. Smith, “All Freedom in Every Sense,” in Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective , exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, with Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2003), 171. These years also included a summer in 1954 at the Skowhegan School of Painting in Sculpture in Maine, where Bontecou learned to weld, and were followed by a Fulbright Scholarship spent in Rome, where she combined welding with lost wax casting, from 1956 to 1958.

4. Bontecou, as quoted in Elizabeth A. T. Smith, “Abstract Sinister,” Art in America 81, no. 9 (Sept. 1993): 87.

5. Oral history interview with Lee Bontecou.

FRED W. MCDARRAH, PORTRAIT OF LEE BONTECOU AS SHE POSES WITH ONE OF HER SCULPTURES AT THE LEO CASTELLI GALLERY, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 4, 1966. FRED W. MCDARRAH/ MUUS COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Robert Smithson

“In a very, very definite way I wanted nothing to do with high school.” At 34, the antipathy Robert Smithson (1938–1973) held for Clifton High School in Clifton, New Jersey, was still vehement. A woodcut made as a senior showing students near the podium of a male “speaker at high school assembly” (as he wrote on the sheet), a boy turned away lost in thought, makes clear his identification with disengagement. He continued, “Everything was kind of constricted and compartmentalized.”1 That could also describe family issues. His parents had conceived him almost exactly one year after the death of their first son when a preteen by then-untreatable leukemia, manifested as explosive hemorrhaging. Smithson became their second “only child.” Parents who suffer the loss of a child and conceive a successor, particularly after horrific deaths like this one, are often exceedingly risk averse. Smithson reacted by seeking adventure.

S o as a Clifton High junior in the fall of 1954, Smithson began chasing buses going into Manhattan. Countering his high school classes—“There was no comprehension of any kind, no creative attitude”—he was stimulated by

instruction at the Art Students League. On Friday nights in both semesters he took life drawing and cartooning from the prominent illustrator John Groth. Before coming to the League in 1942, Groth had been acclaimed for his dynamic illustrations of the battlefields of World War II. He also produced what Life magazine featured as “studio war art.” In its June 10, 1944 issue, Groth described his Barrage, produced retrospectively in Manhattan, as “a war dance by the Nazi devils.” Smithson himself imagined a war subject, undoubtedly driven by a newspaper photograph; his Medical Evacuation on Gurney was not a florid dance but a funereal dirge. Smithson’s classroom cartoons have not survived; his own fluidly imagined figures appear in his

drawings of the early 1960s.

T he next fall, his senior year, Smithson was awarded an Art Students League Elizabeth Carstairs Scholarship. Groth’s evaluation acclaimed Smithson as “one of three students of my ten years at the League whose work and talent give real promise of future success.” The jurors were League teachers Arnold Blanch, Thomas Fogarty, Jr., and Philip Guston. All had worked in the style of an expressive or expressionist realism, as did the novice they evaluated appreciatively. In that academic year he took evening classes Monday through Thursday in life drawing, then painting composition, with Richard Bové. A year earlier Bové had received his MFA degree from Pratt Institute, where he would be a longtime professor while also teaching at the League.

I n one of Smithson’s surviving untitled pastel street scenes from 1955, at dusk, a black-cloaked protagonist bent over his cart appears downtrodden, not of the same world as the passing lady in furred green and the glowing apartments above. Its angled architecture and morbid mood is something of an amalgam of George Grosz’s Berlin Metropolis (1916–17) and the Manhattan vitality of Grosz’s City Lights, made a decade after the League’s offer of a teaching position had prompted him to emigrate to New York in 1932.

C ountering Smithson’s alienation from high school, “The Art Students League,” he said, “gave me an

opportunity to meet younger people and others who were sort of sympathetic to my outlook.” He made friends with young League students attending New York’s High School of Music and Art such as Mimi Gross, Jonathan—later Eli—Levin, and Kathryn MacDonald. All continue to make art.

W ith his high school graduation, Smithson’s education, thus his need for a compensatory sanctuary at the Art Students League ceased. He found another way to resist familiar and familial confinement: one week after graduating, he left home to join the Army Reserves for six months of activeduty training. On his return at nineteen Smithson began life in Manhattan as an artist, within a decade on his way to becoming renowned as a sculptor, earthworker, and essayist.

SUZAAN BOETTGER

1. Smithson’s statements about his art education are from “Oral history interview with Robert Smithson, July 14–19, 1972,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interviewrobert-smithson-12013#transcript. An edited version is in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 270–296. In both of these, Smithson’s spoken “compartmentalized” is erroneously transcribed as “departmentalized.” Further analysis of the ramifications in Smithson’s art and life of having been conceived as a replacement child is in Suzaan Boettger, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

Francis Cunningham

[Cunningham’s] interest is in creating what he calls a “functioning” figure: one who could get up, change position, and move around the studio.

It was at the League in 1955 that Francis Cunningham (b. 1931) met the artist whose teachings hit him with the force of revelation—Edwin Dickinson. Dickinson introduced him to the tool that would consume Cunningham for the entirety of his career: the color-spot. A color-spot is a piece of color/value, carefully observed from the subject and put down directly on the white canvas. These “spots of color” make a network of notes out of which the painting is born and developed. The truth and specificity of these spots give them integrity as building blocks. Cunningham used color-spots in one form or another for the entirety of his career.

But as powerful a concept as the color-spot was, it turned out to be a necessary but insufficient tool to address Cunningham’s core concern— the painting of the life-size figure. The color-spot could not fully address the problem of the life-size human figure because painting the figure requires vital conceptual information, like perspective, anatomy, and form concepts. Because Dickinson considered himself a “general painter“—rather than a specialist in figure, landscape, or still-life painting— he eschewed the teaching of just such conceptual information, even believing it to be an obstacle to learning to see directly. And while Cunningham paints landscapes and still life and interiors, he considers himself first and foremost a figure painter. His interest is in creating what he calls a “functioning” figure: one who could get up, change position, and

move around the studio. Cunningham said he found no way to get from Dickinson’s color-spot to the functioning figure, until he encountered another great League Instructor, Robert Beverly Hale. It was Hale’s authoritative lecturing on artistic anatomy, along with his compendium of form concepts, that gave Cunningham the missing piece of his training. Dickinson’s color-spots, Hale’s form concepts, and Berenson’s “tactile values” constituted everything he needed to pursue the life-size figure over the course of almost seven decades of painting. It is only at a school like the League—a school based on the atelier system, in which each faculty member is sovereign in his or her own studio—that a young student could encounter such opposing views about painting and meld them in his own mind, according to his or her own needs.

Francis Cunningham took these tools and taught us, his students, how to use them. Most importantly, he taught us how to see. His tools were ancient and venerable: the plumb line, the viewfinder, and the sighting stick. You had to have these three items every time you came to class. The plumb line—a nail and a piece of red thread. So simple to make, yet so profound in its implications for seeing. If you could see true vertical, you could measure any deviation to the right or left. “The Egyptians had the plumb line,” he would say, hoping that its pedigree would register with us. “Matisse said it took him three years of practice to build

the plumb line into his eye. And that was Matisse,” he would reckon—“‘God help the rest of us.”

EPHRAIM RUBENSTEIN

FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM, MIMI SCHERB , 1970–71. OIL ON CANVAS, 50 × 32 IN. PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, 102211, PHOTO: ED WATKINS, COURTESY OF FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM

David A. Leffel

The skill of chiaroscuro painting is not easily taught and not easily learned. A feel for such a vivid approach needs to be sensitively passed on from teacher to student in a form of hands-on instruction that stretches all the way back to Titian.

T he Art Students League has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in keeping that chain unbroken. Preserving and maintaining it was not easy. All over the country and all over the world, art schools have been forsaking realism and veering off into a sensibility where chiaroscuro was not only untaught but disdained. The Art Students League of New York unapologetically carried the torch for this crucial discipline. From the League’s inspiring early years with teachers like William Merritt Chase, George B. Bridgman, and Robert Henri through Frank Vincent DuMond, Robert Brackman, and Robert Philipp, the school created an atmosphere where the great heritage of beautiful realistic painting was both communicated and celebrated.

recalling that momentous occasion in Studio 7 when he looked at a still-life setup and had this profound revelation. The atmosphere that Frank Mason encouraged in the dimly lit, north-light space was the perfect hothouse for such a breakthrough.

D avid A. Leffel (b. 1931) came to the League in 1960 to try to hone his already considerable skills. He enrolled in Frank Mason’s class, and it was there that David had his breakthrough. “I suddenly saw light, light flowing like water over surfaces!” he says now,

A fter that insight David moved on, developing his own distinctive style. The League, ever sensitive to who could strengthen their mission, asked David if he’d like to become a teacher there. He accepted with alacrity.

I w as fortunate to arrive on the scene when David was just starting to teach and I benefitted from David’s fresh enthusiasm. I, too, had also studied with

Frank Mason, and I, too, had benefited from Frank’s feel for making paint accurate and dynamic. But the gods were good to me when they nudged me into David’s classroom. Here was a new teacher who communicated directly with

insight and clarity.

On my first day in the class David, rather unobtrusively, strolled up to my painting, studied it, looked at the model, and then tried to convey why my painting wasn’t more effectively coming together. His approach was logical—not formulaic, not rigid— just a clear-headed decoding of the issues.

I was instantly hooked and pleased that I’d enrolled. But what truly stirred my blood and made me realize what a brilliant choice I’d made was when I saw David’s paintings.

Wow! That was the kill shot. Hearing good ideas is one thing, but seeing where those good ideas can lead— that is a whole other ball game.

I n my humble opinion, David’s paintings are among the greatest of our era, and I feel deeply blessed that whatever or whoever is in charge of my life sent me, way back when, into the classroom of David A. Leffel.

GREGG KREUTZ

“…when I saw David’s paintings! Wow! That was the kill shot. Hearing good ideas is one thing, but seeing where those good ideas can lead— that is a whole other ball game.” —Gregg Kreutz

James Rosenquist

In 1954, James Rosenquist (1933–2017) graduated from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis with an associate degree in art. The following year he moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League. The Art Students League was the beacon that pulled Rosenquist east from his deep midwestern roots. This was no small decision for “Jim” (as his friends and colleagues called him). In 1955, he was debating the lure of a sunny life in California, or to commit to the lifestyle and continuing education of an artist in New York City.

Rosenquist’s mentor and painting professor in Minneapolis, Cameron Booth, had previously taught at the Art Students League. With Booth’s encouragement, Jim applied for and was awarded one of the eight out-of-town scholarships the League offered in 1955, which included tuition for one year but nothing for room and board.1 Rosenquist arrived in the city with a few hundred dollars and Booth’s letter of introduction. He quickly made friends and was deeply impressed by the professional artists who taught him at the League, including Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson, Sidney E. Dickinson, George Grosz, Robert Beverly Hale, Morris Kantor, and Vaclav Vytlacil. Rosenquist felt bittersweet that his studies could not continue beyond the first year due to financial strain and a serious illness. Living in cold water flats with limited resources had taken its toll; he had fallen seriously ill with pneumonia and spent a couple of weeks in the welfare ward

of a local hospital during the academic year. Nonetheless, Rosenquist’s enrollment began a sea change in his life and career. In the heady community of upcoming young artists and older established artists in New York, he found a vibrant primordial soup for his artistic soul. The Art Students League set him on his path and placed him in the scene in which he would develop his singular vision as a foundational American Pop artist.

Jim spoke fondly of his time at the League and recollected that he frequently “had to choose between food and art supplies” during his earliest moments in the city.2 His personal circumstances propelled him toward a day job and ultimately a commercial painting job to make ends meet. Jim’s facility with commercial art allowed him to pay the bills and continue life in the city— eventually painting billboards across the five boroughs and theater marquees in Times Square. This job left little time for his personal artwork outside of evening hours. In 1960, however, after leaving “the boards,” he finally committed himself to a studio on Coenties Slip and a fulltime fine-art career.

A rriving at the Art Students League in New York City was an integral step in the making of this major American artist. Then, the necessity of leaving the League and working a day job to make ends meet in New York ultimately led Rosenquist to develop his particular brand of Pop Art. It was his time painting “on the boards” that inspired him to incorporate found images

It was his time painting “on the boards” that inspired him to incorporate found images from advertisements and photographs into novel juxtapositions (the same type of material he had painted at large scale on billboards, he now recombined in novel and mysterious compositions in his studio).

from advertisements and photographs into novel juxtapositions (the same type of material he had painted at large scale on billboards, he now recombined in novel and mysterious compositions in his studio). Within five years of leaving the League, Rosenquist had established with his contemporaries Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and others one of the most profoundly shocking and significant movements of the twentieth century. The environment and location of the League set him on the path to his

singular vision as an American painter and quintessential Pop artist.

A rriving for his first day at the Art Students League, Rosenquist jumped onto a desk and hollered, “Hi! I’m here now. I made it! I finally made it!” 3 Indeed, he had.

SARAH C. BANCROFT

1.

2.

3.

Board of Control minutes, April 27, 1955. Archives of the Art Students League of New York.

The artist James Rosenquist in conversation with the author on multiple occasions, 2000–17.

James Rosenquist in his memoir with David Dalton, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art (New York: Knopf, 2009), 33.

ROSENQUIST, PRESIDENT

Helen Levitt

By the time Helen Levitt (1913–2009) enrolled at the Art Students League in 1956 she was already a respected street photographer of working-class neighborhoods. Her pictures of children and their enigmatic chalk drawings had received a solo exhibition and a fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s. Levitt next explored motion pictures as a cinematographer, camerawoman, editor, and director.1 This professional success masked a secret: a high school dropout, Levitt had never attended art school nor any other institution of higher learning. Indeed, she said she became a photographer because she couldn’t draw; she learned photography on the job. “When you wanted to know something, you went to the store and you asked the man at the store how to do it.” 2

W hat more did she have to learn by signing up in her forties for a year of classes at the Art Students League, supplemented by a summer session at Hans Hofmann’s school of art? Neither program offered instruction in photography. Instead, these studies allowed her to investigate additional media while developing new skills, or finally learning “how to draw.”

Perhaps Levitt enrolled to prepare for what came next, as she subsequently applied successfully for a Guggenheim fellowship to explore the medium of color photography.3

W hat might she have learned in art school that was borne out in her first color photographs?

L evitt did not study painting, composition, or color at the Art Students League. Instead, her records document course after course in life drawing and anatomy. League catalogues describe these drawing studios as imparting a back-to-basics foundation. 4 A woman of few words, Levitt rarely commented on her experience at the League other than to remark that George Grosz wasn’t much of a teacher.5 Yet she took several courses with him.

L evitt later explained that she turned to color photography because it was “more real” than black-and-white. 6 Her drawing instructors at the Art Students League maintained that “line does not exist in nature” and that life drawing requires more than observation: “The ‘masters’ differentiated between what they perceived and what they knew, selecting and emphasizing aspects of the human figure for the purposes of art.” 7 For someone who claimed that she didn’t know how to draw, Levitt, in fact, knew some things about drawing from her street photography. To work in blackand-white required composing pictures in monochrome that abstracted from the three-dimensional world. The drawings and glyphs Levitt photographed on streets and walls probed the boundaries between figuration and writing. In an early color photograph, bars of red and black heighten the scale of written words against a worn background: “ MAMÀ” emerges loud and large, “papà” recedes in smaller letters. Levitt’s framing of

Levitt learned from her classes at the League to experiment and reframe the streets that inspired her. With color film in her camera and deliberation, she saw them anew.

what was derisively considered “graffiti” becomes art.

From line, as per Robert Beverly Hale, one of Levitt’s instructors, the artist proceeds to arranging shapes in space, in ways that recall how a still photograph isolates and creates an image from the living flux around it. 8

L evitt’s black-and-white photographs that seemed to capture active children absorbed in play, differed from her first color photographs of

adults, paused or resting, holding a prop or leaning on a support—as models do in figure drawing classes. These subjects suited the slower speed of color film.9 Their stilled poses offered opportunities to relate people to objects around them through color and form.

A m an holding a tabloid leans against a car with fantastically swooping green fins accented by chrome and red taillights that are in dialogue with the colors of his shirt, its red triangular

insignia mirroring the taillight. In the background, men and women walk past stores selling watches, housewares, and children’s clothing, a commercial street, unlike Levitt’s usual haunts.

T he car amplifies the man’s persona and visually augments his body. Levitt’s teacher Will Barnet used a related strategy: he “had his own special way

of setting up a pose, putting the figure in a certain position and then extending it with color pieces, a tilted mirror, a chair, a stack of books, something, so that your eyes expanded away from the figure.” 10

A nother photograph uses color to reimagine a subject that Levitt had explored previously: children or women watching from a window, observed from below while framed by architectural features at an angle to the photograph’s edges. It seems nearly monochrome until one notices small areas of color that animate the picture: the red shoe pulls forward, the skirt juts out, the green square of light through a window leads back from the picture’s surface.

Hofmann’s color theory comes to mind. 11

B etween the dicta of art instruction, the controlled space of the studio classroom, and Levitt’s photographs lies a social world of people living in the city, their home, interpreted through an artist’s eye. Levitt learned from her classes at the League to experiment and reframe the streets that inspired

her. With color film in her camera and deliberation, she saw them anew. 12

REBECCA ZURIER AND DEBORAH DASH MOORE

1. Levitt’s friend James Agee compared these street photographs to “the best mutual improvisation of a jazz band, or the most studious choreography.” Agee, untitled note for 1943 exhibition of Levitt’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, 1943, cited in Shamoon Zamir, Helen Levitt: New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021), 41. Levitt’s 1948 film The Quiet One, made with Sidney Meyers and Janice Loeb, was nominated for an Academy Award.

2. Levitt interview with Marvin Hoshino at the International Center for Photography, 1987, fansinaflashbulb.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/helen-levitt-why-dont-we-letpeople-look-at-pictures/. For variations of this story, and the formative artistic influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, see Sandra Phillips and Maria Morris Hambourg, Helen Levitt, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1991), 47–48; Elizabeth Margaret Gand, “The Poetics and Politics of Children’s Play: Helen Levitt’s Early Work,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011, 10–13.

3. Levitt studied at the Art Students League from April 1956 through May 1957 and attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art in Provincetown in July–August 1957 [Hans Hofmann Papers, Archives of American Art, Box 5, Folder 13], and returned to the Art Students League in August 1958. That year she applied for a Guggenheim fellowship that was awarded in 1959 and renewed the following year.

4. Per records kindly provided by Stephanie Cassidy, Levitt registered for one or more life drawing and/or anatomy classes with Will Barnet, Robert Brackman, Thomas Fogarty, George Grosz, Robert Beverly Hale, and Bernard Klonis, and a sculpture class with John Hovannes. For descriptions of their teaching philosophies, see Art Students League of New York, 81st Regular Session. September 17, 1956–May 25, 1957 (New York: Art Students League, 1956).

5. Gand, “Politics and Poetics,” 98.

6. Interview with Levitt, 2003, quoted in M. Darsie Alexander, Slideshow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2005), 119.

7. Quotation from George Grosz, George Grosz Drawings (New York: H. Bittner and Company, 1944), 5, as cited by Grosz’s former ASL student Robert Cenedella in PeterKlaus Schuster, ed. George Grosz: Berlin/New York, exh. cat. (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1994), 308; Robert Beverly Hale quoted in Raymond J. Steiner, The Art Students League of New York: A History (Saugerties, NY: CSS Publications, 1994), 99–100. Hale once said, “you have to know the function of a line. You have to know why an artist draws a line. You have to know, for instance, that actually in the human figure there aren’t any lines. You have to know that lines are drawn where places meet.” Hale, Oral history interview by Forrest Selvig, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. aaa.si.edu/ download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212258.

8. Robert Beverly Hale, Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (New York: WatsonGuptill, 1964), 14.

9. Alexander, Slideshow, p. 119 explains Levitt’s later switch to faster Ektachrome film.

10. Natasha Pashak, “Almost outnumbered: the role of Alberta in the Life and Work of Marion Nicoll,” MA thesis, Concordia University, 2010, 53–54. Nicoll attended a workshop with Barnet in Canada, then moved to New York to study with him at the ASL in 1958–59.

11. As recollected by the artist Allan Kaprow, who studied with Hofmann in the 1940s: “Each picture is an organic whole whose parts are distinct but relate strictly to the larger unit . . . This, we found out, was not easy at all . . . so this part-to-whole problem occupied the class continually and further broke down into a study of special particulars of all painting; color, that is, hue, tone, chroma, intensity, its advancing and receding properties, its expansiveness or contractiveness, its weight, temperature, and so forth.” Allan Kaprow, “Hans Hoffman,” quoted in Irving Sandler, “Hans Hofmann, the Pedagogical Master,” Art in America, May 30, 1973.

12. The challenge of composing in color was ongoing, as Levitt wrote in another Guggenheim application years later, “I still consider this work-in-progress. As I work I discover more and more complexities in the relationship between color, form, and subject, over which I would like to gain complete mastery.” 1980 application quoted in Gand, “Politics and Poetics,” 101.

Joan Personette

At the Roxy Personette designed hundreds of different costumes each year—on tight budgets, with short deadlines, supervising a staff of twentyfive. This was no job for a shrinking violet, and Personette’s energy and ingenuity were up to the challenge. But the Roxy’s long hours and persistent pressures took a toll;3 Personette quit her job in 1954 and decided to devote herself to creating her own art, full-time. S o she went back to school—initially studying with master teacher Hans Hofmann, at his summer painting workshop. 4 Unfazed by Hofmann’s harsh comments about the first piece she submitted for critique, Personette began exploring new ways of making and thinking about art.5 That fall, she enrolled at the Art Students League. There, between 1958 and 1964 Personette took

The woman I met in 1997, while doing research for a retrospective exhibition of her work,1 was petite, gentle, and so softspoken that it was difficult to imagine her standing up to the New Jersey highschool teacher who told her not to apply for a scholarship to art school. It was also hard to believe that she had developed successful careers in the famously cutthroat worlds of high fashion and New York theater. But Joan Personette (1914–1998) did these things, and more. She won that scholarship—to the New York School of Design—where, between 1932 and 1934, she learned to draw and paint from the model, and to make fashion illustrations. This led to a job designing evening gowns for Milgrim’s, an upscale women’s clothing store on Fifth Avenue. Next, Personette spent a decade and a half designing costumes for the Roxyettes (precursors to the Rockettes): twenty-four female dancers who performed in ever-changing “novelty numbers” for patrons of the Roxy Theatre, a lavishly decorated movie palace just off Times Square. 2

Although she was well aware of the developments in avant-garde American art of the late twentieth century, Joan Personette’s own work was not influenced by art-world trends. Instead, she found her own way of working and was able to spend forty years producing art that no one else had asked her to make. As she said: “It was pure pleasure.”

classes in drawing, oil and watercolor painting, and lithography, but she was especially keen on the Life Drawing/ Painting/Composition class taught by Morris Kantor—which she took fourteen times.6

T his represented quite a commitment for someone who had already been an artworld professional for twenty years. Moreover, Personette was much older than the other students at the League; as a forty-year-old divorced woman with a young son, she “felt like an antique,” as she later recalled. But Personette ignored whatever self-consciousness she felt, to learn everything she could from this additional training.

A lthough she was well aware of the developments in avant-garde American art of the late twentieth century, Joan Personette’s own work was not influenced by art-world trends. Instead, she found her own way of working and was able to spend forty years producing art that no one else had asked her to make. As she said: “It was pure pleasure.”

Personette’s mature work consists primarily of stylized, painted figures— often female, plus luscious landscapes and pure abstractions—notably the handsome collages she began creating with the paper wrappers in which her cutlery was delivered during an extended hospital stay. She identified the principal influences on her painting as the Japanese American artist Kenzo Okada and Milton Avery, a fellow League alumnus. While the art of Personette and Okada share elements of color and composition, the comparison with Avery—especially his faceless female figures—seems especially apt.

NANCY G. HELLER

1. See Nancy G. Heller, Joan Personette: On Stage and On Canvas (New York: Exhibitions International, 1998). The show was held at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden in New York City. For this project Personette and I spoke frequently—in person and via telephone; her niece Helen de Keijzer was also extremely helpful. Another retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work was held in 1990 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC

2. Personette also designed costumes for the Skating Vanities, a popular roller-skating troupe that toured internationally, plus the Broadway revue Two on the Aisle starring Bert Lahr, and the gowns for Tallullah Bankhead’s Las Vegas nightclub debut.

3. Until recently theatrical costume renderings were considered unimportant and were routinely discarded, even by the artists who had created them, once the garments were completed. However, attitudes have changed and today Personette has drawings in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library and at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. (Unfortunately, many of Personette’s costume drawings, and her lithographs, were destroyed in a 1995 studio fire.)

4. That year the 77-year-old Hofmann had an important solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; he was also profiled in a Life magazine article “A Master Teacher: Hans Hofmann influenced three decades of U.S. art,” Life 42, no. 14 (April 8, 1957): 70–76.

5. Not knowing who had created it, when Personette submitted her second piece Hofmann pronounced it “a perfect painting.” See Heller, Joan Personette, 23.

6. Personette’s other teachers at the League were Vaclav Vytlacil, Mario Cooper, and Harry Sternberg. She studied with Kantor (1896–1974) from 1958 through 1964.

Anita Steckel

“Give yourself permission to become a great artist. The magic comes from the inside out and you must believe in your own magic. If you believe it, you have enormous power to convince others of it.” —Anita Steckel 1

This advice, which feminist artist Anita Steckel (1930–2012) offered her students near the end of her career, points toward the passion that animated her practice for more than six decades—one rooted in the Art Students League, where she studied in the late 1950s and taught from 1984 until her death in 2012. Trained as a painter and illustrator at the ASL , she worked in various media but focused primarily on collage and montage—often in the form of drawn or painted additions to found photographs—and photomechanical reproduction technologies.

Reared in Brooklyn and schooled at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, Steckel came to public attention in 1963 with her Mom Art exhibition at the Hacker Gallery on 57th Street. Her title inverted the moment’s male-dominated Pop Art, and her montaged vintage photographs and art history illustrations posed wry critiques of contemporary gender and racial inequities. For example, in Discretion, (1963), she updated a Flemish Madonna and Child with a Black baby, black-and-white masks, the New York skyline, and white picket fence. Designed to challenge what she saw as White churches’ inattention to the Civil Rights struggle, the composition goes further to literalize the conception of racial identity as performance; conjure associations, perhaps unintended, with minstrelsy and bondage gear; and question the supposedly natural and unconditional

maternal bond, telegraphing her lifelong attention to female experience. By the end of the decade, Steckel had started the series of large-format photomontages that remain among her most celebrated works: oversize female nudes situated in a phallic New York skyline in ways that range from playful to painful. Rendered at a scale that is difficult to ignore, these figurations of female subjectivity, agency, sexuality, and pleasure, often juxtaposed with male nudity, provoked a fierce backlash among social conservatives. In response, she cofounded the Fight Censorship group alongside Louise Bourgeois, Joan Semmel, Hannah Wilke, and others, indexing her vanguard position in the nascent feminist art movement.

W hile Steckel’s profile waxed and waned in sync with fluctuating interest in feminist and activist art over her long career, she trusted her magic regardless. For example, her Giant Animals series (1977–79) turned the New York skyline into a safari park; her Anita of New York Meets Tom of Finland series (2004–05) inserted female nudes into the legendary illustrator’s homoerotic scenarios; and The Bush Follies series (2008) outfitted midcentury bathing beauties in swimwear adorned with President George W. Bush’s face.

A t the same time, she devoted almost every Saturday over her last three decades to teaching a daylong class at the ASL entitled Drawing from

Life, Color, Composition, Collage. Her “deeply supportive, Buddhist-oriented” pedagogy attracted a devoted cadre of students, one of whom commuted from Reading, Pennsylvania, for eighteen years. 2 In return, that community sustained her own creative practice, grounded in her advice to “be strong for your art! Be the earth in which it grows,

the water to nurture it—the sun to fire it up—and you must believe in it with all your heart and strength.”

ANNE MONAHAN

1. Anita Steckel, quoted in Jessica Maffia, “The Gifts Anita Gave,” in Anita Steckel: The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics , exh. cat., ed. Richard Meyer and Rachel Middleman (Stanford, CA : Stanford Art Gallery, 2022), 36.

2. Maffia, 35. For the following quote, see p. 36.

Hervé Télémaque

For much of the twentieth century, the Art Students League was seen as a place of possibility for artists throughout the Americas, a place where one could receive art training and become part of a collective not determined by race, gender, or national origin. Hervé Télémaque (1937–2022) arrived in New York from Haiti in 1957 to immerse himself in what it offered. Born into a prominent Haitian family, he spent most of his childhood with his maternal grandfather, Raphaël Brouard, and uncle, the poet Carl Brouard. Uncle Carl was one of the founders of the publication La Revue indigene, which concretized the aims and goals of the Indigenist movement in Haiti. Later, Brouard cofounded the noirisme publication Les Griots with Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude and the then-unassuming country doctor, François Duvalier. Both groups sought to create an art movement centered on Haitian subjects to resist the cultural dominance of France and the nation’s occupation by the United States (1915–34). Their creative ethos relied on a liberatory creolized approach to art and literature that infused Télémaque’s approach to painting.

Télémaque did not speak English when he arrived. He was recommended to Julian E. Levi’s Life Drawing and Painting class because Levi was the only instructor able to communicate with him in passable French. Though he spoke fluent English by his second year, he worked directly under Levi his entire time at the League, except for a sculpture class. Immersed in Abstract Expressionism

and its commitment to the dissolution of form, Télémaque befriended Larry Rivers, absorbed the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers, and Mark Rothko and crafted a mature painting practice which Levi described as exhibiting “sheer sophistication” of form. He loved New York. Thanks to his friend Maya Deren, he came to understand himself as a Haitian artist there and was inspired at every turn. But New York did not love him back. Despite receiving recognition and praise at the ASL , Télémaque’s painting gained little traction in the New York art world. Doors closed rather than opened for him. Overt and ambient racism, along with the social isolation he experienced outside the League, left him feeling alienated from the city.

To help navigate life, Télémaque began psychoanalysis in French, with Dr. Georges Devereux, an early advocate of transcultural psychiatry. This coincided with his increased interest in Surrealism, Haitian painting, and the work of Hector Hyppolite. He came to believe that Abstract Expressionism was not enough to express the fullness of his story. But he didn’t replace one approach with another. Instead, Télémaque built a mature, creolizing practice which, in his words, mobilized the “force of poetic synthesis” through form. Toussaint Louverture in New York (1960) embodies this synesthesia, making it difficult to interpret the painting in a singular, or reductive manner. Despite his best efforts

Despite receiving recognition and praise at the ASL, Télémaque’s painting gained little traction in the New York art world. Doors closed rather than opened for him. Overt and ambient racism, along with the social isolation he experienced outside the League, left him feeling alienated from the city.

to forge a life in the city, the repeated rejection of his work for exhibitions and the attendant racism made life in the city untenable. In 1961 he left for Paris.

L evi kept track of his former student’s career, noting Télémaque’s embrace of Pop Art by the late 1960s and surmising that he would do well if he returned. He chose not to, remaining in France for the remainder of his career,

rising in a contemporary art world that had once excluded him, with exhibitions and works that synthesized his entire experience gracing the walls and collections of premier institutions from the Centre Pompidou to MoMA

ERICA MOIAH JAMES

HERVÉ TÉLÉMAQUE (LEFT) AND JULIAN E. LEVI (RIGHT) AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, 1961. ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

Yayoi Kusama

January 1960

29th: Go to Immigration

February 1960

1st: Met Kimura of League

4th: Met Kimura of League

5th: Go to League [$] 35.

Admitted to League

8th: League

9th: Go to Immigration

16th: Immigration card (visa) for one year arrived

18th: Go to League. Levin [Sic.?] came 24th/29th: Go to League

—excerpted from Yayoi Kusama’s calendar

T he Art Students League is a collegial artist community, with the students serving on its Board of Control and contributing to the school’s direction.1 Artists associated with the League have included such luminaries as Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, to count a few. Moving from Japan in 1957, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) enrolled in the League between February 1960 and February 1962. Achievements from this time included her May 1961 second solo exhibition in New York at the Stephen Radich Gallery. However, this show does not appear in the school’s bimonthly Art Students League News exhibition listing.

T he primary reason for this oversight was that Kusama was often absent from the League. Her attendance totaled only twenty-four days in two years, and she

was not recognized at the League. Like any foreigner, Kusama had to obtain a visa; thus, on July 8, 1958, she excitedly reported in her letter to Georgia O’Keeffe that she had secured a visa extension by moving from Seattle to the world’s art capital, New York. 2 That visa expired in 1959. Her calendar reveals that on January 28, 1960, Kusama visited Immigration. On February 1, she met an Art Students League student named Kimura.3 They met again on February 4. The next day, Kusama was admitted to the League. Kusama enrolled in Julian E. Levi’s life drawing class. The choice was unusual for an abstract painter. 4 If the “Levin” logged on February 18, 1960, in her calendar was a typo,5 she invited Levi to her studio on her second day at the League. They must have become friendly, possibly resulting in his tolerance for her limited attendance.

On April 1, 1961, she began painting her most ambitious artworks to date, seven white Net paintings; the largest, White B. S. Q., measuring 96 × 390 inches. In April and May 1961, Kusama could not attend classes, probably explaining her

absence in her letter to the League on March 28, 1961. There was some agreement between Kusama and the League. On the first day of the fall class, on September 18, she wrote, “League began, bring painting this day.” She probably showed progress during her absence. After that day, she only attended League for eight more days until February 1962. However, with that attendance and the success of the Radich show, she was able to obtain her permanent residency visa on May 6, 1963.

MIDORI YAMAMURA

1. “1960 Board of Control Completed by Two New Member-Students,” Art Students League News 1, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1960), 1–2.

2. Yayoi Kusama, letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, July 8, 1958 (CICA/YK/GO. 19).

3. This was most likely Reiji Kimura.

4. Among the Japanese expatriate community, this was known as the class in which Sam Francis’s first wife, Teruko Yokoi, was enrolled in for three years.

5. Japanese transcriptions of foreign names are phonetic. It is possible she added an “n” to “Levi” by mistake. The name Levin does not appear in other parts of her diary.

Kusama’s attendance at the Art Students League totaled only twentyfour days in two years, yet her time there helped secure a permanent residency visa—and shaped her path as an artist in New York.

Mavis Pusey

“I went to the Art Students League to do fashion illustration, and I went into Will Barnet’s class. And after a month, I said, ‘This isn’t what I want. I’m a fashion designer; I’m not doing figures and things like that.’ And I went to him, and I told him, and he said, ‘You stay, you’re going to become an artist.’ And I must say, it’s the only thing I have found that satisfied the anger and the hurt and the love in me. So, it was good.” —Mavis Pusey

The time that Mavis Pusey (1928–2019) spent at the Art Students League, from 1961 through 1965, profoundly transformed her life, steering her toward an unforeseen career as an artist. When Pusey moved to New York City in 1959 from a small town called Retreat in the Saint Ann parish of Jamaica, she was intent on becoming a fashion designer. She initially enrolled at the Traphagen School for Design, but after two years financial constraints forced her to discontinue her studies and secure fulltime employment. Pusey then began working at a bridal boutique but remained adamant about pursuing a degree in fashion. She found the Art Students League, which offered courses compatible with her work schedule, and enrolled with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation. Her first course, life drawing with Will Barnet, marked a pivotal moment for her career as he encouraged her to abandon fashion for art:

“I went to the Art Students League to do fashion illustration, and I went into Will Barnet’s class. And after a month, I said, ‘This isn’t what I want. I’m a fashion designer; I’m not doing figures and things like that.’ And I went to him, and I told

him, and he said, ‘You stay, you’re going to become an artist.’ And I must say, it’s the only thing I have found that satisfied the anger and the hurt and the love in me. So, it was good.”1

Ba rnet proved to be an exceptional educator and advocate for Pusey.

Following her initial life drawing class, she pursued six additional courses with Barnet before transitioning to study with Harry Sternberg, from whom she learned printmaking. Through these courses, Pusey moved from figuration to geometric abstraction, developing a keen interest in the work of the artists around her and those who came before her at the Art Students League.

B eyond providing Pusey with a foundational art education, the League formed a system of support that sustained her well beyond graduation. In 1967, Pusey moved to England. When she returned to New York, Barnet, her former mentor, introduced her to the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, where he was a founding member. Both Pusey and Barnet later went on to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Despite the limited number of surviving documents from Mavis

Pusey, the profound significance of the League in her life is unmistakable. In every extant lecture and article, she consistently referenced the Art Students League and her mentor, Will Barnet. Among her remaining documents are a book and a newsletter from the League, both featuring her work. Her unwavering commitment to the institution was further demonstrated through her donation of several prints, which were

prominently displayed during her memorial service. When Pusey passed away in 2019, the decision to hold her memorial at the League was a testament to the profound and enduring impact the institution had on her life.

HALLIE RINGLE

1. Mavis Pusey, c. 1976 talk at Communications Village, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Quoted with permission by the Benjamin Wigfall Estate.

Kazuko Miyamoto

Approaching the Art Students League in 2019 for the opening of Postwar Women , an exhibition that highlighted the women artists who studied at the League between 1945 and 1965, Kazuko Miyamoto was surprised to find herself tearing up as she climbed the same front steps she had crossed countless mornings fifty-five years prior.

Approaching the Art Students League in 2019 for the opening of Postwar Women , an exhibition that highlighted the women artists who studied at the League between 1945 and 1965, Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942) was surprised to find herself tearing up as she climbed the same front steps she had crossed countless mornings fifty-five years prior. 1 With work in the exhibition and her first institutional retrospective on the horizon, Miyamoto reflected on her first years in New York, finding her footing after immigrating from Japan in 1964 at twenty-two years old.

F rom 1964 to 1968, Miyamoto spent every day at the Art Students League, attending morning and afternoon courses and assisting with cleanup to reduce the modest tuition. Proximate to M o MA , with a wide variety of classes to choose from and an even wider range of students, the school provided an entry point to the New York art world and a space for artistic experimentation, an experience Miyamoto shared with a broader network of immigrant artists who attended the Art Students League during the twentieth century. Scholars have highlighted the primacy of the school as a landing place for Asian artists in particular,

noting its accessible tuition, liberal course structure, and the absence of enrollment requirements or language tests. 2 By the 1960s, it had an established history of Japanese artists as students and instructors throughout its first century, with Yasuo Kuniyoshi heralded among celebrated alumni. 3 M iyamoto first enrolled in textile design but was quickly swept up in the League’s rich painting scene, repeatedly taking courses with Charles Alston, Sidney Gross, and Theodoros Stamos for her remaining years. Early works evidence the influence of these distinct painting instructors and the artist’s corresponding stylistic experimentation: from loose gestural compositions to layered geometric swaths of color. In 1966, a painting Miyamoto created in Alston’s class was awarded a class selection in the student concours exhibition, one of her first opportunities to exhibit work. Decades later, she noted Alston as her most influential instructor, recalling he would, at times, pick up her paintbrush to demonstrate directly on the surface of her work. In 1968, Miyamoto ceased her enrollment and left 57th Street for the Lower East Side, where she joined a growing community of immigrant artists, many of whom had likewise passed through

the Art Students League. Outside the classroom, she began working directly on the wall, creating ephemeral sculptures and environmental installations and coproducing artist-curated exhibitions as an early member of A . I . R . Gallery and the Rivington School. In 1986, she opened Gallery Onetwentyeight, an exhibition space that became known as a resource for international artists moving to New York. In the decades since, the gallery has shirked curatorial conventions to provide an experimental, accessible, and collaborative space, all qualities that one could argue Miyamoto encountered at the Art Students League. Long after her time as a student, Miyamoto continued to engage with the League as a place to connect with young Japanese

artists in New York, many of whom she subsequently exhibited at Gallery Onetwentyeight.

ELISE ARMANI

1. Kazuko Miyamoto in conversation with the author, November 22, 2019.

2. See Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2005); Anthony Yung, “Chinese Artists in New York, 1980s” in Taiping Tianguo—A History of Possible Encounters , ed. Doryun Chong and Cosmin Constinaş (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); and Ramona Handel-Bajema, Art Across Borders: Japanese Artists in the United States Before World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 2022).

3. In 1966, when MoMA presented the first major American exhibition of postwar Japanese art, The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture , four of the artists included were current or former students at the Art Students League (Takeshi Kawashima, Reiji Kimura, Tadasky [Tadasuke Kuwayama], and Sei Yamamoto). Additional prominent Japanese artists who attended or taught at the Art Students League over its first 100 years include Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Yayoi Kusama, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Kagawa Tamiji, Shimizu Toshi, Kikuo Saito, and Takako Saito. Kikuo Saito, Takako Saito, and Takeshi Kawashima were enrolled contemporaneously with Miyamoto.

4. Artist Toki Ozaki, a close friend of Miyamoto’s, initially met the artist after encountering flyers she had posted at the Art Students League, written in Japanese and advertising an open room in her loft. A 2013 exhibition, 57th Street Now and Then , presented Miyamoto’s own student work from the 1960s alongside the contemporary work of then-student Fumiko Kashiwagi.

LEFT: KAZUKO MIYAMOTO, WOMAN IN A BOX , C. 1966. OIL ON CANVAS, 48 × 45

Jesse Treviño

At first and even second glance, the late Jesse Treviño (1946–2023) ASL alumnus and an accomplished painter in San Antonio, Texas, would seem far removed from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist of the 1930s, best known for his concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony. Not as well-known are his formulations of “the war of maneuver” and the “war of position.” Obviously, terms borrowed from military tactics, Gramsci used them metaphorically to name, as the “war of maneuver,” the active, physically overt, often armed opposition to oppressive social formations, chief among them, modern capitalism. The “war of position” is the “peaceful” opposition to such oppressive formations through activities such as journalism, teaching, and artistic creativity.1

W hen he came to the ASL in 1966, Treviño had already lived through a war of position as an ethnic Mexican growing up in San Antonio, Texas, at mid-twentieth century, one waged mostly silently against a racially and economically oppressive, predominantly White, Texas society. Indeed, the scholarship he won as a high school student to the ASL afforded him a highly unusual opportunity, not only to further develop his already evident talent as an artist, but also to escape this war of position if only to better arm himself through the arts were he to return to San Antonio, as he eventually did. He studied primarily with William F. Draper. 2 Draper’s own highly affluent, privileged

East Coast upbringing was radically different from Treviño’s. Nevertheless, Draper had served as a World War II combat artist in the Pacific creating several compelling images. After the war, these can be said to include his most famous one of John F. Kennedy, himself a World War II veteran.3

A s it happened, Treviño experienced his own literal war of maneuver when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the war in Vietnam in 1967 during his second year at the Art Student League. Perhaps sensing that Vietnam was a very different war, one of anti-colonial maneuver, Draper tried to keep Jesse from going by arranging a scholarship to an art school in Paris. 4 As part of the war of position, military service for the dominant society is a paradoxical way that oppressed racial minorities across the globe sometimes choose to prove themselves, as had the artist’s older brothers. Treviño chose to go to Vietnam, where he was severely wounded, losing his right arm. He returned to San Antonio. Training himself to paint with his left arm, he forged a marvelous career as a photorealist painter of canvases and murals of everyday Mexican American life in San Antonio with emphasis on its vibrancy, joyfulness, and social achievement as he continued the war

1. Daniel Egan, “Rethinking War of Maneuver/War of Position: Gramsci and the Military Metaphor,” Critical Sociology 40, no. 4 (2014): 512–538.

JOSÉ E. LIMÓN

2. Jesse Treviño, as quoted in oral history interview with Cary Córdova, July 15–16, 2004. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Insitution.

3. Jesse Treviño, as quoted in oral history interview with William McNaught, June 1–28, 1977. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Insitution.

4. Córdova, 3.

5. José E. Limón, “Sighting Mexican America among the Phantoms: Jesse Treviño, Photorealism, and the Art of Remembrance,” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 3, no. 1 (2018): 92–119.

[Treviño] forged a marvelous career as a photorealist painter of canvases and murals of everyday Mexican American life in San Antonio with emphasis on its vibrancy, joyfulness, and social achievement… of position in a still-repressive Texas.5 However, in his very first such mural on his own bedroom wall, and suffering from PTSD, he represents the haunting images of his experience from San Antonio and Vietnam.6 Later, he rendered it even more personal in a photo of himself sitting in front of his mural. It remains Treviño’s signature statement of his wars of position and maneuver.

6. These include his involvement with smoke, drink, and drugs; a lost girlfriend recessed into the background; the soldier on the right; but, also his car, a Mustang, and Mexican sweetbread with coffee on the left. But the mural is clearly centered on his Purple Heart, which is rendered as a prosthetic for his missing arm.

Donna Dennis

I began to take evening classes at the Art Students League in the late fall of 1965. In 1964 I had graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, with a studio art major and then gone to Paris to study in a program at the American Center there. It was a wonderful year. I painted or drew from the figure every day and began to find my voice. When I returned from Paris, I found a full-time job at the Whitney Museum, then on 54th Street. I shared an apartment on West 13th Street with five or six other young women. I had not yet figured out how to continue my painting in New York. With no place to work, I was not making art at all.

O ne cold and blustery November evening, as I walked on Park Avenue after work, I experienced a sudden and frightening depression. I decided it had happened because I wasn’t making art. I had to find a way to make my art again.

T hat’s where the Art Students League came in. The next evening I signed up. I saw I could study with Stephen Greene (1917–1999). I knew the name! I’d read Ford Maddox Ford’s The Saddest Story in college, a book with a beautiful cover by Greene. Now I could study with him!

F ive nights a week, I walked up to the Art Students League to paint. What a blessing! I was making art again. The first week I brought in the paintings

I’d done in Paris, colorful Pop-inspired paintings of imaginary figures. Stephen Greene was not impressed. I trusted him somehow. I began to look at Jacques Henri Lartigue and Eugène Atget, and I began to make quite different paintings that foretold the aesthetic that came to be mine. Stephen quietly approved. One night that stands out for me, he came up to look at a painting I was working on and began to critique, then stopped himself, saying, “Oh, I don’t have to tell you; you’ll know what to do.” What a great affirmation! I also remember a night in the spring when he arrived at class looking radiant. He came up to me, and said, “Stick

“One night that stands out for me, [Stephen Greene] came up to look at a painting I was working on and began to critique, then stopped himself, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t have to tell you; you’ll know what to do.’ What a great affirmation!”

—Donna Dennis

out your hand.” The next thing I knew, he was pouring fine-grained sand into it, saying the spring day had been so grand he’d driven out to Long Island to walk on the beach. Magical!

L ater, he urged me to apply to Columbia, where he also taught. I was accepted provisionally, which meant I was not given a studio. I needed a studio.

Stephen was disappointed, but then he said, “Do you want to teach?” I said

no. He replied, “What do you need it for then? Just do your work.” Years later, the greatest compliment came when he asked me to fill in for him, to teach some classes at the League.

I h ave the fondest memories of Stephen Greene and will forever be grateful that the Art Students League was there when I desperately needed it.

DONNA DENNIS

Richard Mayhew

As [Mayhew] shared with an ever-present, beaming smile, full of optimism and encouragement, “you have to be [in the dominant culture] to survive…but you have the potential of breaking out…and setting up a unique interpretation of the world.”

In 1963 the African American and Native American artist Richard Mayhew (1924–2024) joined Spiral, an artistic alliance initiated by Romare Bearden that represented Black artists in the March on Washington and formulated an artistic response to the Civil Rights Movement. Mayhew’s abstracted landscapes—with their saturated, brilliant color and allusions to landscape—serve as a visual bridge between a more overtly figural and political African American aesthetic, and a commitment to abstraction and modernity. Mayhew’s landscapes, as well as his portraits, draw inspiration from his involvement in the Art Students League, and particularly from ASL instructor Edwin Dickinson. As in Dickinson’s work, Mayhew’s paintings and watercolors allude to external realities: for example, the removal of Native people from the land and the failure of the government to honor the promise of reparations to African Americans (“40 acres and a mule—you don’t come to the end of that until it’s fulfilled—forty, forty, forty.”) 1 Yet his work is rarely explicitly figural or political. Exposure to Dickinson’s premier coups, his dreamlike, abstract landscapes, is suggested in Mayhew’s richly allusive but abstract work. Mayhew never formally registered at the Art Students League but learned from teachers like Dickinson; he later served as an instructor (1965 to 1969), taking a leave for one year and

returning in 1970–71. Norman Lewis, on Mayhew’s recommendation, took over his class at the end of the academic year. Lewis, a profound influence on Mayhew and former president of Spiral, whom Mayhew admired for his refusal to compromise his abstraction, continued teaching at the League until his death in 1979. Richard Mayhew also taught at the ASL summer school at Woodstock in 1969, and at the ASL city summer school in 1971. T he Art Students League exposed  Mayhew to, and helped him navigate, a challenging dialectic: the insistence on the importance of representation (“the figure was important during the Civil Rights Movement—the figure which had been denied and omitted,”) 2 and his passionate commitment to his own personal, abstracted style, not always recognizable as landscape, but always alluding to memories and experiences related to place. Mayhew’s joie de vivre and collegiality—his love for conversation, community, group performance, and jazz—may distract observers from the seriousness of his political and/or aesthetic commitments. Yet Mayhew was resolute in his commitment to “the spiritual feeling of space,” to what he describes as the internalized essence of an experience.3

Mayhew was passionate about advancing rights for Native and African American people, about museums

and critics acknowledging their unique histories, and about lifting up marginalized artists and communities, but his outlook was warm, convivial, and inviting; his perspective and aesthetic was one of brilliance, beauty, and possibility. As he shared with an ever-present, beaming smile, full of optimism and encouragement, “you have to be [in the dominant culture] to survive…but you have the potential of

breaking out…and setting up a unique interpretation of the world.”4

JANET BERRY HESS

1.

2.

3.

African

4.

Richard Mayhew, interview with Janet Berry Hess, Soquel, California, January 2008.

Richard Mayhew, interview with Janet Berry Hess, Santa Cruz, California, 2003.

Quoted in Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, “The Spiritual Realm of Richard Mayhew,”

American News 13, no. 2 (2001): 16.

Richard Mayhew, interview with Janet Berry Hess, Santa Cruz, California, 2003.

Peter Cox

“I

think about an explanation [Cox] gave of the word ‘art’ stemming from the Latin trahere or ‘to pull from’ and how it differs from lustrare or ‘to illuminate from without’ as the essential difference between art and illustration regularly…. That is: the concept that art asks questions, illustration answers them has been the basis of my own understanding of art ever since.”

—John McMahon

Peter Cox (1942–2017) was a pivotal figure at the Art Students League throughout the 1980s and into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. He continued the tradition of esteemed anatomy instructors, following in the footsteps of George B. Bridgman and Robert Beverly Hale.

Perceiving the world clearly is an essential skill, as emphasized by John Ruskin, who famously stated, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.” Peter Cox, a consummate artist and art educator, embraced this philosophy and imparted it to his students, introducing them to new perspectives on the world. True perception goes beyond mere observation; it involves seeing beyond our biases. While many people tend to see a world that aligns with their prejudices, Peter encouraged his students to observe both the pleasant and unpleasant truths.

For years, Peter’s Saturday morning and afternoon Anatomy for Artists, Life Drawing class attracted students of all ages, with waiting lists extending far beyond capacity. This demand prompted the then-Executive Director, Ira Goldberg, to request Peter to add a Sunday morning class. Peter’s dedication to his craft was

evident as he arrived at the studio an hour and a half before class, accompanied by his assistants, to meticulously prepare the space. He would arrange numerous large anatomical schematics on easels and adjust the lighting to highlight them, showcasing his skills as a stage performer. Peter had a unique ability to captivate his audience. Without notes or a script, he would lead his students through the intricacies of a pose, focusing

on specific muscle groups from the model. Using the studio chalkboard, he would carefully layer colored chalk to explain the function, connections, and contractions of each muscle. In addition to anatomy, his lectures delved into art history, enriched with anecdotes and personal stories. A single phrase from Peter had the power to open doors in the minds of his students, providing clarity and insight into complex concepts.

Peter’s lectures were not confined to technical aspects; they also explored the conceptual depths of art. He seamlessly transitioned between discussions on aesthetics and debates on the true meaning of art. Each lecture was a rich journey through the intricacies

of art, leaving a lasting impact on all who attended. John McMahon, a globetrotting writer, artist, and former student of Peter’s, recalls: “I think about an explanation he gave of the word ‘art’ stemming from the Latin trahere or ‘to pull from’ and how it differs from lustrare or ‘to illuminate from without’ as the essential difference between art and illustration regularly. Art is an object from which meaning can be pulled, illustration is an object that informs. That is: the concept that art asks questions, illustration answers them has been the basis of my own understanding of art ever since.”

We at the Art Students League were deeply shocked and saddened by Peter’s sudden passing in 2017. The world lost a brilliant artist and an inspirational teacher, and I lost an influential colleague and supportive friend. I miss our stimulating conversations, his wisdom, and especially our banter.

COSTA VAVAGIAKIS

Sophie Rivera

[Rivera] intentionally chose Puerto Ricans to take part in the Latino Portfolio , as this body of work has become known: black-and-white portraits of everyday men and women immortalized by Rivera as life-affirming symbols of a persevering community.

A pioneering Latina photographer in New York, Sophie Rivera (1938–2021) chronicled life in the city’s Puerto Rican communities with empathy and a deep acuity. That she even discovered photography was a small miracle. Rivera spent much of her childhood living in an orphanage after the breakup of her parents’ marriage, and as a young adult, she worked as a secretary. But in her mid-twenties, she found the means to study at the New School for Social Research as well as at the legendary Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York, where she took courses with such noted photographers as Lisette Model and Paul Caponigro. Back in the city, she enrolled at the Art Students League. Although her time there was brief, over several months in 1968 she took some ten life drawing classes—an atypical course of instruction for one with an avowed interest in the camera. And although we do not have a record of her thoughts on her time at the school, her work suggests that it had a palpable impact on her approach to photography.

R ivera began her career in the 1970s, alongside the first significant generation of Puerto Rican photographers that was coalescing in New York, especially in the Bronx and in East Harlem. She was among the very few Latinas active in a period when the photo world as a whole was dominated by men, and in the city,

by those dedicated to documenting the grittier aspects of urban street life. Rivera also took to the streets, inviting passersby outside her upper Manhattan apartment to come upstairs for a portrait to be made. She intentionally chose Puerto Ricans to take part in the Latino Portfolio, as this body of work has become known: black-and-white portraits of everyday men and women immortalized by Rivera as life-affirming symbols of a persevering community. Originally printed at roughly life-size scale (48 × 48 inches) and starkly lit from behind, Rivera magnifies the presence of each sitter, compelling us to confront their essential nature, their humanity.

R ivera also captured people on the subway, in parks, and along city streets. For a 1990s series, she depicted children at local parks, printing the images as double exposures that evoke shifts in time, a stark reminder of the transitory nature of childhood. She also traveled to Greenwich Village to portray participants in the city’s Halloween Parade, creating images that parsed, as she noted, “the relationship between personal fantasy and personal reality.”

W hile Rivera is known for her portraiture, lesser-known aspects of her œuvre show us an artist boldly experimenting with the theme of the body. At times she worked more conceptually, as in a series studying

her nude body from different angles, conjuring the kind of scrutiny of the human form that she would have pursued in her anatomical drawing classes. In the following decade, she made color photographs of her own waste—used tampons and feces—to confront social taboos related to the female body. I

sense that her ability to produce such fearless images was rooted in part to the instruction she received at the Art Students League, in directly beholding, recording, and expressing the body’s physical and psychological dimensions.

ELIZABETH FERRER

SOPHIE RIVERA, ANTHONY HERNANDEZ , 1978, PRINTED 2006. GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 48 × 48 IN. NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC, ALFRED H. MOSES AND FERN M. SCHAD FUND 2024.8.1, COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF MARTIN HURWITZ AND JEANNOT R. BARR, FINE PRINTS & DRAWINGS

Mary Beth McKenzie

I am happy to share my memories of Robert Brackman (1898–1980) and Robert Philipp (1895–1981), both of whom taught at the Art Students League for over thirty years.

A lthough I studied only a relatively short time with Robert Brackman, I continue to feel his influence as a teacher. When I was a young student, Brackman was almost a god to me. I even traveled from Ohio to New York City to wait outside the Art Students League to catch him as he came out the door and awkwardly introduce myself. I later studied with him evenings at the League and attended two summer sessions he taught in Connecticut. He absolutely loved color. He would walk around the class critiquing paintings, and everyone would have to follow him and listen to everyone else’s critique. He was offended if the whole class didn’t follow him. He made it clear that we could learn more from what he had to say to other people than from listening only to his comments on our individual work. Once, much to his dismay, we all even followed him to the door of the men’s room. Often he would come up to someone’s painting and repeat only one phrase: too literal, too literal. In the summers, he did a demonstration every week outdoors with a model. He always had a cigarette in his mouth while he was painting. We secretly made bets as to which color the ashes would fall into first.

To me, the best way to teach people to paint is to show them how on their canvas. Painting is visual—demonstrating

how to solve a problem is more effective than merely describing it. When I first started Robert Philipp’s class, he picked up a giant brush and said, “You’re not seeing the light on the model,” and used almost a whole tube of flake white to add light to my painting. From this I learned that as students, we can’t be precious about our work if we want to learn. Philipp also introduced me to a new way of painting—the physical aspect. His remarkable enthusiasm and excitement for life as well as for painting was contagious. He thoroughly enjoyed the act of painting, and through his bold handling, I became aware of its sensuous aspect—the lushness of surface and beauty of color. I loved his loose, seemingly effortless way of working. Robert Philipp had a tremendous influence on me. While I was still in his class, he asked me to pose for him at his studio in Carnegie Hall. I have such fond memories of his studio, crammed with paintings of various sizes and stages of development. I learned so much from this experience, from watching him paint, from seeing the paintings develop, and also from getting to know him, which I did over the next twelve years. He was 75 when I met him, and until his death at age 87, he painted almost every day. Being around him made me realize that painting is a way of life. The faith he showed in me also encouraged me to believe in myself as an artist.

MARY BETH MCKENZIE

To me, the best way to teach people to paint is to show them how on their canvas. Painting is visual—demonstrating how to solve a problem is more effective than merely describing it.

MARY BETH MCKENZIE, SELF-PORTRAIT (MATISSE PRINT), 1991. OIL ON CANVAS, 32 × 26 IN. COLLECTION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF THE ARTIST, 1992 (1992.111)

Beverly Buchanan

The enrollment of Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) at the Art Students League was brief but significant to her. Her student record includes just two week-long life drawing and painting classes taught by Norman Lewis in June 1972, although the experience remained a point of pride for years to come. She cited Lewis as a “big influence” in a 1989 interview with curator Eleanor Flomenhaft and recalled to art historian Jacqueline Francis in 2014, “When I heard he was at the Art Students League, I had to go there… Lewis was the idol.” 1

B uchanan and Lewis met the year prior, in 1971, at a jazz concert at Lincoln Center featuring an ensemble organized by Dizzy Gillespie. Buchanan was there with a friend who knew the musician, but the real prize for her that night was a poster made for the performance by Romare Bearden. 2 Eager to meet him, Buchanan spotted Bearden walking away from a group of people

at intermission.3 Seeing him isolated, she took her chance but soon realized she had accidentally followed him into the men’s room. Backing out, she ran into Lewis, whom she recognized as the Abstract Expressionist whose work she loved, as she told him, even before she knew he was Black. Lewis introduced her to Bearden; from then on, she and Lewis were good friends. “I stayed in his loft almost every weekend,” she recalled, “because I took care of his mynah bird, Romy” when he was out of town. “At BEVERLY BUCHANAN WITH PAINTING, C. 1974. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN, BOX 8, FOLDER 2, BEVERLY BUCHANAN AND WORKS OF ART, 1970S, BEVERLY BUCHANAN PAPERS, 1912–2017, BULK 1970S–1990S, ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

At the Cinque Gallery, Buchanan showed large-scale abstract paintings from a series she referred to as “City Walls” or “Torn Walls,” inspired by the detail and decay she observed on architectural surfaces throughout the city. “Even on the most deteriorated, crumbling mass of brick and plaster,” Buchanan later wrote, “there runs a thread of beauty or essence.”

some point, he said, ‘You just need to go home and work.’ And I wept.”4

L ewis offered her rare encouragement to focus singly on her art and the space to do it. At the time Buchanan, who already had degrees in medical technology (1962), parasitology (1968), and public health (1969), was working as a health educator for the city of East Orange, New Jersey, though she had always made art. Soon after her stint at the League, Cinque Gallery founders Lewis, Bearden (who had studied at the League), and Ernest Crichlow (who later taught there) offered Buchanan her first solo exhibition, which opened in December 1972.5

A t the Cinque Gallery, Buchanan showed large-scale abstract paintings from a series she referred to as “City Walls” or “Torn Walls,” inspired by the detail and decay she observed on architectural surfaces throughout the city. “Even on the most deteriorated, crumbling mass of brick and plaster,” Buchanan later wrote of the series, “there runs a thread of beauty or essence.” 6 She continued her investigation of architecture through cast concrete sculpture, or “frustula,” and the drawings and sculptures of shacks for which she is best known.

By 1977, she turned down recruitment to Ivy League medical schools and decided to become a full-time artist, moving to Macon, Georgia, in search of favorable weather and more space to work.7 Buchanan’s artistic style shifted throughout her career, though she maintained a sense of scale, color, composition, and most importantly, commitment to an artist’s life, inspired in part by her teacher.

JANA LA BRASCA

1. Beverly Buchanan, quoted in “Shack Portraiture: An Interview with Beverly Buchanan,” in Beverly Buchanan: Shackworks, A Sixteen Year Survey, exh. cat. (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 1994), 15 and in Jacqueline Francis, “The Presence of Norman Lewis,” in Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Press, 2015), 194.

2. “Shack Portraiture,” in Shackworks, 15.

3. It may be that Bearden was surrounded with admirers because he was then the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual, on view from March 25–June 19, 1971. The concert took place in May 1971. See John S. Wilson, “Jazzmobile Offers Summer Samplings In Tully Hall Benefit,” New York Times (May 22, 1971), 20, and moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2671.

4. “Shack Portraiture,” in Shackworks, 15.

5. Lewis taught at the League from 1972 until his death in 1979. Bearden studied there from 1936 to 1937, and Crichlow taught from 1980 to 1998, according to Art Students League records.

6. “Color Interpretations of Urban Ruins: Torn Wall Series Part Three; The Wall. The Core of Its Meaning.” Beverly Buchanan papers, 1912–2017, bulk 1970s–1990s, box 2, folder 27, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

7. Unsigned text on Beverly Buchanan. Beverly Buchanan papers, 1912–2017, bulk 1970s–1990s, box 2, folder 24, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Hughie Lee-Smith

Hughie Lee-Smith (1915–1999), an instructor at the Art Students League between 1972 and 1985, was primarily known for his paintings that featured isolated figures in abandoned spaces. His work thus contrasted sharply with prevailing trends in the postwar art world by avoiding conceptualism, abstraction, and overt political content. Lee-Smith’s success as an artist and teacher resulted from his dedication to figurative symbolism and technical proficiency. He also possessed a lifelong interest in the

history of art, which was fueled by his early training at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he took classes as a child in the 1920s. Lee-Smith later graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art and contributed to various New Deal art projects. In 1943 he joined the U.S. Navy, where he created moraleboosting paintings that represented the contributions of Black Americans to the war effort. After the war, Lee-Smith taught and exhibited throughout the upper Midwest and mid-Atlantic while

[Lee-Smith’s] distinct style led a contemporary critic to write his “mystical landscapes are painted in a traditional way” that resulted in “spiritually inward, poetic, and solemn” images. At the same time, these scenes held a subtle form of social criticism considering the era’s persistent racism.

earning a degree in art education from Wayne State University on the GI Bill. In 1958 he relocated to New York.

L ee-Smith’s early influences included Clarence Carter, a mentor at the Cleveland Museum School, as well as social realists such as Joseph Hirsh and Moses Soyer. While these artists often produced realistic scenes that addressed social inequalities, during the postwar era Lee-Smith’s work portrayed isolated figures within spaces characterized by an eerie stillness reminiscent of the work of Edward Hopper. The dream-like quality of many of Lee-Smith’s canvases were, he noted, influenced by the work of artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Albert Pinkham Ryder. This distinct style led a contemporary critic to write his “mystical landscapes are painted in a traditional way” that resulted in “spiritually inward, poetic, and solemn” images.1 At the same time, these scenes held a subtle form of social criticism considering the era’s persistent racism. Lee-Smith acknowledged that the anonymous, alienated figures which inhabited his canvases suggested an affinity with the personal and professional struggles that he and other Black artists faced. For example, Lee-Smith characterized Black artists as a “minority within a neglected minority” that often went unacknowledged by the art establishment.2

L ee-Smith’s classes at the League prioritized both technical craftsmanship and the history of art. In his own words, his course goals included an examination of the “how and why of painting” while also offering “an inside view of the ‘mechanics’ of painting.” 3 Historical topics addressed in class ranged from the social history of art, including the training of artists between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, to contemporary trends. At the same time, his courses emphasized practical aspects of painting, as seen in class demonstrations that prioritized the technical rendering of three-dimensional space. Writing in 1986, Lee-Smith articulated his teaching philosophy as “based on a profound respect for tradition.” His “insistence on adherence to time-honored painting procedures” was, he noted, intended to allow his students to “develop a knowledge of the craft that prepares them to pursue a professional career in art.”4

AUSTIN PORTER

1. Carol Wald, “The Metaphysical World of Hughie Lee-Smith,” American Artist 42 (October 1978): 49.

2. Lecture Notes, [undated] Hughie Lee-Smith papers, circa 1890–2007, bulk 1931–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 8, folder 28.

3. Lecture Notes, [undated] Lee-Smith Papers, box 8, folder 29.

4. Statement, May 1986, Lee-Smith Papers, box 10, folder 16.

Norman Lewis

Lewis…was active in programs with the Studio Museum in Harlem and was a mentor to many younger artists, especially Black practitioners such as [Jack] Whitten and Sam Gilliam, who wished to root their work in abstraction.

Education was important to Norman Lewis (1909–1979), a true intellectual with an extensive and diverse library. 1 Lewis often said he was self-educated, that reading about and looking at art were as consequential as attending classes. His formal studies, however, included a brief stint with Raphael Soyer in the early 1930s; time at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and the study of lithography with Riva Helfond at the Harlem Art Guild, which enabled Lewis to print lithographic images for himself and others. 2

L ewis’s parents moved from St. Kitts, through Bermuda, to New York City in 1906/07. With them, he was based in Harlem for much of his life. As a mature artist, he traveled through Europe and North Africa, studying art, architecture, and people. His last trip, in 1973, was to visit artist Jack Whitten and his family. Lewis’s sole work in the Art Students League collection, Untitled (1976), is among the many water-inspired paintings on both canvas and paper in response to experiences from that trip. From the start of his career, Lewis had created many bodies of art in series or closely related examples. These works convey his views about segregation, in some more obviously than others. However, he often reiterated his belief that activism was most effectively accomplished on the street rather than

through art. He stood on many picket lines as the struggle for civil rights became increasingly central to life in the United States.

L ewis’s art, which includes numerous drawing books of rapid studies, is primarily based on viewed experiences—people, cityscapes, and/or nature, leading to visual tensions as he moved from figuration to abstraction in the 1940s. His work carried additional tension, owing to his importance in the worlds of both Black and mainstream White artists. In the former, this is evident in his 1963 election as the first president of Spiral, a group of Black artists attending to the unique pressures of the era. In the latter, Lewis’s art was championed by New York’s prestigious Willard Gallery from 1946 through 1965. Marian Willard was engaged by Eastern thought, which also interested Lewis, especially the calligraphic character of their art.

L ewis taught at the League from 1972 through 1979. Also, late in life (1967) he purchased and renovated a loft in Soho, where he lived with his soon-to-be wife, Ouida Bramwell Williams. By the time he was with the League, Lewis had long been an admired teacher at several schools and for the Works Progress Administration. He had exhibited in solo and group shows internationally and had contributed to

the creation of teaching and exhibition spaces on behalf of Black artists. These included the Harlem Community Art Center and Cinque Gallery, founded in 1969 with Romare Bearden and Ernest Crichlow. Lewis also was active in programs with the Studio Museum in Harlem and was a mentor to many younger artists, especially Black practitioners such as Whitten and Sam Gilliam, who wished to root their work in abstraction.

RUTH FINE

1. In 1950, the contents of Lewis’s library were catalogued by Joan Murray, his companion at the time, and published in Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction, exh. cat., ed. Corinne Jennings (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1989), 57–70. His library grew exponentially over his later years; some parts were distributed after his death, especially texts related to politics. The rest is overseen by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery with other aspects of his estate. The most extensive chronology on Lewis is published in Ruth Fine, ed., Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2015). It is the source for the biographical content of this essay.

2. Lewis denied being a student of Augusta Savage in the early 1930s, though he was listed as one in many contemporary news articles.

NORMAN LEWIS CLASS, 1978. PHOTO: WAINTROB-BUDD, ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

Gustav Rehberger

In the past, Art Students League course catalogs described Gustav Rehberger (1910–1995) as “a master draftsman, brilliant teacher and demonstrator. His aim, as artist and teacher: the realization in pictorial language of a powerful imagination; his means: a driving whirling movement, involving all parts of the composition in a total activity.”

Personally, it is not easy to find the right words to express the right sentiment when talking about Mr. Rehberger. This is not only because of the long relationship I enjoyed with him for over twenty-three years as both a student and friend, but primarily because of the complexity and richness of his own life. He was born in rural Austria and came to this country as a thirteen-year-old boy. Friends told stories of him sitting on the deck of the ship bringing him to America, drawing portraits of passengers. A year later he was the youngest student ever to win a full scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago.

T here are so many aspects of his life one could address—whether it be his artistic accomplishments, sense of humor, love of music, athletic ability, or his perfectionism. Rosina Florio, former Executive Director of the Art Students League, called him “the last of the super illustrators.” His work can be seen in countless magazine articles, books, and movie posters.

W hat has impressed me the most was the personal testimonies of so many students and friends who felt that Rehberger had played a pivotal role in their development not only as artists but as individuals. None could deny the force and strength of his personality. Many were charmed by his honest warmth and good nature.

Perhaps the true source of his charisma beyond his artistic gifts stemmed from his insight and treatment of each person, relating to their own qualities and talents as individuals. Many

[Rehberger] resonated an unquenchable optimism and a belief that human potential has no boundaries.

students sensed his uncommon ability of understanding their inner being and giving credence to their inner strivings.

H is art and teaching were forged by his faith in the power of the human will. Out of the chaos in a world rife with conflict, a person could still be a master of one’s fate. Reminiscent of his love for Beethoven’s torrential surges, Rehberger’s work employed both the human and equine form as vehicles to implore his viewers and students to keep searching and growing. He was described as a “volcanic expressionist.” He resonated an unquenchable optimism and a belief that human potential has no boundaries. I would like to conclude with Mr Rehberger’s favorite poem entitled “Hope” by Friedrich Schiller, which best exemplified his beliefs:

The future is Man’s immemorial hymn. In vain runs the Present a-wasting: To a golden goal in the distant dim

In life, in death he is hasting.

The world grows old, and young, and old,

But the ancient story still bears to be told.

Hope smiles on the Boy from the hour of his birth;

To the Youth is gives bliss without limit; It gleams for old age as a star on earth, And the darkness of death cannot dim it. Its rays will gild even the fathomless gloom

When the pilgrim of life lies down in the tomb.

Never deem it a shibboleth phrase of the crowd,

Never call it the dream of a rhymer:

The Instinct of nature proclaimed it aloud:

We are destined for something sublimer.

This truth which the witness within reveals

The purest worshipper deepliest feels.

LUKAS CHARLES

Jane Rosenberg

“I breathed in the smells of oil paints and turps that permeated the main lobby. Beautiful figurative paintings hung on the walls. A bulletin board with all kinds of notices hung to the right—art supplies for sale, cheap studios, models for hire, and artists who seemed to have a purpose scurried about. I had found my community. I was home.”

—Jane Rosenberg

“It’s been done before! Find something new to do!” As an art major at a New York state college during the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was the advice I got from my professors regarding traditional figurative art. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Alexander Calder were in vogue. I was a closet portrait artist— setting up a mirror on my kitchen table to do self-portraits. I couldn’t stop myself—there was no new direction I wanted to take. I craved deeper knowledge of how to draw and paint realistically. I was just “old fashioned.”

I graduated with a BA in art and somehow landed a job (based on my astrological sign) at a textile company coloring in flower patterns for sheets and pillowcases. A job, yes. But I was uninspired.

T hen I discovered the Art Students League. Soon after climbing past the art students with sketchpads hanging out on the front steps of the West 57th Street building, I breathed in the smells of oil paints and turps that permeated the main lobby. Beautiful figurative paintings hung on the walls. A bulletin board with all kinds of notices hung to the right—art supplies for sale, cheap studios, models for hire, and artists who seemed to have a purpose scurried about. I had found my community. I was home.

T he League did not have course requirements. People chose to study with

the instructors from whom they wanted to learn. I carefully studied the catalog with brief statements and samples of work from different teachers.

I started with a couple of months of night classes in drawing and painting. Soon after, I was studying with David A. Leffel and Frank Mason mornings and afternoons. I had quit my day job and decided to take a summer class in landscape painting with Frank Mason in Stowe, Vermont.

T he next month I found myself in Provincetown, Massachusetts—a thriving artist community. I showed one of my pastel self-portraits and landed a gig doing portraits of tourists. Charcoal profile portraits sold for $5 and front view color portraits for $25. I found a way to earn a little money with my art. I also learned to tolerate people watching over my shoulder as I worked (a skill which came in very useful in future art endeavors such as plein-air painting and courtroom art).

T hroughout the 1970s I spent the summer seasons earning enough money doing portraits in Provincetown to pay for winters in my rent-stabilized NYC apartment and classes at the Art Students League but money was always tight. I’d call these my “starving artist days.” I did what I could to earn a buck. I even did chalk copies of Rembrandt and Vermeer with a hat out on the sidewalks of New York.

My days at the Art Students League were inspirational. The fourthfloor studios at the League had atmospheric north-light skylit painting studios, which I fell madly in love with. The ceilings were high, walls painted gray, cool soft light lit the room (although it was rough to see on dark rainy days). The third floor had a little cafeteria with cheap soup and tea. If you wanted to venture outside on a break, you could go to Chock full o’Nuts for a cream cheese on raisin bread, or maybe a beer at PJ Carney’s bar around the corner.

T he second floor had the room where I studied anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale and also a large open gallery space that housed exhibits by students and teachers. On the ground floor was a tiny art supply store that had just enough supplies to get you through a class. Lockers could be rented in the basement for a small fee. In the studios, there were racks to store wet paintings and palettes. Easels (caked with paint) were provided. I spent many years at the League taking figurative painting classes. I studied anatomy and sculpture as well as doing plein-air painting in various locations around the city.

In 1980, I attended a lecture at the Society of Illustrators by a courtroom artist. I realized this is something I would love to do. I became driven. I started going to

court and asking court officers where the artists sat and what did they bring. They told me I could come the following week and sit with the media at an arraignment. I took my sketch home, got up the nerve and made a call to CNN (which was a startup company back then). They told me they had an artist there. I now had to call one of the “Big Three.” NBC told me to come in to 30 Rock to show them what I’ve got. They shot it (on film back then) and had me fill out paperwork to get paid. I went home, called my parents, and watched it on my little black-and-white TV. It was very exciting. I was hooked.

I continue to this day both careers: courtroom art and showing my plein-air painting in a Provincetown gallery. I’m very fortunate to be able to make a living doing what I love. It isn’t easy—but if you stick with something, it just may work out for you.

JANE ROSENBERG

Pacita Abad

“Color! I have given it color!” exclaims Pacita Abad (1946–2004), donning watermelon earrings and paint-splattered overalls while reclining on her mirrorembellished Rajasthani pillows in the film Wild at Art (1991).1 Her quip playfully doubled in meaning as a woman of color and a colorful woman, she responds to filmmaker Kavery Kaul’s question, “Tell me, what have you contributed to this country as an artist?” Abad continues, “I remember when I was a student at the Art Students League in New York, and we were all painting still lifes. It was a gray November. The teacher came next to me and said, ‘Pacita, these colors are wild.’ I said, ‘These are the colors I grew up with: Chinese red, yellows,

orange. I can’t help it; I have to paint with these colors.’”2 Then a student with an unconventional flair, Abad is now an artist whose previously discounted flamboyance is finally receiving international acclaim.3 These distinguishing marks of Abad’s practice—her love of color and her freespirited nature—were sharpened at the Art Students League.

Born in a political family in opposition to dictator Ferdinand Marcos in Batanes, the northernmost province of the Philippines, Abad relocated to the United States in 1970, soon after his presumed cronies had violently ambushed her family home. In the fall of 1977, Abad and her lifetime partner Jack Garrity moved from Washington, DC to New York. Garrity left

“These are the colors I grew up with: Chinese red, yellows, orange. I can’t help it; I have to paint with these colors.” —Pacita Abad

a position at the Congressional Budget Office to work with a consulting firm in New Jersey. At first, while staying with friends, Garrity commuted to the office in East Orange, while Abad took classes at the ASL . She enrolled in her first course, Anatomy for Artists, taught by John Edward Heliker in the morning and Robert Beverly Hale in the evening. Both men were former students turned instructors at the League, having retired from past careers. 4 Abad excitedly sought out Hale, the author of the widely known primer, Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (1964), although the delightedly shocked instructor that monochromatically gray November was indeed Heliker. Garrity adds, “You’ll notice the oranges and the purples that nobody else in the class had.”5 In an early study of a nude model titled Glenda (1977), a radiant orange line travels up a forearm, scribbles of florid pink curve down a chin, and collide with black to shade an earthy purple near the chest.

T he couple’s stay in New York grew from weeks to months. Eventually, they found their first studio apartment on a flier tacked on a bulletin board at the ASL: a sublet next to the ornate, decadent, and notoriously bohemian Chelsea Hotel. Abad’s quieter life in Washington now lit with the life, buzz, and grit of New York,

“she thought it really stimulating,” says Garrity, “Compared to the Corcoran in DC where she took classes with primarily younger undergraduate students, the Art Students League was a whole mix of people…She made friends with a woman from Buenos Aires who practically lived in a hotel, met a woman who worked in nightclubs as a pole dancer to pay for her classes, and befriended another man who drove taxis at night. I would return to the Chelsea Hotel in my suit and tie after work, and everybody else was all ‘funked up!’” 6

T he couple slept on the floor and used

crates as chairs, Garrity on his 9-to-5 grind while Abad shuttled sketches, studies, and paintings back and forth on the subway. Garrity recalls, “One day, she was coming home with a wet painting from Heliker’s class, suddenly the train lurched, and the paint went all over some guy’s suit. He was not happy.” She tenaciously pursued her mission to master the foundations of figuration, even going so far as to paint her neighbors through their city windows.7 “She never missed a night [of class]. She went every single day,” Garrity remembers. Her diligence would soon pay off. In Chelsea studio (1977) and New York Still Life (1978), Abad begins to render the world before her with more precision and atmosphere. Those once rudimentary oranges would form the glint of a windowsill or the glow of a daylit tabletop. Those sketchy pinks would now dapple the petals of the flowers and luster a floor’s surface.

In Heart-Shaped Still Life (1978), fruits and vessels in bioluminescent hues cluster together. A Manila mango presses against an electric indigo vase, while a plump eggplant teeters on the tabletop. Violet-lipped glasses wedge a curious fruit, blushed with vermillion, orange, and chartreuse. Its rounded lobes curve into the shape of a heart.

Telling of her spirit, the heart is a form she would return to throughout her lifetime. She would conceal one amid flurries of paint strokes and appliquéd Indonesian batik in Blue (2002). She would ‘mask’ it, outlining its shape with collaged

rickrack ribbon and affixing it to a calligraphic plate in Heart-Shaped Mask/ Spiral Lady (1981). The still life and the heart—timeworn motifs—become fluorescent and new, as if illuminated by city neons.

Like the Chelsea Hotel, the Art Students League was populated with the rambunctious, countercultural, and freewheeling community that fueled the dazzlingly maximal works for which Abad would become well known. From her harrowing social realist paintings depicting the raw testimony of the Cambodian refugee crisis to her densely multicultural tableaus in her Immigrant Experience series (1983–95) at the break of the culture wars. The Art Students League served a pivotal role where Abad experienced the unruly bohemia of New York at a critical moment in her life, right before she launched a “thirty-year sojourn…to more than a hundred countries around the world.”

Sojourn, or temporary stay,8 is an apt choice of words for Abad. A perpetual visitor, yet at home everywhere—a state that appropriately calls to mind the Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere (2024). Here, cosmopolitan urban sprawls like Filipinas in Hong Kong (1995) and deeply

humanistic portraits like Haitians Waiting at Guantanamo Bay (1994) and You Have to Blend in Before You Blend Out (1995) hang as testaments to the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of immigrant life as witnessed by Abad.

A bad’s last documented day of inperson class at the Art Students League was March 31, 1979; thereafter, blank registration lines record her membership until 1988. Abad traveled to Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, Cuba, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Mexico in those nine years. Though her time in the Art Students League was relatively short, she began a practice she would continue throughout her life. After New York, she would use the techniques she learned in the city to sketch women bringing clothes to the wash in the villages of Bangladesh or mothers nursing their children while taking refuge in Thai and Cambodian borderlands. By painstakingly learning the contours, complexities, and hues of the human form while at the Art Students League, Abad prepared

herself for the work she would make, fully committing herself to the broader project of picturing—both in mind and on canvas—a fuller, more brilliant spectrum of our shared humanity.

MATTHEW VILLAR MIRANDA

1. Pacita Abad’s nephew, artist Pio Abad also recalls this now iconic scene in “The Decades-Strong Path of Color Set Ablaze By Pacita Abad,” September 17, 2023, Vogue, www.vogue.ph/lifestyle/art/pacita-abad-decades-strong-path-of-color-set-ablaze/.

2. Pacita Abad, quoted in Pacita Abad: Wild at Art, directed by Kavery Kaul (Riverfilms Production for Asian Women United, 1991).3. Albizu, quoted in Robert Friedman, “City Side,” San Juan Star (November 25, 1969).

3. Since Pacita Abad’s recent retrospective originated at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 15–September 3, 2023; and then traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 21, 2023–January 28, 2024; M oMA PS1, New York, April 4–September 2, 2024; and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, October, 2024–January 19, 2025. Several critics have noted the renewed attention on the artist’s life and work. Alex V. Cipolle, “Coloring in the Margins: Pacita Abad,” The New York Times, April 25, 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/arts/design/walker-pacita-abad-minneapolis.html; Murtaza Vali, “Taking Liberty: Murtaza Vali on the art of Pacita Abad,” Artforum 61, no. 10 (Summer 2023), www.artforum.com/features/murtaza-vali-on-the-art-of-pacitaabad-252743/; Raymond Ang, “Overlooked During Her Lifetime, Filipino American Artist Pacita Abad Has Suddenly Become a Global Star,” April 19, 2024, Vogue, www.vogue.com/ article/pacita-abad-moma-ps1-retrospective.

4. Robert Beverly Hale (1901–1985) taught at Columbia University, worked as editorial associate for Art News, and served as curator of American paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oral history interview with Robert Beverly Hale, October 4–November 1, 1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-beverlyhale-12653. John Heliker (1909–2000), known for his still lives, previously taught at Columbia University. “John Heliker,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, americanart.si.edu/artist/john-heliker-2160.

5. Jack Garrity interviewed by author on May 12, 2024.

6. Ibid. Garrity also notes Abad’s friendship with artist Rocco Licardi (b. 1938), a fellow “hippie” spirit who would later introduce Abad to Filipino American artist Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990). Jack chronicles Pacita’s meeting with Liccardi and Ossorio; Jack Garrity, A Passion to Paint: The Colorful World of Pacita Abad (Pacita Abad Art Estate, 2016), 10, issuu.com/pacitaabad/docs/a_passion_to_paint_by_jack_garrity.

7. Ibid. Garrity recalls a humorous memory related to Abad’s early painting The Exhibitionist (1978).

8. Pacita Abad, excerpted from an unpublished lecture titled, “The Philippines: Prospects in Business and the Arts,” sponsored by the Philippine Cultural Society at the Hilton Hotel, Singapore, October 26, 2002.

Sylvie Covey

I was born in Paris, where I first studied traditional methods of printmaking: etching, aquatint, sugar lift, and so on. Early on, as a young artist, I was already focused on that path, but in 1976, at age 22, I left France to see the world. I spent eighteen months in Southeast Asia, traveling through seven countries, learning batik painting in Indonesia and sumi-e ink painting in Japan.

W hen my visas ran out, I flew from Japan to the United States, crossed the country west to east by bus, and eventually arrived in New York in late 1977. I was staying in Hell’s Kitchen, where my roommate, whom I met in Bali, told me about the Art Students League. I immediately enrolled in the printmaking class taught by Michael Ponce de Leon (1922–2006), eager to make prints again.

Susan Cirigliano was the monitor; we became fast friends, and our friendship endures still today. In Michael’s class, I also met the accomplished Japanese artist Masaaki Noda; Hye Sun Lee from Korea; Tristan Wolski from Poland by way of Canada; Hoffy Steingrimsdottir from Iceland; Lenio Peirera from Brazil; Ramon Benito from Spain; Denise Karas from Greece; Janet Summers, Rhoma Mostel, Doug Mayhew, Bernard Zalon, Patricia Van Ardoy, Paula Holland, Karen Preissler, and countless other artists from the US and abroad. Michael Pellettieri, an instructor, was working as our master lithography printer. Ponce de Leon had traveled and taught in India, among other places. I had just spent three months in India as well, and I felt a kinship with his work and philosophy.

I am proud to teach printmaking at the Art Students League because there I am free to encourage as many techniques and styles as possible. From the historical to the contemporary, we aim to command the highest quality of prints in the most congenial atmosphere.

In 1980, I bought a large Charles Brand etching press and installed it in my loft on Times Square. I was committed to printmaking and to becoming a New Yorker. I stayed in the US with a student visa sponsored by the League. Susan Cirigliano became an instructor for the newly created children’s class, and I continued in Ponce de Leon’s class as his monitor for seven years, from 1978 through 1984. The early 1980s were, of course, marked by the tremendous loss of life from the AIDS epidemic we suffered; an entire group of League artists disappeared.

Our printmaking class was international, eccentric, and energetic. We challenged and inspired each other. This was a period in the art market when works on paper were highly valued. Galleries and dealers would commission young artists to print whole editions and that kept us busy.

We, as League printmakers, also had the best parties during the student concours, often collaborating with the sculpture department: Who can forget the naked Venus plaster bust, with vodka pouring from her nipple? I often invited musicians and dancers to perform during the opening receptions, and we had wild parties.

T he most important reason for me to study with Ponce de Leon was that he was a pioneer printmaker, bringing together sculpture, painting, and methods used in commercial photo-engraving processes, incorporating all these features in his work. His influence on my early work is evident. I was not yet skilled as a photographer, but I was already intrigued by ways to combine photo processes with traditional printmaking. This turned out to be my life’s journey, and Michael’s work was its beginning. I was fascinated by the work he did with photo etching.

At first, I started working like him on large metal plates (zinc, brass, copper) for maximum impact. The plates were 24 × 36 inches to fit on our largest presses. Then, in the 1980s, inspired by his use of multiple

pieces of plates in a three-dimensional format, I cut some of my plates, folding my prints in origami fashion. Later, in the early 1990s, I learned photography first on film, then digital photography, and produced numerous plates and grids. My use of the grid turned philosophical: I see the grid as a multitude of variations of life, translated to one, originating from my take on Michael’s work.

M ichael Ponce de Leon was born in Miami, a direct descendant of the famous Spanish explorer who discovered Florida. He was educated at the University of Mexico, the National Academy of Design, and at the Art Students League of New York. In 1951 he studied printmaking with Gabor Peterdi at the Brooklyn Museum, and in 1953 he learned to print lithographs from Margaret Lowengrund at Pratt Graphics Center. After mastering this craft, he became a printer in both lithography and intaglio, and printed plates and stones for such artists as David Smith, Kurt Seligman, Enrico Donati, Adolph Gottlieb, Stuart Davis, and others.

A Fulbright Fellowship (1956–58) gave him the opportunity to travel to Norway, where he met and worked with one of the world’s greatest printmakers, Rolf Nesch. Nesch was perhaps the first artist to make intaglio prints from plates on which pieces of metal were soldered. This experience widened the possibilities of printmaking for Ponce de Leon.

M ichael taught printmaking at Pratt Institute and at the Art Students League for many years, and at Cooper Union, Columbia University, and Hunter College. His work is represented in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA , the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. He wrote:

My approach to teaching is as free as the human spirit and as complex as life. But in teaching, the how has little relevance to the why. Technique to me arises from a unique and personal aestheticism. With the process understood, the student may discover his personal technique and through it a fresher vision and his own voice […] To me, a work of art is like a gong and a hammer. Craft, materials, and tools

in one hand, and visions and ideas in the other. By themselves they are mere potentials, but when we strike them together in a single moment of totality, we get a profound reverberation, a release of the spirit, a truth beyond appearance.

R hythms, vibrations, and the life forces of the universe are our rich reservoir of creative energies; while symbols, ideas and beliefs are our vehicles of growth and change. By wedding his opposing words, emotion, and reason, conscious and subconscious, chaos and order, wisdom and innocence, the child, and the man in the artist merge to form a new creative oneness.

hired to teach printmaking at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I have kept both positions while continuing my own work in my printing studio in Times Square.

P rintmaking is the one medium especially attuned to the sensibilities of our technological age. Through technical processes we educate our senses and discover our actual sense of awareness.

I left Michael’s class in 1984 and took Seong Moy’s night class, where I met more printmakers and opened my horizons further into less representational work. I went on to pursue an MFA at Hunter College. Then, in 1995, Director Rosina Florio hired me to teach printmaking. At last, I was able to continue bringing both traditional and photo processes to League printmakers. Later, in 2001, I also was

My teaching philosophy is to share whatever I learn. I must acquire the latest technologies and adapt them to my classes. Over the years, traditional techniques in printmaking have proven resilient, but materials have improved, becoming less toxic. In the last thirty years, photo-etching techniques have evolved, moving not only from highly toxic to safe materials, but also achieving a much higher level of artistic quality.

I a m proud to teach printmaking at the Art Students League because there I am free to encourage as many techniques and styles as possible. From the historical to the contemporary, we aim to command the highest quality of prints in the most congenial atmosphere.

SYLVIE COVEY

Richard Pousette-Dart

“There is genius in every one of us waiting to be born, to be awakened, and liberated. Everyone needs to adventure to discover his own sensibility and his own form, to begin, no matter how poorly at first, to speak out of his own soul, to make a music of his own sounds, a poem of his own words, a painting of his own lines, colors and forms.”

—Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) implored his students at the Art Students League to “get on the thread of your own being.” His father, Nathaniel PousetteDart, studied briefly at the League with Hermon Atkins MacNeil and was deeply interested in the traditional rigors of art pedagogy. Richard, in contrast, eschewed a formal course of instruction, favoring a self-directed education that yielded a highly individualistic artistic practice. From the outset, he was drawn toward abstraction, first through sculpture, and then through painting and drawing, for which he today is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s leading innovators.

R ichard Pousette-Dart’s passion for teaching—or more rightly, for mentoring emerging artists—was first ignited by an opportunity to present his philosophies of art to students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in January, 1951. This occurred at the exact moment when he and his fellow Abstract Expressionists achieved international fame through the publication of the now-famous “Irascibles” photograph in Life magazine. Addressing aspiring artists in Boston, he proclaimed: “There is genius in every one of us waiting to be born, to be awakened, and liberated.

Everyone needs to adventure to discover his own sensibility and his own form, to begin, no matter how poorly at first, to speak out of his own soul, to make a music of his own sounds, a poem of his own words, a painting of his own lines, colors and forms.” 1

I n 1958 Pousette-Dart began teaching at his home in rural Rockland County, New York, followed by faculty positions at the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Disenchanted with the emphasis on formalized curricula, in 1980, he found his true home at the League, where he taught until his death in 1992. In an interview during this period, PousetteDart underscored the special regard he held for the culture of the Art Students League, as well as his beliefs about the nature of the true artist:

I h ave people at the League who come from all over the world. It’s a nice thing at the League. People who are teaching are there because they want to teach and believe in teaching, and what keeps me teaching there is the fact that the people are exciting and wonderful. I believe not really in teaching, but in creating an environment or condition or atmosphere where people can teach

themselves. I love to see people discover themselves and flower in themselves, and that’s what keeps me teaching.

T he premise of my teaching is that everyone is a genius…. Unfortunately so many people get cut off at their roots by lack of opportunity and miseducation. I think an artist is a child who survives. I think that the artist in terms of being a creative person is the hope of the world. Art is the dynamic balance between the conscious and unconscious—it’s a great balance and one has to bring wholeness to it.

T he Art Students League has much to commend it in that it is a noncredit program—most educational institutions are credit factories.

I think that education is its own reward. I like the freedom. There is great freedom there. 2

CHARLES H. DUNCAN

1. Untitled talk delivered at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 1951. Richard Pousette-Dart papers, 1918–2015, bulk 1930s–1992. The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation.

2. Richard Pousette-Dart interviewed by Richard Kaplan, June 7, 1990 (audiovisual format). Richard Pousette-Dart papers, 1918–2015, bulk 1930s–1992. The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation.

Zhang Hongtu

Zhang’s story is but one example of how the League shaped modern and contemporary American art through policies that attracted and nurtured international talents.

Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) is one of the most significant voices in contemporary American art, whose works in diverse mediums articulate profound ideas about being an immigrant in the United States and living in the intersection of multiple cultures and identities. He has exhibited internationally and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Queens Museum in 2015. His works reside in the collections of such major museums as the Brooklyn Museum, New York, as well as such international private collectors as Charles Saatchi. But before he blossomed into the influential artist he is today, Zhang was a student at the Art Students League of New York.

Z hang grew up as part of the Muslim minority in China, and his family suffered persecution during the regime of Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Zhang’s education at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing was interrupted by government orders to work in the countryside. This was the first of many obstacles that Zhang faced in his pursuit to become an artist.1 To gain agency in directing his studies, he immigrated to the United States in 1982 through his own means, by gaining admission to the Art Students League. 2

T he League’s admission policy reflected a commitment to welcoming international students. Zhang observed that many of his classmates hailed from foreign countries. He also pointed out

that unlike other schools, the League did not require foreign applicants to take the English language test TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). In Zhang’s eyes, the omission of this requirement demonstrated the League’s status as a bona fide art school because it considered visual art as the primary language of instruction. Moreover, the League welcomed past international students back to the school as instructors, as was the case with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who returned to teach and counted renowned artists Louise Nevelson and Marisol as his students.

A recurring theme in Zhang’s recollection is that the League helped him to understand how to work as an artist “in [real] life.” For instance, Zhang’s life drawing and painting classes, which he attended consistently from 1982 to 1986, featured a live model who moved freely until the instructor told them to stop and pose. Each pose lasted ten to twenty minutes only, compelling students to complete their work under time pressure and hone their technical and observational skills. The League also espoused the atelier method of teaching, in which a master artist teaches a small number of students in a workshop or studio setting and gave students the autonomy to choose whom they wanted to study with. Lastly, the term length of one month allowed students to explore a variety of teachers and creative approaches within a short period of time. Zhang praised this pedagogical approach

as greatly beneficial for students. Even though Zhang had the freedom to study with different instructors, there was one artist whom he followed closely: Richard Pousette-Dart, one of the pioneers of the Abstract Expressionist movement, who taught at the League for a decade. Records at the ASL show Zhang taking a course with him every term for three of his four years there. Stylistically, Zhang could not be farther apart from his teacher, but what he most appreciated learning from Pousette-Dart was an understanding of how life is connected to art, how creative inspiration draws from lived experiences. This viewpoint undergirds Zhang’s works, such as the readymade sculpture Ping-Pong Mao (1995), which consists of a table tennis table with cutouts in the shape of Chairman Mao Zedong’s head. To stay in play, players must avoid hitting their balls into those holes. Interacting with the sculpture simulates the experience of living in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Z hang’s story is but one example of how the League shaped modern and contemporary American art through policies that attracted and nurtured international talents. The names of other artists who became significant contributors to the field populate the school’s registration records, including Louise Bourgeois, Carmen Herrera, Yayoi Kusama, and Ai Weiwei.

AILEEN JUNE WANG

1. The stories of Zhang’s years at the League originated from several conversations between the artist, his wife Miaoling, and this author during the first half of 2024. I am grateful to them. A general account of Zhang’s early years in New York is in Jerome Silbergeld, “The Displaced Artist Sees Things for Us: Zhang Hongtu and the Art of Convergence,” in Zhang Hongtu: Expanding Visions of a Shrinking World, ed. by Luchia Meihua Lee and Jerome Silbergeld (New York: Queens Museum 2015), 13–36.

2. Zhang emphasized that this was an important distinction to make. Qinghua University had offered him an opportunity to study in France, but he declined.

William Scharf

American painter William Scharf (1927–2018) had a prolific decades-long career that started at a young age. Growing up in Media, Pennsylvania, he met famous illustrator N.C. Wyeth through a family friend when he was about ten years old. The illustrious Wyeth took Scharf under his wing, supplied him with art materials, and later recommended him for entrance to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied both before and after serving in World War II. Although initially set on becoming an illustrator, Scharf transitioned to painting after seeing works by Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard at the Barnes Foundation in 1947. He continued his studies in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in 1948 and at the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, before landing in New York in 1952. 1

S charf soon got a job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; he said he wanted to work in the museum to be close to the paintings. 2 He began teaching in the early 1960s and developed a passion for it that he carried with him throughout his entire life. In

1963 Scharf joined the staff of the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 1964 he taught at the Art Center of the Museum of Modern Art. In the later 1960s Scharf divided his time between San Francisco and New York City, where he taught at the School of Visual Arts, and in the 1970s he also lectured at Stanford University, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and Pratt Institute.3 He began teaching at the Art

[Scharf’s] imagination would continue to transform his canvases over time, and he often returned to them months, or even years, later to make adjustments. That type of experimentation was what he emphasized in his classrooms—for Scharf, and by extension his students, the journey was the destination.

Students League in 1987 and continued there until 2012. The League’s Executive Director, Rosina Florio, saw Scharf’s one-person exhibition at Saint Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue in New York and called him up for an interview, subsequently offering him the job. 4 For the next quarter of a century Scharf taught a Painting, Color, Design, Composition course at the League. As indicated by his long career at prestigious art schools across the country, Scharf found great satisfaction in helping other artists, and by all accounts he was an extremely popular teacher who inspired countless students over half a century. In his obituary for Scharf, Christopher Rothko wrote that he was “a beloved teacher,” who insisted that

students “always find their own way” and be true to themselves.5

S charf also practiced what he preached, and he spent a lifetime developing a highly personal style and sophisticated philosophy about his own artistic production. He experimented with oil, gouache, and acrylic, creating mysterious and colorful abstractions with layered organic forms and rhythmic movements that provoke the viewer to search for meaning. His imagination would continue to transform his canvases over time, and he often returned to them months, or even years, later to make adjustments. That type of experimentation was what he emphasized in his classrooms—for Scharf, and by extension his students, the journey was the destination. 6

JENNIFER L. STREB

1. William Scharf, interviewed by Robert Telenick, October 22, 2004. The Art Students League archives.

2. William Scharf, Telenick interview.

3. William Scharf, Telenick interview He taught painting and drawing at the SFAI several semesters/summers between 1963 and 1989. Dates of Scharf’s teaching assignments can also be found in William Scharf: Imagining the Actual, exh. cat. (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2016).

4. Solo exhibition, 1987, Saint Peter’s Church, New York. Press release for the exhibition found in William Scharf Art and Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art and Portrait Gallery Library, Washington, DC

5. Christopher Rothko, “William Scharf (1927–2018),” Artforum (Feb. 15, 2018), artforum.com/columns/william-scharf-1927-2018-2-237941/ The sentiments of Rothko were echoed by League colleague Bruce Dorfman, who called Scharf a “caring teacher and mentor.” Former board member Victoria Hibbs affirmed that “Bill loved teaching and respected each student’s style…. He guided you toward your best work.”

6. The phrase “the journey is the destination” appears on a page of Scharf’s handwritten notes. Unpublished materials, Scharf Archives, Pelham, New York.

Jonathan Shahn

Jonathan Shahn (1938–2020), a figurative sculptor of exceptional talent and wideranging intellect, was a longtime beloved instructor at the Art Students League. He taught at the League continuously from 1997 through his retirement in 2017.1 Rising at 5:00 a.m., two days a week, he made the bus trip from his home in Roosevelt, New Jersey, to New York City. He clearly connected to the League—its serious yet informal atmosphere; its open, democratic admission policy; and its diversity of students of various ages hailing from many different places, walks of life, and livelihoods—all motivated to pursue art under the guidance of professional working artists. Shahn took great pleasure in talking with fellow League teachers and students; he found people infinitely interesting and could talk to anyone about anything that interested him. He also loved the energy of New York City, where he enjoyed walking its storied streets, savoring good coffee, buying books, and taking in the latest gallery and museum shows. In many ways, the League—a quintessentially New York institution— embodied much of what Shahn valued.

Trained at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Shahn brought to the League years of experience as a sculptor of the human form and would continue to evolve his practice while teaching. He sculpted for nearly a decade in Rome (1970–79), where he had abundant access to marble and

where he learned from ancient Roman sculpture and modern Italian sculptures by Medardo Rosso and Marino Marini. He completed major public commissions honoring Franklin D. Roosevelt (1962) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010), among others, and exhibited widely. Working in clay, plaster, bronze, terracotta, and wood, Shahn created hundreds of heads of known and imagined people—heads that populated his studio, a former factory from the days when Roosevelt was a New Deal cooperative town for Jewish garment workers. (Shahn grew up there as the son of noted artists Ben and Bernarda Bryson Shahn.) Viewers have found these undramatic heads—whether placed atop totemic columns, under arches, or in carefully lit boxes—endlessly intriguing. Their plain yet enigmatic expressions exude quiet mystery and raise profound artistic questions. 2

S hahn’s morning class at the League, Sculpture: Modeling in Clay and Other Media, was very popular with students, many of whom returned year after year. Coming from France, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and from across the United States, his ever-loyal students remember him as a generous, supportive, and patient teacher—unassuming but gently guiding them to find their own paths. One of his monitors said he changed her life, inspiring her to become a sculptor and teaching her how to look at form—to focus on what the eye sees, not what the mind knows. Another reflected on how he encouraged her to move into

“Jonathan Shahn gives us sculptures of heads that are full of thought and full of life. Some of them are mysterious, reticent, and modest, like the artist. An unusual man, Shahn claims that his work is more interesting than he is.” —Meredith Bergmann

mixed media to explore her conceptual interests and how he instructed students to draw if they were stuck—as drawing for him was akin to thinking. She said he made his students feel professional. Yet another student, who became his friend, fondly recalled the annual Memorial Day party that Shahn organized for his students in Roosevelt, where they marveled at the breadth of his work in his studio. She recounted furtive class trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where

he delighted in cleverly getting around the official procedures for tours in order to show his students relief sculptures. He conducted his class critiques in equally unconventional ways, responding to students’ sculptures subtly and indirectly, as he would wander around the room and strike up casual conversations with each student about broader topics.3

B ecause of Shahn’s understated manner, his sharp mind, keen eye, erudition, and wry sense of humor

ABOVE: JONATHAN SHAHN WITH SELECTED HEADS AT HIS SOLO EXHIBITION AT KORN GALLERY, DREW UNIVERSITY, 2011.

PHOTO BY CHARLOTTE BIALEK OPPOSITE: SHAHN IN THE SCULPTURE STUDIO AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, C. 2000. ARCHIVES OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

were not always immediately apparent. Incredibly articulate about his own art and the art he liked, he was also a tough critic. He drew on a deep knowledge of art history and introduced students to artists he thought could offer inspiration or direction. Without pretension, he could quote philosophers, novelists, and blues musicians, speak fluent Italian (using little Italian proverbs in class!), memorize French poetry, and even parlay his knowledge of German to participate in a Yiddish book club that met after his League class.

A nyone who knew Shahn, including his League colleagues and students, sensed that he shied away from the spotlight, preferring to talk more about his work than himself. Yet the two are hard to separate. As artist Meredith Bergmann wrote: “Jonathan Shahn gives

us sculptures of heads that are full of thought and full of life. Some of them are mysterious, reticent, and modest, like the artist. An unusual man, Shahn claims that his work is more interesting than he is.”4 As to the latter point, those who had the good fortune of spending time with Jonathan Shahn, teaching with him, or studying with him, would beg to differ.5

LAURA KATZMAN

1. According to Jeb Shahn, Jonathan’s widow, who shared invaluable information, Jonathan Shahn was a substitute instructor at the League in 1988 and also at other times. Author’s interview with Jeb Shahn, May 31, 2024.

2. While Shahn should be better recognized, his work is in the National Academy of Design, New Jersey State Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Vatican Museums.

3. Comments are derived from the author’s interviews with Shahn’s former students: Orly Shiv, September 21, 2024; Anna Rabinowitz, September 29, 2024; Alison Shapiro, September 29, 2024; and Charlotte Bialek, October 6, 2024.

4. Meredith Bergmann, “Jonathan Shahn: Thoughts on His Work,” in Jonathan Shahn: Sculpture, 1972–2002, exh. cat. (New York: O’Hara Gallery, 2002), 5.

5. The author conducted many interviews with Jonathan Shahn while researching Ben Shahn for her 1998 PhD dissertation and for subsequent books and exhibition catalogues on Ben Shahn. Although Jonathan Shahn often stated that he knew little about his father’s work, his insights were always remarkably perceptive and illuminating.

Sharon Sprung

Sharon Sprung (b. 1953) views the studio as an immersive cultural space.1 Here, her language is visual; instead of words, she defines aspects of composition. She teaches her students to see and portray their subjects through gesture, anatomy, and mood—her terminology. The canvas is a page, a blank place, where the translation of words to visual art occurs, and Sprung is the interpreter. Her students learn the same observational skills and approaches that she employs in her own paintings.

T he portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in the White House Collection was painted by Sprung in 2018. Its composition offers a parallel between how she creates work as an artist and how she brings those practices into the studio as a teacher. First, Sprung focuses on gesture—an understanding of the sitter’s movements. She believes that without acknowledging gesture, the sitter’s feelings cannot be conveyed. Mrs. Obama sits on the sofa facing the viewer, legs crossed and arms

SHARON SPRUNG, MICHELLE ROBINSON OBAMA , 2018. OIL ON PANEL, 44 × 36 IN. GIFT OF THE WHITE HOUSE ACQUISITION TRUST, 2020, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION/ WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

The First Lady, as portrayed by Sprung, is poised and strong, yet the manner in which she leans and looks at the viewer simultaneously reveals ease and openness.

welcomingly folded. Gesture gives way to the subject’s anatomy, the mechanical aspects that Sprung defines as the body’s architecture. The First Lady, as portrayed by Sprung, is poised and strong, yet the manner in which she leans and looks at the viewer simultaneously reveals ease and openness.

Once Sprung determines the compositional structure of the sitter, she explores color. Her palette establishes the portrayal of the subject and affects the overall mood of the work. Color selection shapes how the viewer experiences the portrait. Specifically, the background influences the entirety of the work’s color scheme. Sprung encourages her students to find a single base color first to set the mood before painting anything else. The portrait of Mrs. Obama unites bold reds and pinks with bright blues. The colors are sophisticated, yet playful, and lead the viewer through the work. The background color flows into the red hues of the sofa, and the blue and white highlights in the folds of her gown move through the lower half of the canvas.

Further exploring color, Sprung places special emphasis on her subject’s flesh tone. For her, the correct depiction of this physical aspect is one way she communicates the sitter’s personality. She teaches her students to aim for matched perfection with this element. Sprung brought numerous color samples with her

when working with the First Lady outside of her personal studio, so that she could accurately match her flesh tones and begin to tell the story of this famous subject via her canvas.

Movement is a theme throughout the composition. Sprung aims to capture the entirety of the subject into the viewer’s line of sight by ensuring that the architectural components of their body work together— hand placement as it relates to the bend of an elbow, for example. Achieving the correct interpretation of movement brings the painting together. She finds this overall composition to be the leading factor in creating “good” art.2

Sprung teaches her students to understand viewer perspective, to identify perceptions and recognize slight differences in their subjects, and to decipher personality from the inside out. By transforming graphic concepts into artwork, her pupils will write the story of the sitter with their own visual language, a unique language composed and defined by Sprung and shared with those who immerse themselves in the culture of her studio.

NICOLETTE HARLETH

1. For the purposes of this entry, unless otherwise noted, “studio” references the spaces where Sprung teaches at the Art Students League of New York instead of her personal studio; Sharon Sprung, email message to author, June 11, 2024.

2. The information pertaining to Sprung’s artistic process was discussed with the artist via phone; Sharon Sprung, telephone interview by author, April 29, 2024.

Acknowlegments

I’m deeply grateful to Robin Lechter Frank, President of the Art Students League’s Board of Control; Michael Hall, Artistic/ Executive Director; and the Board’s members for their unwavering support over the three years that the 150 Stories project has been in development.

T hank you to all the contributors who accepted the invitation to join this historic collaborative endeavor, embracing its unusual parameters and offering fresh insights, vivid details, and compelling narratives that have brought artists’ experiences at the Art Students League to life in these entries. Your brilliance, scholarship, ingenuity, and efforts inspired me throughout the project.

Special thanks to Ruth Fine, Chair of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and Nancy G. Heller, Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, for their thoughtful, incisive suggestions on a draft of the introduction; Christina Weyl, independent scholar, for her expertise on American printmakers and making introductions to scholars in the field; Sara W. Duke, Curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art, Library of Congress, for helping spread the word about the project to scholars of comic art; Jeff Fontana, the Harry E. Smith Distinguished Teaching Professor in Art History in the Department of

Art and Art History at Austin College, and Roberta K. Tarbell, Professor Emerita, Rutgers University, Camden, for their collegiality and generous support throughout the long, complex process of editing this anthology.

T he exceptional team behind the design of this book, Reed Seifer and Chris Burnside showed sensitivity to the project’s aims and, reading every word of its text, handled the artwork, photographs, and documents with great finesse in beautifully composed spreads. Martin L. Fox, the project’s copy editor, was a steadfast and perceptive reader whose light touch offered constructive suggestions and refinements to ensure accuracy and clarity throughout the book. Thank you to Mark L. Hineline, the book’s indexer, for his speed and attention to detail.

O n behalf of the Art Students League, I thank the institutions, artist foundations, artists, private collectors, and families who have generously provided images and permissions for this book: Sarah Auld, Tony Smith Estate; Jeannot R. Barr, Jeannot R. Barr Fine Prints & Drawings; Erin Beasley, National Portrait Gallery; Madelyn Berezov, the Perle Fine and Maurice Berezov Legacies; Kathryn M. Blackwell, SaintGaudens National Historical Park; Jonathan Boos, Jonathan Boos Gallery; Marisa Bourgoin and Josh T. Franco, Archives of American Art; Veronica Brusilovski, The Wylie Agency;

Lynn Caponera and Jonathan Weinberg, PhD, The Maurice Sendak Foundation; Selena Capraro, Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Caitlyn Carl, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, New Mexico History Museum; Melissa Celona and Erin Robin, Delaware Art Museum; Robert Cenedella, ASL Instructor; Leslie Chang; David Charlot; Susan Cirigliano, ASL Instructor; Christiane Citron; Cynthia Clabough, Professor, Graphic Design & Illustration, SUNY Oswego; Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, Barnett Newman Foundation; Carolyn Cruthirds, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Helen de Keijzer; Pamela Demme, Ellen Drew, Downeast Graphics and Printing, Inc.; Monica Espinel and Grace Leonhardt, Lisson Gallery; Rachel Federman, Betty Parsons Foundation; Mary Anne and Eugene A. Gargaro, Jr.; Jack and Kristi Garrity, Pacita Abad Art Estate; Emma Halm, The Ohio State University; Julia Hayes, Toledo Museum of Art; Peter Huestis, National Gallery of Art; Nicole Delfino Jansen, Minnesota Museum of American Art; Gregory Jallat, The Phillips Collection; Sophie Jones, Art Resource; Peggy Kinstler, Kate Fuertes, and Dane Kinstler; James Kohler, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Anna Kupik and Hillary Dunn, International Hildreth Meière Association; Sofía Galarza Liu and Isabella Dino, Spencer Museum of Art; Dan Munn, Director of Communications, Michael

Rosenfeld Gallery LLC; Anne Mason and Scott Mason; Sherrie McGraw, former ASL Instructor; Djelloul Marbrook; Joan Marter, Dorothy Dehner Foundation; Cristina Meisner, Harry Ransom Center; Rachel Middleman, Anita Steckel Estate; Kenta Murakami, Ortuzar Projects; Julia Murphy, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Melanie Neil, Chrysler Museum of Art; Kira Nußbaum, Zander Galerie; Liz O’Brien, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; Stephanie A. Patterson, Family Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith; Anthony Pham, Getty Research Institute; Allen Phillips, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Kristen Regina, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ron Rumford, Director, Dolan/Maxwell; Benjamin Shepard, Wright’s Media; Christian Siekmeier, EXILE; Luke Smith-Stevens, The Estate of David Smith; Margaret Smithglass, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University; Michael Somple, Munson; Riche Sorensen, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Jenny Sponberg, Curtis Galleries, Inc.; Tracey Schuster, Head of Permissions and Photo Archive Services, Getty Research Institute; Susan Teller, Susan Teller Gallery; Hoang Tran, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Britta Traub, Rights Manager for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Malia Van Heukelem, Jean Charlot Collection and Archive of Hawai ‘ i Artists & Architects, University of Hawai ‘ i at Mānoa Library; Gabriel

Quintero Velasquez, President/ CEO, Avenida Guadalupe Association; Andrea Walsh, Judd Foundation; Ronald Warman, Morris Warman Photography; Christopher Whitten, Asheville Art Museum; Blair Williams, The Art Spirit Gallery; Gwenolee Zürcher and Natalie Preston, Zürcher Gallery.

M any people at the Art Students League contributed to this project in various ways. In Archives and Library: Caroline Ongpin, Jessica Angamarca, and Jason Colella, Research Assistants, Maureen Guinan Fitzgerald; in Gallery and Collection: Anki King, former Associate Gallery Director, and Tiffany Miller, Permanent Collection and Exhibition Registrar; in Finance: Kathleen Hayes, Chief Financial Officer, Rajdai Hardowar, Director of Finance, and Carlos Arteaga, Controller; in Development, Ginevra Shay, former Manager of Institutional Giving, and Patrick Grenier, Manager of Institutional Giving; in Administration: Astrid Rodriguez, Manager of Administrative Services; in Marketing and Communications: JJ Loonam, Director of Marketing and Communications, Andrew Drilon, Communications Associate/Content Producer; Jennifer Liu, Marketing Manager, Rudy Bravo, Digital Communications Manager; in Programming: Eva Avenue, Member Services Manager, and Demion Riddick, Studio

Manager, Monitor and Model Services; in Facilities, Kenneth David, Director of Facilities, Samuel Handler, and Martin Robinson. Ongoing generative conversations about the Art Students League’s history with Instructors Bruce Dorfman and Costa Vavagiakis enriched the project in many ways. Jerry N. Weiss, Instructor, and Ephraim Rubenstein, Instructor Emeritus, offered constructive suggestions on an early project prospectus.

A g rant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art generously supported this book. Receiving this award, the Art Students League’s first for a scholarly project, provided vital funding and an affirmation of its interest to a broader audience.

My dearest friends, Tatiana van Riemsdijk, a fellow historian, and Miriam Engstrom, offered good humor and reminders to take the long view. Finally, thank you to my husband, James Harrington, who is my own Art Students League love story, and daughter, Amelia, for their boundless support and patience with my career-long fascination with the Art Students League of New York.

Author

ASIA ADOMANIS is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at the Ohio State University with research interests in modern American art, Asian American artists, global modernism, and modern Chinese art. Asia’s dissertation focuses on the relationship between abstraction, race, and the politics of style in the work of Chinese American artists active during the Cold War.

KIMBERLEY AHARA is the owner of Q Antiques and Design in Los Angeles, California. She contributed to The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann (2011) after completing her master’s thesis, “Marie Zimmermann: Master of a Dozen Crafts,” for the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She worked previously with Gem Antiques and Swann Galleries in New York City and the National Museum of the United States Navy in Washington, DC

KATIE ANANIA is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art, particularly art as a way of knowing throughout the Americas. Her book, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America (2024), examines the ties between drawing and artists’ understanding of their surroundings inside and outside scientific templates. She is currently an assistant professor of art history at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

JENNY ANGER is Professor of Art History at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her research has long focused on deconstructing modernist myths, especially those related to gender. She is currently editing a volume, tentatively titled Surrealist Women Artists with Mental Illness (expected 2026).

MARY JANE APPEL is a historian of American social documentary photography, the author of Russell Lee: A Photographer’s Life and Legacy (2021), and coauthor of American Coal: Russell Lee Portraits (2024). Appel has worked with image collections in archival and curatorial capacities at institutions including the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and

Texas State University. She lives in Washington, DC

ELISE ARMANI is a PhD candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University, where she is writing a dissertation on transnational networks of immigrant and diasporic artists on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (1975–1989). She was a 2023–24 History of Art and Visual Culture Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has contributed to curatorial projects at TANK Shanghai, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum, and recently cocurated Revisiting 5+1 (2023) at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, presented in partnership with the MFA Boston.

SARAH C. BANCROFT is an art historian who has held curatorial roles at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art. She curated major traveling exhibitions, including James Rosenquist: A Retrospective for the Guggenheim Museum (2003), Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series (2012) for OCMA , and other national and international projects. Bancroft served as the Executive Director of the James Rosenquist Foundation, and as President of the board of directors of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation.

KIKI BARNES is a doctoral candidate completing her dissertation at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, on landscapes of the Americas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has been a Curatorial Intern at the American Federation of Arts and Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

SAMANTHA BASKIND is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Cleveland State University, series editor of Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination (Pennsylvania State University Press), and a museums correspondent at Smithsonian magazine. She is the

author of five books and over 100 articles, including Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art (2004).

TONY BECHARA is an artist born in Puerto Rico who lives and works in New York City. Beyond his artistic career, Bechara has a strong commitment to community service, serving as executor of the Estate of Carmen Herrera as well as the Chairman Emeritus on the board of El Museo del Barrio. He also serves on the boards of Studio in a School and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

DANIEL BELASCO is an art historian and Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation. He is a former curator of the Jewish Museum, New York, and Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, and the author of Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (2024). Recent publications include essays in the catalogues Al Held (2021), Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (2023), and Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection (2023).

BARBARA J. BLOEMINK is an art historian and former director and chief curator of five museums, including the GuggenheimHermitage Museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Smithsonian National Design Museum. Her publications include Florine Stettheimer: A Biography (2022), Spill: Daniel Beltrá & The Gulf Horizon Oil Spill (2015), Esteban Lisa: Playing with Lines and Colors (2012), Design Does Not Equal Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread (2004), Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation (2002), and Re-Righting History: Contemporary African American Artists (1999). Bloemink earned her PhD from Yale University.

SUZAAN BOETTGER is an art historian, critic, and lecturer in New York City. She is the author of Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (2002), a contextualized history of the land art movement. Her biography Inside the Spiral:

The Passions of Robert Smithson (2023) discloses the extent of Smithson’s formerly unknown career as a figurative painter and the hidden symbols in his imagery and earthworks, expanding his art historical, personal, and sexual identities.

TRACY BONFITTO, a curator of art, is responsible for research, access, and interpretation of the Ransom Center’s art collection. Bonfitto holds a PhD in Art History from UCLA , and her recent exhibitions include Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds (2024) and Art in Words: Prints from the 20th Century to Today (2024). She has curated exhibitions at the Ransom Center, the Fowler Museum at UCLA , and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.

ALEXIS L. BOYLAN is a professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Visual Culture (2020), Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man (2017), coauthor of Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road (2020), and editor of Thomas Kinkade, The Artist in the Mall (2011) and Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender, Art, and Business (2020).

MICHAEL BURBAN is a New Yorkbased artist who works in drawing, painting, and installation media. In addition to the Art Students League of New York, he has taught and lectured at the National Academy of Design, Cooper Union, and Columbia University, and has also coordinated painting and drawing workshops in the United States and abroad. His book Lessons from Michelangelo (1986) was published by Watson-Guptill. He has exhibited at several New Yorkarea galleries, and his drawings are in many private collections.

STEPHANIE CASSIDY is the Head of Research and Archives at the Art Students League of New York and founding editor of its journal LINEA

ROBERT CENEDELLA is one of many artists whose life has, in one way or another, revolved around the Art Students League of New York. He was

first a student in George Grosz’s life drawing class in 1957 and became an instructor of that same class from 1988 to 2020. He is a life member of the Art Students League of New York.

LUKAS CHARLES is a longtime student at the Art Students League, portrait painter, and physician.

WEN-SHING CHOU is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Chou’s book, Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain (2018), explores the transformation of China’s preeminent pilgrimage mountain during the Qing dynasty. Chou cocurated and coedited C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction (2023).

EILEEN COSTELLO was the Project Director for Ellsworth Kelly Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture (2015–), Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing (2018), Brice Marden (2013), and Jackson Pollock and Tony Smith Sculpture (2012).

SYLVIE COVEY was born and raised in Paris, France. She moved to New York in 1978 and established a printmaking studio on Times Square, where she continues to live and produce all types of prints. She teaches printmaking at the Art Students League of New York and at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Covey has exhibited in the United States, France, Slovenia, Poland, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, and Japan. She is a member of Noho M55 Gallery and the Old Printshop Gallery, New York.

ROBERT COZZOLINO is an independent art historian, critic, and curator based in Minneapolis. He frequently collaborates with contemporary artists and communities to examine history and its perpetual impact on the present. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021), World War I and American Art (2016), Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (2014), and David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014).

SUSAN BRAEUER DAM is the Director of Research and Publications at the Calder Foundation in New York. For the last twenty years, she has worked as an associate editor on projects such as Calder Jewelry (2007) and Calder in France (2015). Dam regularly writes articles on Calder’s work for exhibition catalogues, monographs, and journals.

DONNA DENNIS is known for her complex sculptural installations with sound. She has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Neuberger Museum, and participated in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. Dennis also has collaborated with poets Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Daniel Wolff, and Ted Berrigan, and with performance artist/puppeteer Dan Hurlin.

BRUCE DORFMAN has been exhibited and collected internationally and is the recipient of many awards and grants. He has also taught at many museums and universities worldwide, most especially, sixty years—to date, since 1964, at the Art Students League of New York. He studied during 1949 and 1951–52 at the League with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Arnold Blanch, and Charles H. Alston, continuing his studies from 1954 through 1958 at the University of Iowa with Mauricio Lasansky, Stuart Edie, and historian Roy Seiber.

ERIKA DOSS is a Distinguished Chair in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her books include Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy (1995), Looking at Life Magazine (editor, 2001), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), American Art of the 20th–21st Centuries (2017), and Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (2023).

LINDA DOWNS is a retired art historian and art museum director whose positions included Curator of Education at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Director of Education at the

National Gallery of Art, Director of the Figge Art Museum, and Director and CEO of the College Art Association. She is the author of Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (1999), as well as exhibition catalogues and essays on artists and museum education.

STEFFI IBIS DUARTE is a curator, design historian, and member of the Modern Design Program at Manitoga/the Russel Wright Design Center in upstate New York. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London and has worked for curatorial departments at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum.

CHARLES H. DUNCAN is the Executive Director of the Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation.

ELLEN EAGLE studied with Harvey Dinnerstein from 1994 to 2002. When Harvey semi-retired from the League, he recommended Ellen to carry on in his place. She has been a faculty member for nineteen years and is the author of Pastel Painting Atelier (2013).

PHILIP I. ELIASOPH is Special Assistant to the President for Arts and Culture and Professor of Art History at Fairfield University, Connecticut. He wrote his doctoral dissertation “Paul Cadmus: Life and Work” (1979) and organized a national touring Cadmus retrospective (1981–82). He has also authored monographs on Colleen Browning, Adolf Dehn, and Robert Remsen Vickrey. Philip’s grandmother, Paula Eliasoph (1895–1983) was a life member of the ASL and worked closely with Childe Hassam at his West 57th Street studio between 1926 and 1935.

JACK FARAGASSO enrolled in the Art Students League of New York after his discharge from the US Army and completed his artistic training by frequenting museums throughout the United States and Europe. He taught at the Art Students League for forty-eight years, serving as reference teacher for the Reilly method, to which he added his own principles.

He is the author of The Student’s Guide to Painting (1979/2020) and Mastering Drawing: The Human Figure from Life, Memory, Imagination (1998).

RACHEL FEDERMAN is an art historian with over a decade of experience as a curator. She has organized exhibitions of the work of Bruce Conner, Maurice Sendak, Rick Barton, Bridget Riley, and Helène Aylon, and has published essays on Paul McCarthy, Allen Ruppersberg, Betye Saar, and Jay DeFeo, among others. She is currently writing a biography of American artist and art dealer Betty Parsons. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

ELIZABETH FERRER is a New York-based curator and writer specializing in Latinx and Mexican art and photography. She is author of the 2021 Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021). Her 2024 exhibition on the Chicanx photographer Louis Carlos Bernal at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, was accompanied by a monograph published by Aperture.

JENNIFER FIELD is the Executive Director of the Estate of David Smith. She has held curatorial and research positions at Di Donna Galleries, the Willem de Kooning Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She received her MA from Hunter College and her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

RUTH FINE was a curator for the National Gallery of Art for forty years. Upon leaving Washington she organized Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in 2015; and wrote for Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s 2023 exhibition, Norman Lewis: Give Me Wings to Fly. Fine chairs the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and is a consultant for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

JEFFREY M. FONTANA holds the Harry E. Smith Distinguished Teaching Professorship in Art History

at Austin College. His research focuses on topics related to drawing, and is split between the Italian Renaissance and instructors and students at the Art Students League, particularly George B. Bridgman. His articles have appeared in The Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, LINEA , and in Patronage and Dynasty: The Rise of the della Rovere in Renaissance Italy (2007).

LAUREL GARBER is the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she works with the collection of modern and contemporary works on paper. Her recent exhibition projects include Wanda Gág: Art for Life’s Sake (2025), Mary Cassatt at Work (2024), and Emma Amos: Color Odyssey (2021). She received her PhD at Northwestern University with a dissertation on the history of etching and monotype in nineteenth-century Paris.

CHRIS GILBERT is Associate Professor of English in Communication and Media at Assumption University. He is the author of Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (2021), the forthcoming book When Comedy Goes Wrong (Indiana University Press), and numerous articles, and is coeditor of the forthcoming volume Pleasure and Pain in U.S. Public Culture (University of Alabama Press).

JANN HAYNES GILMORE focuses her research on forgotten American women artists. She is the author of seven books including an awardwinning scholarly biography of Olive Rush (2016). As a board member of American Women Artists, she writes a bimonthly blog on rediscovered American women artists and patrons.

SARAH GOETHE-JONES is a fashion historian, stylist, and costume designer. She holds a degree from Parsons New School of Design in New York. She has written for Norman Rockwell Museum’s Illustration History website and Dismantle Magazine, and served as a research fellow of fashion illustration at Norman Rockwell Museum’s Center for American Visual Studies.

LINDA M. GRASSO is professor of English at York College, City University of New York, and also holds faculty appointments in the Liberal Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Biography and Memoir programs at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Equal Under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and TwentiethCentury Feminism (2017), The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820–1860 (2002), and numerous essays about US women’s literature and culture.

ALLISON GREEN is a researchbased artist, writer, and League student. Her work as a costume artist has appeared in Broadway and off-Broadway productions since 2017, and her work as a sculptor and fabricator has been featured on television like Sesame Street and additional projects for stage, screen, and installation. Her writing has been published by The Brooklyn Rail , Tussle magazine, and other online forums.

CHRISTOPHER T. GREEN is a New York-area based writer and art historian whose research, curating, and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art, Native North American art and material culture, and primitivisms of the historic and neo-avant-garde. He recently curated Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art (2024) at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He currently serves as visiting assistant professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College.

THIERRY GREUB is a Professor at the Department of Art History at the University of Cologne. He has held positions as Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Studies Morphomata at the University of Cologne and as Senior Scientist at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies | University of Art and Design Linz in Vienna. His publications include three books on Cy Twombly: (Ed.), Cy Twombly. Image, Text, Paratext (2017); Das ungezähmte Bild. Texte zu Cy Twombly (2017); and Cy Twombly. Inscriptions, Vol. I–VI (2022).

KAITLIN HALLORAN is the Associate Curator and Publications Manager at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. Halloran has worked on corresponding exhibition catalogues for James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing (2023) and Artists Choose Parrish (2024). Most recently, Halloran curated Across the Avenues: Fairfield Porter in New York (2024), which featured twenty-seven paintings and prints from the museum’s permanent collection showcasing the artist’s cityscapes from 1942 through the 1970s.

NICOLETTE HARLETH is the Associate Curator of Fine Arts in the Office of the White House Curator. Prior to joining the Executive Residence in 2018, she worked with the fine arts collection at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC

HELEN A. HARRISON , who recently retired as director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York, attended the Art Students League as a teenager. A former New York Times art critic and NPR arts commentator, she is the author of Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (with Constance Ayers Denne, 2002), monographs on Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers, and four mystery novels set in the New York art world—one of them at the League.

NANCY G. HELLER is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her principal books are the 4th revised-and-expanded edition of Women Artists: An Illustrated History (2003) and Why a Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art (2002). A longtime flamenco student, teacher, performer, lecturer, and author, Dr. Heller wrote the catalogue essay on music and dance for the National Gallery’s 2022–23 exhibition, Sargent and Spain

JANET BERRY HESS received her Masters degree from Columbia, her PhD from Harvard, and her law degree from the University of Iowa. She has published widely on liberation-era

cultures in Africa, the diaspora, and Native America. Dr. Hess has received numerous grants from the NEH and NEA supporting Native speakers and institutions; she received the 2022 Excellence in Scholarship award from Sonoma State University.

ELSIE HEUNG works in philanthropy and is an independent art historian who received her PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has worked extensively on Theresa Bernstein and is a contributor to Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art (2013).

SANFORD HIRSCH is the Executive Director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. He has organized numerous exhibitions and has written and lectured extensively on Gottlieb and his art. Hirsch began working with the Gottlieb Foundation in 1976 and has helped develop the Foundation’s grant programs, collection management, and exhibition program.

MARGI HOFER , an independent curator specializing in American decorative arts, is Executive Director of the Coby Foundation and museum director emerita of the New-York Historical Society. Her publications include Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman (with Roberta J. M. Olson, 2016); Stories in Sterling: Three Centuries of Silver in New York (2011); and A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls (with Nina Gray and Martin Eidelberg, 2007). She is the author of a forthcoming article on the pottery of Charles Volkmar and Kate Cory.

JESSICA S. HONG is Chief Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. She was previously Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art, and Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Hong has contributed to publications including Where is Art?: Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art

(2024), Marisol: A Retrospective (2023), Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts (2021), Huma Bhabha: They Live (2019), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist (2017), among others.

ELIZABETH B. HOPKIN has an MA in art history, specializing in American modernism. She worked at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio for over twenty years, both as a registrar and editor. With the opening of the Museum’s new George Bellows Study Center, Hopkin enjoyed the opportunity to support and expand research into one of Ohio’s favorite sons. She wishes to thank Marianne S. and Michael Kearney, and Laurie Booth, Bellows’s grandchildren, for their generosity with family stories.

KATHLEEN L. HOUSLEY is the author of Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine (2005) and Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on the Cusp (2001). She teaches in the Wasch Center Seminars at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

HELEN HSU is the Associate Curator for Research at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

ERICA MOIAH JAMES is an art historian, curator, and Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami whose research centers on indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and the African Diaspora. Her book After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary (2025) is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

DIAN JORDAN is the Harold Stevenson biographer, archivist, and curator for Art in Community: The Harold Stevenson Collection (2020).

ROBIN OWEN JOYCE is the Assistant Curator of Academic Engagement at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he cocurated Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA (2024).

He received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

ANNA KATZ is Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where her recent exhibitions include Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 (2024), MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (2023), Long Story Short (2023), Judith F. Baca: World Wall (2022), Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor (2021), and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019), which traveled to the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2021. She holds a PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

LAURA KATZMAN is professor of art history at James Madison University and a scholar of twentieth-century documentary photography on the continental United States and in Puerto Rico. She served as guest curator of the retrospective, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2023–24), and as lead author of its exhibition catalogue. Katzman is editor of The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano (2023); principal author of Reviewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam (2014); and coauthor of the award-winning Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times (2000).

WILLIAM B. KELLER , son of Deane Keller and brother of Deane Galloway Keller, is the former Fine Arts Librarian, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

PAT KIRKHAM is Professor of Design History, Kingston University, London, Professor Emerita, Bard Graduate Center, New York, and Associate Research Fellow, Cinema and Television History Research Institute, De Montfort University, Leicester. Writing on design, film, and gender, her publications include Saul Bass, A Life in Film and Design (with Jennifer Bass, 2011) and Charles and Ray Eames

and Hollywood: Design, Film, and Friendships, 1941–1988 (forthcoming).

PAMELA N. KOOB was curator of the permanent collection and exhibitions at the Art Students League from 1998 to 2013. She holds an MA in twentiethcentury American Art. With William C. Agee she coauthored Max Weber and American Cubism (2023).

GREGG KREUTZ studied at the Art Students League from 1973 to 1976. He won a Merit Scholarship there and studied with Frank Mason, Robert Beverly Hale, and David A. Leffel. He has taught at the Art Students League since 1986. He is the author of two bestselling painting books—Problem Solving for Oil Painters (1997) and most recently Oil Painting Essentials (2016), both published by Watson-Guptill.

LAUREN KROIZ is an Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era (2018) and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (2012).

JANA LA BRASCA is a researcher, writer, and doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in modern and contemporary art. She was curatorial researcher for the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art (2023–24) at the Nasher Sculpture Center and will be in residence at the Menil Drawing Institute and the Smithsonian American Art Museum during the 2024–25 academic year. Previously, she was a curatorial fellow at the Blanton Museum of Art and the catalogue raisonné research fellow at Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and New York.

STEPHANIE LAKE is the fifth scholar in the world to earn a PhD in the History of Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture. She is a noted jewelry designer, curator, and fashion designer Bonnie Cashin’s sole heir. As owner of Cashin’s personal design

archive, Lake authored Bonnie Cashin: Chic is Where You Find It (2016) and regularly collaborates on projects celebrating the designer’s legacy.

VALERIE ANN LEEDS is an independent scholar and curator specializing in the work of Robert Henri and his circle. She previously held curatorial positions at the Flint Institute of Arts, Orlando Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art. She has organized more than forty exhibitions, served as guest curator for museums and galleries around the country, and published and lectured widely.

EMILY LENZ is Director and Partner at D. Wigmore Fine Art, specializing in twentieth-century American art. She has written on Irene Rice Pereira, Charles Green Shaw, and other early members of American Abstract Artists for gallery publications and magazine articles.

JENNIFER LI is a professional artist who lives in Kalispell, Montana. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Montana. She studied painting for twelve years at the Art Students League of New York, earning a Certificate in Fine Arts Painting. She is an Adjunct Professor of Art at Flathead Valley Community College and the Director of the Wanda Hollensteiner Art Gallery.

ANGELINA LIPPERT is the Chief Curator and Director of Content of Poster House in New York City, the first museum in the United States dedicated to the art and history of the poster. She holds an MA in the art of the Russian avant-garde from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is the author of The Art Deco Poster (2023), coauthor of Wonder City of the World: New York City Travel Posters (2024), and has written for Muse by Clios as well as the New York Journal of Books

JOSÉ E. LIMÓN is the Notre Dame Foundation Professor of American

Literature Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. His book The Streets of Laredo: Texas Modernity and Its Discontents was published in 2025 by Texas A&M University Press.

ALICIA G. LONGWELL is Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Curator Emeritus at the Parrish Art Museum, where she served as Chief Curator for 38 years. She is the author of William Merritt Chase: A Life in Art (2014) and Photographs from the William Merritt Chase Archives at the Parrish Art Museum (with Ronald Pisano, 1992). She received her PhD in 2007 for her work on John. D. Graham in the 1920s and ’30s.

CAROLINE LUCE is Project Director with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the Chief Curator of Mapping Jewish LA , a project of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, where she authored a digital exhibit about Hugo Ballin’s work. Her book, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor, and Culture in Los Angeles, is forthcoming from NYU Press.

ABIGAIL MCEWEN is associate professor of Latin American art history at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching interests span the modern Americas, with emphasis on the art of twentieth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico, the transnational history of abstraction, and the postwar avantgarde. Recent publications include Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (2016), Concrete Cuba: Cuban Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s (2016), and catalogue essays on Agustín Cárdenas, Zilia Sánchez, and Joaquín Torres-García.

CAITLIN MCGURK is the Curator of Comics and Cartoon Art at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and Associate Professor at the Ohio State University. McGurk’s scholarship and exhibitions center around the work of women in comics, alternative and underground comics, and early American comic strips. Her book, Tell

Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund was published in 2024.

MARY BETH MCKENZIE is a painting instructor at the Art Students League of New York since 1994, and she also taught at the National Academy of Design from 1981 until it closed. She was elected to the National Academy in 1994. Her work is included in many museum collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, among others.

LEONARD S. MARCUS is a historian, exhibition curator, and educator, and one of the world’s leading writers about children’s books and the people who create them. His books include Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (1999) and Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (2000). He lives in Brooklyn.

BRYAN MARTIN is an editor, art critic, and art historian based in New York City whose writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. His concentration is on the intersection between disability and outsider art.

KATE MEYER is Curator of Works on Paper at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. Her publications include The Prints of Mary Huntoon (2021), Larry Schwarm: Kansas Farmers (2018), and C. A. Seward: Artist and Draftsman (2011).

MATTHEW VILLAR MIRANDA (he/they/siya) is Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In their former position as Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they worked on exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Pao Houa Her, Paul Chan, and Pacita Abad. They serve on the Board of Stakeholders of Museums Moving Forward (MMF).

RAMEY MIZE is Associate Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. She specializes in art of the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on cultural exchange and expressions of place. Her recent exhibitions include Passages in American Art (2023), Jeremy Frey: Woven (2024), and Peggy Bacon: Biting, never Bitter (2024). She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

ANNE MONAHAN is an independent art historian and curator with a focus on modern and contemporary art. She is the author of Horace Pippin, American Modern (2020) and Faith Ringold: Die (2018), and her research has been published in Art Journal, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Nka, edited volumes, and museum catalogues.

ERIN MONROE is the Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2007 and led the American art department since 2016. She holds an MA in art history from Hunter College, City University of New York.

DEBORAH DASH MOORE is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She specializes in twentieth-century urban Jewish history. Her recent book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (2023) won a National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.

WILLIAM D. MOORE is an American Studies scholar with a joint appointment as Associate Professor of American Material Culture in the Department of History of Art & Architecture and the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University. Shaker Fever: America’s Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect (2020) is his most recent book.

JOANNE B. MULCAHY is a writer and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. Her essays and interviews have appeared in numerous journals

including Hyperallergic, The Writer’s Chronicle, and the Women’s Review of Books. She is the author of Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz (2011), Writing Abroad: A Guide for Travelers (with Peter Chilson, 2017), and the forthcoming Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait (2025).

CHRISTINE CRAFTS NEAL joined the art history faculty at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2000 after earning her PhD in art history from the University of Missouri. Her publications include “Bringing French Modernism to Singapore: Nanyang Painter Georgette Chen,” French Cultural Studies (December 2022), “The White-Gloved Maverick: Ellamae Ellis League (1899–1991), An Architect from Macon, Georgia,” Arris: Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (Fall 2022) and “Leila Ross Wilburn,” Dynamic National Archive, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (November 2020).

PAULA NELSON spent the summer of 1966 studying with Robert Angeloch at the Woodstock Summer School after two years at the Art Students League in New York. Like so many others, she is still there. In 1968, Nelson became assistant registrar in the Woodstock office, and subsequently helped Angeloch form the Woodstock School of Art, offering instruction to students during the winter when the League was closed. In addition to becoming a painter and printmaker, she became League registrar until it left town in 1979, and then became President and Director of the WSA, assuming the title of Advisor upon her retirement.

JACQUE NODELL , author of How to Go Steady: Timeless Dating Advice, Wisdom, and Lessons from Vintage Romance Comics and the historian behind Sequential Crush has a background in museum curation and comics. She has written articles for various academic encyclopedias and textbooks, including Icons of the American Comic Book and Comics Through Time, as well as forewords and afterwords for Dark Horse and Oni Comics . Her most recent publication is a chapter in the Eisner Award-nominated collection Desegregating Comics: Debating

Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023).

PATRICIA MARROQUIN NORBY (P’urhépecha) is Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and former director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

KSENIA NOURIL is the Assistant Director of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art. From 2022 to 2025, she was the Gallery Director and Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Art Students League of New York. Nouril holds an MA and PhD in Art History from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

MONICA OBNISKI is a design historian and curator, currently at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where she is responsible for collecting, exhibiting, and programming a global collection of design, which includes a yearly architectural piazza commission. Obniski received an MA from the Bard Graduate Center and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has held curatorial posts at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JOAN PACHNER specializes in modern American and European sculpture. She authored the Tony Smith Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné (MIT Press, 2024) and was a curatorial consultant and catalogue coauthor for Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor (1998), the artist’s first museum retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She has also published and lectured extensively on the work of David Smith, as well as Anthony Caro, George Segal, and Christopher Wilmarth.

STEPHANIE HABOUSH

PLUNKETT is the Chief Curator and Rockwell Center Director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, and the curator of many exhibitions relating to Norman Rockwell and the art of illustration, including What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD

Magazine (2024); Tony Sarg: Genius at Play (2023); Imprinted: Illustrating Race (2022); Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms (2018); Inventing America: Rockwell and Warhol (2017); and The Unknown Hopper: Edward Hopper as Illustrator (2014).

AUSTIN PORTER is Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at Kenyon College. He coedited Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949 (2020).

VEERLE POUPEYE is a BelgianJamaican art historian, curator, and critic specialized in art from the Caribbean. Her past professional associations include the National Gallery of Jamaica, where she served as Executive Director from 2009 to 2018 and previously as a curator, and the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, where she lectured until 2022. Her publications include Caribbean Art, of which the second revised and expanded edition was published in 2022 by Thames and Hudson.

KIMBERLY RANDALL is the Collections Manager for the Textiles Department at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She was the curator of the exhibition Sophia Crownfield: Drawn from Nature (2022). Her essay on designer Marion V. Dorn was included in the 2020 publication E. McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in Advertising.

SHIRLEY REECE-HUGHES is Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. ReeceHughes organized and edited the exhibition catalogue for The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury (2023) and authored Texas Made Modern: The Art of Everett Spruce (2020). Reece-Hughes has contributed essays to publications including Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables (2017), A New American Sculpture, 1914–1945, Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman, and Zorach (2017), and Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (2016).

HALLIE RINGLE is the Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Her most recently curated exhibition is Joanna Piotrowska: unseeing eyes, restless bodies (2024).

JANE ROSENBERG studied at the Art Students League throughout the 1970s. She is now a courtroom artist working for media outlets and a plein air painter in New York. Her work is in many private and public collections as well as the Library of Congress, Museum of the Constitution, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and the Museum of Television and Radio. She is the author of Drawn Testimony (2024).

LAUREN ROSENBLUM is the Jensen Bryan Curator at the Print Center in Philadelphia. She is also a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, writing a dissertation on the rise of mid-twentieth-century collaborative lithography in the United States. Rosenblum cocurated the exhibition A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries (2023) and coedited its accompanying catalogue.

ELIZABETH J. ROSENTHAL is the author of Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson (2015) and the forthcoming The Master of Drums: Gene Krupa and the Music He Gave the World (Citadel Press, 2025). Her first book was His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John  (2001). She received a degree in journalism from Syracuse University (BS, 1982) and studied law at Rutgers–Camden School of Law ( JD, 1985).

EPHRAIM RUBENSTEIN is an Instructor Emeritus at the Art Students League of New York, where he taught painting, drawing, and art history for over twenty years. He was also an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Richmond in Virginia. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

JILLIAN RUSSO is an independent curator and art historian. She served as curator and gallery director at the Art Students League from 2013 through 2018. Her recent publications include “Vision and Grit: Margaret Lowengrund and New York’s female gallerists of the 1950s” for the exhibition catalogue A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries. She has written articles for The Brooklyn Rail, American Quarterly, Panorama, and Public Art Dialogue. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a focus on modern and postwar American art.

MAI SATO is a Visiting Research Fellow at Ritsumeikan University, International Institute of Language and Culture Studies. She specializes in the history of Japanese-American immigration and art history. She is the author of Nyū Yōku no Nihonjin gakatachi: senzenki ni okeru geijutsu katsudō no sokuseki = Japanese Artists Who Worked in New York City: Artistic Traces from the 1910s to the 1940s (2021).

ELIZABETH G. SEATON is a curator at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University. She earned her PhD in art history from Northwestern University in 2000. Her research interests include American printmaking, US government patronage of the arts, and John Steuart Curry.

KATHLEEN MURPHY SKOLNIK teaches art and architectural history at Roosevelt University in Chicago and classes on architecture and design at the Newberry Library, a private research library also in Chicago. She is the coauthor of The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière (2014) and a contributor to Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (2018). She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Art Deco Society of New York and the International Hildreth Meière Association.

ELSA SMITHGALL has served as the Chief Curator of The Phillips Collection with oversight of the curatorial department since 2022. Smithgall has curated exhibitions

including Bonnard’s Worlds (2024); Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (2016); Ten Americans: After Paul Klee (2018); and Whitfield Lovell: The Kin Series and Related Works (2016). Smithgall directed the museum’s landmark centennial project, Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century (2021).

KATHLEEN SPALTRO is the author of Lionel Barrymore: Character and Endurance in Hollywood’s Golden Age (2024), which includes more about Barrymore’s time in art schools and about his later achievements as a composer and etcher.

JONATHAN MILLER SPIES is a life member, former member of the Board of Control, and monitor under Joseph Peller. The discipline and craft he honed at the League now serve his work as an art dealer, in which he has the pleasure of promoting many League artists, past and present.

GAIL STAVITSKY has been Chief Curator at the Montclair Art Museum since 1994. Her publications include the exhibition catalogues Steve Wheeler: The Oracle Visiting the 20th Century (1997) and Will Barnet: A Timeless World (2000).

DONNA STEIN is an art historian, curator, and critic, who served as an adviser on Western modern art to the Secretariat of Her Imperial Majesty, the Shahbanou of Iran. Recent publications include her memoir, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected, and Rediscovered Modern Art (2021). She also published “Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian In her Words (1985)” in Woman’s Art Journal (Spring/Summer 2023), one of many publications on the artist since 1977.

DANIELLE STEWART is Curator and Head of Academic Initiatives at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. Prior to this appointment, she served as Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the University of Warwick

in Coventry, UK . Her writing has appeared in publications including Luso-Brazilian Review, The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945 , and H-ART.

DAVID STEWART lived at the Watts Gallery while completing his PhD in Art History at Boston University. Prior to retirement from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he advanced the thesis that G. F. Watts painted in support of women’s suffrage in his late career. While helping to build the archive of Sellars Collection of Women’s Art at the Huntsville Museum of Art, he researched the radically anti-patriarchal art of Agnes Millen Richmond.

JENNIFER L. STREB is a professor of art history at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Publications include her dissertation, “Minna Citron: A Socio-Historical Study of an Artist’s Feminist Social Realism in the 1930s,” “Minna Citron’s ‘Feminanities’: Her Commentary on the Culture of Vanity,” in Woman’s Art Journal and two exhibition catalogues: Minna Citron: The Uncharted Course from Realism to Abstraction (2012) and The Art & Science of Portrait Miniatures (2015). Her current research is focused on American painter William Scharf.

ROBERTA K. TARBELL earned an MA (1968) and PhD (1976) at the University of Delaware and taught art history there from 1980 to 1984. At Rutgers University, Camden, she chaired the Fine Arts department for four years and directed the Museum Studies program for ten years. She is a Visiting Scholar, Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and has co-curated exhibitions at Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University.

ELLEN WILEY TODD is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, where she taught

American Art History, Women and Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies. She is the author of The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (1993). She has also published on the visual imagery of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

THAYER TOLLES is Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She was editor and coauthor of a two-volume catalogue of the Met’s historical American sculpture collection (1999, 2001), author of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009), and contributor to Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French (2023). Since 2017 she has served as President of the SaintGaudens Memorial, the nonprofit partner of the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, New Hampshire.

ALEXANDRA VAN DONGEN is a museologist and art historian who has served as the curator of historic design at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam since 1992. She has stewarded a variety of innovative curatorial projects, including Unpacking Boijmans. The Colonial Past and the Collection (2021), Dichter bij Vincent. Alledaagse voorwerpen in het werk van Vincent van Gogh (2022), and the ongoing initiative ALMA : Art Linked to Material Artefacts.

JOHN A. VARRIANO is an instructor of painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. He studied at the League with Gustav Rehberger and Frank Mason, who introduced him to the concepts espoused by Frank Vincent DuMond. He teaches in Studio 7, where DuMond and Mason taught for over a century.

COSTA VAVAGIAKIS is an artist who lives in Brooklyn and Greenport, New York. He is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

and the Gregory Millard Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, among other awards. He has exhibited throughout the United States including at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Hirschl & Adler Galleries,  ACA Galleries, and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York; HackettFreedman Gallery, San Francisco;  and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.

CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNÉ has worked as a gallerist, art fair director, art critic, and curator since 1994. He was the Guest Curator of the 2023 Converge 45 biennial (Portland, OR) and currently serves as Curatorat-Large at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. He is the author of several books, including Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art (2019).

AILEEN JUNE WANG received her MA and PhD degrees in art history from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has worked as a professor in art history and as a client advisor for an international fine art auction house. Her socially engaged curatorial practice manifests not only in the form of text but also as design, collaboration, and community engagement.

BRUCE WEBER has served as a curator at several museums and for many years as Director of Research and Exhibitions at a major New York art gallery. He has written extensively on American art, including on the artists Robert Fredrick Blum, James Carroll Beckwith, William Merritt Chase, Marsden Hartley, and Stuart Davis, and American silverpoint drawing, the apple and rose in American art, and the art of New York City. In recent years he has been focusing on the historic Woodstock art colony.

JERRY WEISS is an artist, writer, and instructor at the Art Students League of New York. His work is in many private and public collections, including the New Britain Museum of

American Art, Dayton Art Institute, and Harvard Club of New York City. His most recent solo exhibitions were at the Museum of Art–Deland and the Connecticut River Museum.

AMY WERBEL is Professor of the History of Art at the State University of New York–Fashion Institute of Technology. She is the author of numerous works on visual culture, sexuality, and censorship, including Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (2018).

CHRISTINA WEYL is an independent scholar and curator based in New York City and author of The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York (2019) and A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries (2023).

PAULA WISOTZKI is Professor of Art History at Loyola University Chicago. Her article “Art, Dance, and Social Justice: Franziska Boaz, Dorothy Dehner, and David Smith at Bolton Landing, 1944–1949” appeared in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Fall 2021). She was coeditor of American Women Artists, 1935–1970: Gender, Culture, and Politics (2016).

TOM WOLF is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College. His primary areas of research are the history of art in the Woodstock, New York, art colony, and Asian American art.

MAGGIE WRIGHT is the director of Louise Bourgeois’s foundation, the Easton Foundation, which oversees the Louise Bourgeois Archives in New York City.

MIDORI YAMAMURA , author of Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (2015), Yamamura is an Associate Professor at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York. She specializes in feminism and post-WWII art history with a focus on Asia and its diaspora.

MIDORI YOSHIMOTO is professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. Yoshimoto’s publications include Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (2005) and Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota (2021–22). Most recently, she guest-curated the exhibition Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus (2023–24) at the Japan Society Gallery.

REBECCA ZURIER is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her research investigates US art in all media and its relation to urban life.

Abad, Pacita, 374–377

Chelsea studio (1977), 376 Filipinas in Hong Kong (1995) at the Venice Biennale (2024), 376, 377 Glenda (1977), 375 Haitians Waiting at Guantanamo Bay (1994) at the Venice Biennale, 376 Heart-shaped Still Life (1978), 374 , 376 New York Still Life (1978), 375, 376 You Have to Blend In, Before You Stand Out (1995) at the Venice Biennale, 376, 377 Abbey, Edwin Austin, 100 ABC Bunny, The (Gág), 136 Abels, Alexander, 261

Abstract Expressionists and Abstract Expressionism, 164–165, 190, 206, 248, 251, 298, 302, 304, 326, 344, 364 a nd Morrison, 269 formative years of, 251 Académie Biloul, 194 Académie Colarossi, 174, 194

Académie Julian, 22, 32, 64

Académie Moderne, 150 Adams, George Matthew, 135 Addams, Jane, 78

Age of Reptiles, The (mural), 163 Agee, James, 339n1 Ai Weiwei, 305, 385 Aikman, Cicely, 258, 269

A.I.R. Gallery, 351 Akin, Louis, 30 Albers, Anni, 308 Albers, Josef, 219, 344 Albizu, Olga, 298–299

Alla Africa, 299 Radiante (1967), 298, 299 Alec the Great (Dumm), 135 Alexander, Franklin, 293 Allen, Ruth (Marie Zimmermann’s partner), 73 Alloway, Laurence, 313

Alston, Charles, 318–319, 350

American Abstract Artists (AAA), 200, 218 American Academy in Rome, 162

American Artists Congress, 210–211

American Artists Professional League (AAPL), 64

American Artists’ Congress, 149

American Book Company, 101

American Federation of Arts (AFA), 15

American Fine Arts Society, 15, 32, 137, 296

American Masters from Eakins to Pollock (commemorative show), 15

American Masters: Art Students League (commemorative show), 15

American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 242, 249

American Print Renaissance, 177

American Regionalist movement, 216, 217

American Scene painting, 95, 192, 212, 218

American Society of Etchers, 64

American Society of Miniature Painters, 40

American Society of Painters, 40

American Student of Art, The (student publication), 82–85

Amiens cathedral, 37

“An Artist Speaks: Sonja Sekula” (Aikman), 258

Andean textiles, 249

Andrews, Eliphalet Frazer, 66 Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), 313

Angelico, Fra, 191

Angeloch, Robert (Bob), 290, 291, 292, 293

Anguissola, Sofonisba, 80

“Animal News Club” (radio series), 107 Archipenko, Alexander, 159

Archipenko, Angelica, 159

Archives of American Art, 245 Armento, Rocco, 302

Armory Show (1913), 31, 78, 150, 155 Arnold, Grant, 181, 182–183, 214

Railroad Yards—Kingston, NY (1935), 182

Arnold, Jenny, 183

Arp, Hans, 242

Art Directors Club of New York, 252

Art Institute of Chicago School of Art, 104–105

Art News (magazine), 130 , 206

Art of This Century gallery, 248, 258

Art Spirit, The (Henri), 146–147

Art Students League building (West 57th Street), 372, 373

Art Students League News, 270, 346

Art Students League Quarterly (magazine), 243

Art Students League, 10–17

Board of Control, 13, 24, 43, 54, 76, 90, 104, 132, 166, 183, 185–186, 319 constitution, 11–13

Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, 137 m ixed life class controversy, 44–49 a nd the National Academy of Design, 12 Artists Union, 210–211, 212

Arts & Decoration (periodical), 86 Arts and Crafts movement, 38

Arts, The (magazine), 192

Asawa, Ruth, 220

Ashby Gallery, 269

Ashcan School, 97, 126, 139, 144, 155, 170

Ashton, Dore, 322, 327

Associated Artists, 22

Atelier Lacourière-Frelaut (Paris), 261

Atelier 17 (New York), 261, 262

Atget, Eugène, 354

Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 30

Auerbach-Levy, William, 184

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (Pollock), 229–230

Avery, Milton, 198–199, 276, 341

Husband and Wife (1945), 199 Winter Riders, 198

Ay-O, 324

Bacher, Will Low, 142

Bacon, Charles Roswell, 114

Bacon, Elizabeth Chase, 114

Bacon, Margaret Frances “Peggy,” 114–117, 120, 121, 224

T he George Bellows Class (1918), 95

L ady Artist (1925), 116, 117

T he Lunch Room (Lunch at the League) (1918), 115–116

Ballin, Florence, 86

Ballin, Hugo, 68–71

Warner Murals (Detail), Wilshire

Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles (c. 1929), 68–70

Ballin, Mabel, 70

Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper), 232

Barnard, George Grey, 78

Barnes Foundation, 386

Barnet, Will, 168, 191, 204, 205, 214–215, 242, 244, 248, 254, 261, 284, 299, 304, 320, 334, 338, 348, 349

Self-Portrait (1952–53), 215

Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 130

Barrage (Groth), 328

Barrell, Robert, 242, 248, 249

Barrer, Gertrude, 249

Barrett, Bill, 210

Barrymore, Doris, 64–65

Barrymore, Ethel, 64–65

Barrymore, Lionel, 64–65

Bass, Elaine, 253

Bass, Saul, 252–253

Phase IV (film), 253

W hy Man Creates (film), 253

Baziotes, William, 248

Beal, Gifford, 110, 166

Beal, Reynolds, 110

Bearden, Nanette Rohan, 232

Bearden, Romare, 232–233, 318, 356, 364, 369 Berkeley—The City and Its People (1973), 233 Beaudoin, Kenneth Lawrence, 249

Beaux, Cecilia, 18

Beckwith, James Carroll, 24, 48, 55, 64

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 371 Bell, Cecil, 183

Bellows, George, 31, 85, 88, 94–95, 114, 118, 146, 224

Four Friends (1921), 95 Benito, Ramon, 378 Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Joseph, 32 Bentley, John William, 87

Benton, Thomas Hart, 183, 192–193, 212, 216, 220, 246–247, 248, 250, 264, 206 America Today, Steel (1930–31), 192, 193 Berezov, Maurice, 250

Perle Fine at Work on Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie (1947), 250, 251 Perle Fine’s Studio in the Springs, Long Island (c. 1957), 250 Bergdorf Goodman, 224

Berghash, Mark, William Scharf Class (1999), 387 Bergmann, Meredith, 381

Berliawsky, Leah. See Nevelson, Louise Berlin Metropolis (Grosz), 329 Bernstein, Theresa, 96–97

Self-Portrait (1914), 96, 97 Betty Parsons Gallery, 251, 258, 270, 308–309, 311

Bewley, Marius, 66

Bierstadt, Albert, 20 biomorphic abstraction, 263 biomorphic Surrealism, 248, 249 Birth Control Review, 107 Bischoff, Ilse, 142 Bishop, Isabel, 62, 63, 150 Bistram, Emil J., 183 Black Mountain College (BMC), 219, 308, 309, 320 Blackburn, Robert, 348

Blanch, Arnold, 37, 120, 182, 290, 292, 328

Blashfield, Edwin Howland, 162 Blum, Robert, 68 Blumenschein, Ernest Leonard, 65, 98–99

Boardman, Seymour, 302

Boas, Franz, 249

Bodley Book Shop, 312 Bohrod, Aaron, 183 Bolshevik Revolution, 161

Bone, Florence, 39

Bonino Gallery, 305

Bonnard, Pierre, 386

Bonnat, Léon, 55

Bontecou, Lee, 208, 326–327

Bonwit Teller, 276

Book of a Hundred Hands (Bridgman), 128

Booth, Cameron, 262, 299, 334

Borglum, Barnard, 78

Borglum, Gutzon, 78, 270

Boris, Bessie, 245

Boss, Homer, 77, 201, 220

Bouché, Louis, 284

Boulanger, Gustave, 32

Bourgeois, Louise, 214, 254–255, 342

Personages (carved wood pieces), 255

Bové, Richard, 328

Brackman, Robert, 272, 332, 362

Bradley, A. Frederick, Jr., 50

Braque, Georges, 252, 316

Brewster, George, 44, 45

Bridgman, George B., 29, 33, 74–77, 99–100, 101, 106, 107, 108, 110, 128, 135, 162, 163, 168, 174, 142, 191, 208, 212, 222, 231, 242, 246, 261, 270, 288, 332

Book of a Hundred Hands, 128

Untitled Drawing Panels (1935), 74–75

Bridgman’s Life Drawing (Bridgman), 76 Brill, Alice, 284–285

Vendor on the Viaduto do Chá, 284–285

British Library, 155

Brodsky, Judith, 205

Bronx Zoo, 171

Brook, Alexander, 115, 120, 246

Brooklyn Daily Eagle (newspaper), 73

Brooklyn Jewish Center, Center Academy, 191

Brooklyn Museum, 112, 201, 219, 242, 249

Brooklyn Standard (newspaper), 94

Brooks, James, 213

Brouard, Carl, 344

Brouard, Raphaël, 344

Brown, Don, 159

Portrait Of Russel Wright (c. 1920–50), 159 Brown, Ethel Pennewill, 66

Brown, J. G., 225

Brueghel, Pieter, 37

Brush, George de Forest, 38, 41, 42

Buchanan, Beverly, 364–365

Buchheit, Christian, 52

Bullard, Marion, 86

Bulletin for Cartoonists, 61

Bundy, John Elwood, 66

Bunker, Dennis Miller, 40

buon fresco, 130

Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report, 249

Burlin, Paul, 292

Burliuk, David, 198

Burroughs, Alan, 37

Burroughs, Betty, 138–139

Burroughs, Bryson, 36–37, 50, 138–139, 224

Untitled (1889–90), 37

Busa, Peter, 212, 242, 248–249, 269

Constellation (1941), 249

Bush, George W., 342

Butler, Andrew, 142 Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony, 86

Cadmus, Paul, 184–186, 266, 289

PaJaMa (est. 1937), 186

Portrait of (Carl van Vechten), 187 T he Fleet’s In! (1934), 184, 185 Calder, Alexander, 132, 152, 156, 160, 170–171, 192, 220, 275, 322, 372

Untitled (Excavation) (c. 1924), 170, 171

Calder, Alexander (A.) Stirling, 37, 156, 170 Calder, Nanette Lederer, 170 California School of Fine Arts, 180–181

Campbell, Larry, 230

Canaday, John, 289

Caponigro, Paul, 360 caricatures, of elder artists’ work, 53n2 Carleton, Clifford, 66

Carlson, John Fabian, 34, 86, 87, 88 Autumn Beeches (c. 1908–15), 89 Carnegie Institute prize, 174 Carnegie International, 80 Carolus-Duran, 55 Carone, Nicholas, 161

Carroll, John, 276 Carter, Clarence, 267 Carter, Jimmy, 233 Cashin, Bonnie, 234–237

faux chinchilla-lined parabola skirt, cashmere tights, and sweater (1969), 236

Scottish plaid tweed poncho, pants, and jersey hooded top (1969), 235

Cassidy, Stephanie, 129

Cast Drawing (Cooper Union), 30

Castelli, Leo, 275, 311

CBS (television), 312 Cedar Tavern, 275 Cellini, Benvenuto, 73 Cennini, Cennino, 289 Central Park Zoo, 171

Century of Progress Exposition (Chicago, 1932), 67

Century, The (magazine), 18–19

Cézanne, Paul, 37, 148, 150, 191, 240, 250–251, 316

Chadeayne, Robert Osborne, 171

Champlain, Samuel de, 101 Chanel, 280

Chang Li Ying. See Chen, Georgette Chanin, Abraham, 275

Charles Egan (gallery), 308 Charlot, Anita Goupil, 216

Charlot, Jean, 128–129, 130, 131, 216–219, 244

Fresco Class In Action (1941), 216–217, 219

The Massacre in the Main Temple (1922), 216–217

Charm (magazine), 312

Chartres cathedral, 37

Chase, Ilka, 180

Chase, William Merritt, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 40, 48, 62, 64, 66, 86, 87–88, 90, 92, 96–97, 225, 332

Portrait of Dora Wheeler (1882–83), 22

Self-Portrait (1913), 20

Chatlov, Roman, 189 Chelsea Hotel, 375 Chen, Eugene, 195

Chen, Georgette, 194–195, Self Portrait (c. 1946), 195

Terengganu Market Scene (1960), 194 , 195 Chendana. See Chen, Georgette Cheney Brothers, 39

Chéret, Jules, 42 chiaroscuro painting, 332 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 104 Chichester, Cecil, 86

Chilmark’s Barn House, 156 Chinese Restaurant (Weber), 149

Chock full o’Nuts, 373 Chouinard Art Institute, 234 Christ, Ronald, 273 Christian Dior, 282 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 102–103 Churchill, Winston, 230–231

Cinque Gallery, 365, 369 Cirigliano, Susan, 378, 379, 380, 381 Citron, Minna, 204–205

“Art: Significance and Criteria” (lecture series), 204

“ The Grand Tradition in Modern Art” (lecture series), 204 Nude (1929), 205 Phosphates (1941), 205 City Lights (Grosz), 329 Civil Rights Movement, 356

Clark, Ed, 302

Claudy, C. H., 102 Clay Record (publication), 30 Clert, Iris, 313 Coach handbags, 234 Cochran, Allen Dean, 50, 86 Coe, Fanny Eliza, 101 Cohen, Ezra, 305 Collier, Oscar, 249

Collier’s (magazine), 43, 180, 319 color-spot, 330 Columbus Monitor (newspaper), 134 Committee on Public Information (CPI), 58, 61 Commodore (hotel), 224 Comstock, Anthony, 48, 82–85 Comstock’s raid, 82–85

Concrete Expressionism, 304 Congregation B’nai B’rith, 70 Constellation (Busa), 249 Constructive Anatomy (Bridgman), 76, 99 Contemporaries, The, 176, 177 Contemporary Jamaican Artist Association (CJAA, 1964–74), 306–307 Cool, Fredda, 180 Cooney, Florence, 93 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 39 Cooper Union, 146 Corbino, Jon, 77, 264, 265, 286 Cornwell, Dean, 172–173

Corporate Identity design, 253 Cory, Kate, 30–31

Sun Ceremony (c. 1920), 31 Cossio del Pomar, Felipe, 272 Costume Sketching, 106 Courses

A natomy for Artists, 128, 368, 375

A ntique Drawing, 24, 25, 30, 106, 202 Composition, 94, 196, 202, 319, 341

Constructive Figure Drawing, 76 Croquis (Life Sketch), 198

Drawing and Pictorial Design, 110 Drawing from Life, Color, Composition, Collage, 342–343

Drawing, Painting, and Composition, 322 Etching, Lithography, and Composition, 204 Il lustration, 152

L ettering, Layout, and Design, 202

Life Drawing, 192, 358

Life Drawing and Anatomy, 76–77

Life Drawing and Painting, 40, 94, 156, 344

Life Drawing for Men, 99

Life Drawing for Women, 270

Modeling, 45, 156

Modelling in Clay, 30

Modeling in Clay and Other Media, 388

Morning Painting, 64

Mural Composition, 192

Mural Painting and Composition, 63

Mural, Composition and Fresco Painting, 128–129

Painting, 192

Portraiture, 24, 94

P reparatory Antique, 64

Sketch, 25

Women’s Evening Life, 41 Cousins, Harold, 208, 294–295

Plaiton Suspendu (1958), 295

Covey, Silvie, 378–381

COVID -19 pandemic, 11

Cowl, Clarkson, 51

Cox, Kenyon, 24–25, 26–29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 41, 47, 48, 55–57, 62, 64, 66, 76, 78

T he Girl with the Red Hair (c. 1890), 29 Study for “Evening” (1883), 29

Study for Evening (1883), 27

Untitled (1883), 26

Cox, Louise Howland King, 26

Cox, Peter, 358–359

Anatomical Torso (2017), 358

Cramer, Konrad, 86

Crawford, Morris De Camp, 112

Creative Lithography and How to Do It (Arnold), 183

Creeley, Robert, 309, 311 Crichlow, Ernest, 365, 369 Criss, Francis, 183

Crosby, Percy, 183

Crownfield, Eleanor, 38

Crownfield, Sophia Louise, Untitled (undated, silk), 38

Crownfield, Sophia Louise, 38–39

Study Of Squash Or Pumpkin Plants (undated), 39

Crucifixion and Last Judgment (Jan Van Eyck), 37

Cubism and Cubists, 149, 179, 189, 200, 217–218

Culin, Stewart, 112

Cultural Revolution (China), 384, 385

Cummings, Paul, 206

Cunningham, Francis, 330–331

Mimi Scherb (1970–71), 331

Curry, John Steuart, 240, 237 Czapski, Juljan, 284

Dabrowski, Jan. See Graham, John D. Dada, 189

Dannenberg, George, 50 Dasburg, Andrew, 86, 88, 114 Daumier, Honoré, 240–241, 279 David, Jacques-Louis, 37 Davis, Miles, 280 Davis, Stuart, 80, 118, 160, 214, 248, 380 Day, Worden, 244–245 De Angelis, Sabatino, 247 “Deacon, the,” 99. See also Rockwell, Norman Death of Socrates, The (David), 37 de Chirico, Giorgio, 367 Decker (Maryland Institute College of Art), 39 de Koning, Bastiaan, 25 de Koning, Georgina Florence, 25 de Kooning, Willem, 206, 230, 251, 269, 275, 304, 344, 372 Painting (1948), 304 Degas, Edgar, 279

Dehner, Dorothy, 149, 188–189, 196–197, 201 Portrait Of Wilhemina Weber Furlong (1931), 188 de Kay, Charles, 48 Delacroix, Eugène, 279 de Lamonica, Roberto, 380, 381 Delaney, Joseph, 246–247

Art Students League Cafeteria (1941), 247 L obby, Art Students League (1965), 247 Model with a Hat (1931), 246, 247 Delaware Art Museum, 155 de Milhau, Zella, 51, 226 DeMott, Helen, 261 Dennis, Donna, 354–355 Cataract Cabin (1993–94), 355 Untitled Car Painting (1966), 354 Dennison, Lisa, 313 Deren, Maya, 344 Design (magazine), 68 Design by Katja and Monir, 276 Design Laboratory, 201 Devereux, Georges, 344 Dickens, Charles, 98, 102–103 Dickinson, Edwin, 108, 330, 334, 356 Dickinson, Sidney E., 135, 334 Dictionary of Art Historians, 108 Diller, Burgoyne, 200 Dinnerstein, Harvey, 278–279 Underground Together (1996), 278, 279 Dombrowski, Ivan Gratianovitch. See Graham, John D. Dorfman, Bruce, 290, 291, 300–301 Doughty, Emma W., 38 Douglas, Aaron, 174

Draper, William F., 352

Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (Hale), 231, 375 drawing, Nicolaïdes’s method, 124–125 Dream Balls, 224–227

Dreier, Dorothea, 150

Dreier, Katherine, 150

Dreishpoon, Douglas, 37

Driggs, Elsie, 132 drypoint, 115 du Bois, Guy Pène, 118 Duffy, Edmond, 116, 120

Dumm, Anna Gilmore Dennis, 134

Dumm, Edwina, 134–135

[Smiling Woman at Table] (c. 1940), 134

Cap Stubbs and Tippie (comic strip), 134, 135

Dumm, Frank Edwin, 134

DuMond, Frank Vincent, 29, 32–35, 58, 61, 86, 108, 110, 126, 136, 142, 272, 332

Christ and the Fisherman, 32

Duncan, Don, 245

Duval, Mathias, 74, 76

Duvalier, François, 344

Eakins, Thomas, 37, 47, 108–109, 163, 279

Eames, Marion Gowan, 88

Earle, Ferdinand Pinney, 64

Eaton, Wyatt, 68

Eaves, Winslow Bryan, 208

Eberle, Abastenia St. Leger, 78–79

Girl Skating (1906), 79

Men and Bull (1904), 79

Roller Skating (1907), 78

W hite Slave (1913), 78

École des Beaux-Arts (Paris), 26, 55, 56, 162 Economist, The (magazine), 234

Egan Gallery, 304

egg tempera, 266

Eight, The (exhibition), 132, 146

8 and a Totem Pole (exhibition), 242, 249

Ekberg, Anita, 224

Elizabeth Carstairs Scholarship, 328

Elwell, Frank Edwin, 45, 47

Enrico Donati, 380

Escobar, Marisol. See Marisol Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (Mexico City), 216–217

Esquire, (magazine), 180

etching, 85, 116, 120–121, 142, 166–168, 171, 176, 184, 191, 204, 210, 261, 324–325, 381

Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Traveling Scholarship, 269

Eula, Joseph (Joe) Benedict, 280–281

Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910), 132

Fairchild, Lucia, Untitled, 28

Fakir Auction, 51–52

Fakir Ball, 52

Fakir Band, 51–52

Fakir Dinner, 51

Fakirs, Lemon Fakirs catalogue (1907), 52

Fakirs, Order of the, 224–225

Fakirs, Psychic Fakirs catalogue (1910), 53

Fakirs, Society of American, 50–53, 94, 224–227

FAO Schwarz, 286

Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary project, 241

Farmanfarmaian, Abolbashar (Prince), 276

Farmanfarmaian, Leila, 276

Farmanfarmaian, Monir Shahroudy, 274–277

Reception Desk, 813 Park Street, New York (1981), 274–275

Farr, Helen, 132

Fashion Institute of Technology, 381 Fauves, the, 149

Federal Art Project. See Works Progress Administration (WPA), Federal Art Project Fedra (play), 54

Field Guide to the Birds (Peterson), 203 Fiene, Paul, 292

Fifteen Gallery, 80

Fight Censorship group, 342 figure drawing, Hale on, 228–229

Fine, Perle, 250–251

Fink, Lois Marie, 12

Finkelstein, Louis, 302

Finklestein, William, 208

Fischbach Gallery, 305

Fite, Barbara, 291

Fitsch, Eugene Camille, 167, 183

T he Print Studio #2 (Not Dated), 166–167

#5WomenArtistsChallenge, 277

Flagg, James Montgomery, 34, 50, 58–61, 224 “ The Cartoonist Makes People See Things!” Bulletin For Cartoonists (1918), 60

W hat Are You Doing For Preparedness? (1916), 58, 59

Flomenhaft, Eleanor, 364

Florence Cane School of Art, 244

Florio, Rosina, 205, 239, 291, 370, 381, 387

Flux Chess sets (Saito), 324

Fluxus, 324

Fogarty, Thomas, Jr., 100, 108, 328

Folinsbee, John Fulton, 86 Folksay (culture group), 302 Ford Foundation, 234, 290, 348 Ford, Ford Maddox, 354 Fortess, Karl, 292 Fortune (magazine), 319 Foster, Hal, 135 Foujioka, Noboru, 126–127 American Spirit (1925), 126, 127 A Portrait of Madam X, 126 Still Life, 126 Foujita, Tsuguharu, 126

Founders of Our Country (Coe), 101 Fourteenth Street School, 288 Francis, Jacqueline, 364 Freeman, Don, 183 Freeman, Marion, 142 Frelinghuysen, Suzie, 218 French, Daniel Chester, 48 French, Edwin D., 46 French, Jared, 184, 266

French (née Hoening), Margaret, 184 frescos, 67, 128–131, 174, 212, 216–219 Freuchen, Dagmar, 276, 277, 282–283 Vogue cover (as Dagmar Freuchen-Gale), 283 Friedman, Martin, 152

Friesz, Achille Émile Othon, 126 Fulbright Fellowships, 380 Fulbright Scholarship, 269 Fuller, Buckminster, 234 Fuller, Clara, 40 Fuller, Henry Brown, 40 Fuller, Lucia Fairchild, 26, 40–41 Clara B. Fuller (1898), 41 Untitled (c. 1900), 41 Fundação Hillel para Refugiados, 284 Funny Thing, The (Gág), 136 Furlong, Tomás, 189, 196 Furlong, Wilhelmina Weber, 196

Gabo, Naum, 223

Gág, Wanda, 136–137

Elevated Station (1924), 136, 137 Galerie Neuf, 242, 249 Gallery Onetwentyeight, 351 Gam, Rita, 224 Garel, Leo, 245 Garrett, Adams Wirt, 284 Garrity, Jack, 374–376 Gauguin, Paul, 222

George Putnam newspaper syndicate, 142

Georgia O’Keeffe (O’Keeffe), 90 German Expressionism, 189

Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 26, 38, 56, 162 gesture drawing, 125

Getz, Milton, 70

Getz/Gilberto (record album), 299 GI Bill, 63, 89, 275–276, 280, 292, 294, 296, 302, 304, 306, 308, 367

Gilder, Helena de Kay, 19–20

Paint Box with Nude Study (c. 1871), 18 Gilder, Richard Watson, 18–19 Gillespie, Dizzy, 364 Gilliam, Sam, 369 “Gimmicks, The” (illustrated verses), 107 Giotto, 57

Gist of Art (Sloan), 132 Givenchy, 280

Glamour (magazine), 276

Global South, politicization of art in, 306 Goddard, Paulette, 225

Godwin, Frances, 208 Goldberg, Ira, 358

Goldmannová, Terry. See Haass, Terry (née)

Goldsmith, Oliver, 100–101

Goldstein, Harold, 208

Goldthwaite, Anne, 66, 150–151, 178

Her Daughter, 150

Untitled (undated), 151

T he Young Laundress, 150 Goldwater, Robert, 254 Goldwyn Studios, 68–70

Golestan Palace (Tehran), 277

Golliwog Lounge (Sheraton Ritz, Minneapolis), 221

Goltz, Walter, 86–88

González, Julio, 197

Goodrich, Lloyd, 36, 108–109

Untitled (c. 1913–14), 109

Gorky, Arshile, 160, 248, 344

Gottlieb, Adolph, 118, 132, 141, 152–153, 160, 165, 213, 276, 380

Goudy, Frederic, 43, 202

Gowing, Lawrence, 174

Goya, Francisco, 222

Graham, John D., 152, 160–161, 171, 196, 213 Still Life—Pitcher and Fruit (1926), 160, 161

Grambs, Blanche, 168–169, 210

Gramsci, Antonio, 352

Grand Central Art Galleries, 269 Grand Central Moderns, 269 Grand Portage Indian Reservation, 269

Grand Union Hotel, 51 Grant, Blanche, 66

Grant Arnold Collection of Fine Prints, 182 Graphic Arts program, 142

Grasset, Eugène, 43

Great Depression, 11, 147, 217

Great Migration, 246

Greenberg, Clement, 270, 271 Greene, Stephen, 354–355

Greenwood, Marion, 174–175

Gropper, William, 214

Gross Clinic (Eakins), 109

Gross, Mimi, 329

Gross, Samuel, 109

Gross, Sidney, 350

Grosz, George, 132, 222, 232, 233, 237, 238–239, 244, 282, 306, 334, 336 letter to Robert Cenedella, 239

Groth, John, 286–287, 328

Gruger, Frederic, 135

Grupo Santa Helena, 284

Guccione, Juanita (Marbrook), 201

Guérin, Charles, 126, 150 Guernica (Picasso, 1937), 304

Guggenheim, Peggy, 212–213, 248

Guggenheim (Solomon R.) Museum, 313

Guggenheim Fellowships, 144, 168, 336

Guston, Philip, 269, 292, 328

Gutzman, Amy, 142

Haass, Terry, née Goldmannová, 260–261

L eague (1943), 261

P risoner (1943), 260, 261

Haass, Walter, 260

Hacker Gallery, 342

Hague, Raoul, 208

Haiti, 14, 344

Hale, Robert Beverly, 77, 228–231, 272, 302, 330, 334, 337, 375

Halloween Parade (Greenwich Village), 360

Hals, Frans, 20, 97, 222 Halston, 280

Hammerschlag, Margo, 208

Happiwork, 136

Harlem Artists Guild, 318, 368

Harlem Arts Workshop, 318

Harlem Community Art Center, 211, 369

Harlem Hospital murals, 318 Harmon, Mamie, 125

Harper & Brothers, 42–43

Harper’s (magazine), 286

Harper’s Bazaar (magazine), 43, 234, 280

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 43

Harper’s Weekly (magazine), 42, 43

Harper’s Young People (magazine), 43

Harris, Margo, 208

Harrison, Birge, 86, 87

Woodstock Meadows In Winter (1909), 86

Harrison, Helen A., 283

Hartigan, Grace, 124

Hartley, Jonathan Scott, 45 Harvesters, The (Brueghel), 37 Harvey, Charles Y., 78 Hatofsky, Julius, 302

Haupers, Clement, 262

Hawley, Wilhelmina Douglas, 24–25 Self Portrait (1887), 24 Hawthorne, Charles, 33 Hayter, Stanley William, 142, 262 Hearst (syndication), 140 Hecht, Joseph, 142 Held, Al, 302–303, 304 Genesis II (2001–03), 303

Helfond, Riva, 168–169, 210–211, 368 Mine Foreman, 210

Out of the Pit (Two Miners) (1936), 210, 211 Heliker, John Edward, 375, 376 Heller, Steven, 286

Henri, Robert, 31, 78, 85, 88, 94, 118–119, 132, 136, 142, 144, 146–147, 152, 288, 332

T he Art Spirit (book), 119 Herbst, Josephine, 174

Herman, Cherry, 212 Hermes (De Angelis), 247 Hermès, 234

Herrera, Carmen, 264–265, 385 Untitled (1952), 264–265

Herrmann, John, 174 Hess, Thomas B., 206 Heterodoxy Club, 107 Heye Foundation, 242 higher education, and the Art Students League, 10–11

Hildreth, Marie, 104 Hirsh, Joseph, 367 Hitchcock, Alfred, 253 Hoffman, Harry L., 50 Hoffman, Malvina, 162

Hofmann, Hans, 179, 201, 220, 222, 242, 244–245, 251, 262, 299, 322–323, 340 Hofmann (Hans) School of Fine Arts, 262, 298 Holland, Paula, 378 Holty, Carl, 299 Homer, Winslow, 18, 108, 225 Hoover, Lou, 66 Hopi, cultural traditions of, 30–31 Hopper, Edward, 108, 118, 367 Hotel Astor, 224 Houghton-Mifflin, 203 Howard, Lila Wheelock, 91, 93

Hugo Gallery, 312–313

Human Machine, The (Bridgman), 77 Huntley, Victoria Hutson, 288

Huntoon (Hoyt née Atkinson), Mary, 142–143 8th Street, Kansas City, Mo (1929), 142, 143 Hutty, Alfred, 86

Hyatt, Anna, 78

Men and Bull (1904), 79 Hyde, Eugene, 307

Hyppolite, Hector, 344

Il Libro dell’Arte (Cennini), 289

Impressionist painting, 32 Index of American Design, 112 India, 234

Indian Space Painters group, 215, 242, 248–249

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 279 Injalbert, Jean-Antoine, 37 “Insanity in Modern Art” (Ballin), 68 Inside Fashion (newspaper column), 280 International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, Workers University, 200 invisible chairs (Laverne Originals), 221 Islamic Revolution (Iran), 277 Ives, Neil McDowell, 87

Jamaica, 306–307

James Smithson Bicentennial Medal, 203 Japonisme, 38–39

Jenkins, Paul, 304

Jews, history of, 71 Jitta, Mariette Josephus, 297 John Jay Whitney Fellowship, 269 Johnson, Annetta, 46

Johnson, Burges, 134

Johnson, Frank Tenney, 118 Johnson, Robert Ward, 77, 286, 302 Journal, The (Bernstein), 96 Joy of Life (Matisse), 149 Judd, Donald, 296–297, 302, 304

T he League Stairwell, 296, 297 Untitled (1951–52), 296 Judge (magazine), 58, 106, 180

Kainen, Jacob, 160

Kalin, Katy, 225

Kalin, Victor, 225 Kanemitsu, Matsumi, 213 Kanovitz, Howard, 322

Kantor, Morris, 217, 258, 269, 299, 304, 308, 309, 320, 334, 341 Karas, Denise, 378

Karl Lagerfeld, 280 Katzman, Laura, 218

Kaul, Kavery, 374 Kaz, Nathaniel, 208, 292

Keith, Lucy Dora Wheeler, 22–23

Keller, Caroline Gussman, 162

Keller, Deane Galloway, 163 Keller, Deane, 162–163 Keller, Helen, 66 Kelley, Douglas, 221 Kennedy Galleries, commemorative show, 15 Kennedy, John F., 352 Kent, Rockwell, 95, 118 Kimura (student), 346 King Features, 180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 388

Kingston, City of (New York), Water Department, 292, 293 Kinstler, Everett Raymond, 34, 58

James Montgomery Flagg (1952), 60, 61

Kiphuth, Robert, 163 Kirstein, Lincoln, 289 Klee, Paul, 242

Kline, Franz, 269, 304 Klonis, Bernard, 312 Klonis, Stewart, 63, 178–179, 239, 292, 293, 304 , 305, 319 Klonis, Walter, 292

Know What You See: Flesh and Bones, Simple Anatomy (Delaney), 247 Knox, Page, 19 Kollwitz, Käthe, 279 Krassner, Lenore (Lee), 200, 212–213, 251, 304 Kreutz, Gregg, 333 Kroll, Leon, 88, 244 Krushenick, Nicholas, 302 Kubota, Shigeko, 325 Kumasaki, Kyo, 126 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 114, 116, 120–123, 182, 244, 254, 272–273, 282, 290, 292, 306, 312, 322, 350, 384 Figures Around a Table (c. 1916–18), 120, 121 Kunsthaus Bregenz, 297 Kusama, Yayoi, 346–347, 385

Net paintings, 346

W hite B. S. Q., 346

La Farge, John, 18 La Revue indigene (publication), 344 Ladies Home Journal (magazine), 39, 107 Lahey, Richard F., 152, 196, 200 Lamb, Ella Condie, 20–21 Landgren, Marchal E., 50

Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning. 134, 135

Lanes, Selma G., 286

Laning, Edward, 192 Lanscoal mine operation (Lansford, Pennsylvania), 210

Lartigue, Jacques Henri, 354 Latino Portfolio, 360

Lattimore, Eleanor Frances, 142 Laufman, Sidney, 284, 290 Laverne Originals, 220–221

Laverne, Erwine, 220–221

Laverne, Estelle (née Lester), 220–221

Fun to Run (furnishing fabric, 1947), 220 Lawrence, Jacob, 318 Lawrence, Mary, 46, 48 Lazzell, Blanche, 66

League, The (magazine), 52, 258 Lebrun, Rico, 77, 237

Lee-Smith, Hughie, 366–367 Rooftop (1957), 366

Lee, Doris, 240

Lee, Hye Sun, 378 Lee, Russell, 240–241

Migrant Worker Looking through the Back Window of Automobile Near Prague, Oklahoma, Lincoln County, Oklahoma (June 1939), 240

Lefebvre, Jules Joseph, 32

Leffel, David A., 332–333, 372 Eddie Hamilton’s Studio (1973), 332 Turquoise and Rose Madder (1997), 332, 333 Léger, Fernand, 218, 306 Leith-Ross, Harry, 86 Lemuel, Wilmarth, 12 Lentelli, Leo, 159 Leonardo da Vinci, 240 Les Griots (publication), 344 Leslie, Alfred, 302 Lester, Estelle. See Laverne, Estelle (née Lester)

Lever, Hayley, 37, 88 Levi, Julian E., 344, 346 Levin, Jonathan (Eli), 329 Levine, Jack, 108 Levitt, Helen, 336–339 New York (1959), 337 New York (1959), 338 New York (1959), 339 Levy, Edgar, 201 Levy, Lucille, 201 Lewin, Ruth, 249 Lewis, Allen, 196

Lewis, Norman, 356, 364–365, 368–379

Untitled (1976), 368

Liberator, The (publication), 141 Liberman, Alexander, 275 Libyan Sibyl, the, 37 Lichtenstein, Roy, 335 Life (magazine), 58, 120–122, 138, 180, 203, 328, 382

literati painters, 314 lithography, 42, 94, 144–145, 166, 168, 176, 182, 204, 210, 252, 260, 296

Little King, The (comic strip), 140, 141 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari), 16

Locke, Charles Wheeler, 176, 182–183, 184, 214 Longview Foundation Award, 206 Look (magazine), 227

Lord and Taylor, 224

Louis Comfort Tiffany, 22 Louvre, the, 152

Lowengrund, Margaret, 176–177, 380

Untitled (undated), 176

Lozowick, Louis, 214 Luce, Clare Boothe, 180 Luks, George, 95, 139, 144, 171, 288

Macbeth Galleries, 78, 132, 146 Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture for the Benefit of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 150 MacDonald, Kathryn, 329 Maciunas, George, 324 MacMonnies, Frederick, 37 MacNeil, Hermon Atkins, 382 Macum, George, 87

Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children (Renoir), 37 Magazine of Art, 161 Magic Realists, 289

Magloire-Saint-Aude, Clément, 344 Magnin, Edgar, 71

Maillol, Aristide, 37

Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (Weinberg), 313

Manet, Édouard, 57

Manitoga, 159

Mann, David, 312 Mann, Sarah, 91 Mannell, Elise, 149 Mao Zedong, 384, 385

Marbalia (wallpaper), 220–221

Marcos, Ferdinand, 374 Margulies, Joseph, 142

Marin, John, 34

Marini, Marino, 388

Marion Greenwood, Industrialization of the Countryside (Fresco). Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez, Mexico City (1935–6), 175 Marisol, 322–323, 384 T he Party (1965–66), 323

Maroger, Jacques, 139 Mars, Ethel, 66

Marsh, Betty, 37

Marsh, Reginald, 108, 120, 132, 138–139, 185, 247, 266, 272–273, 288–289, 294, 37, 62, 77

Afternoon, Coney Island (1947), 138 Martin, Fletcher, 290, 292 Martin, Knox, 302, 304–305, 308 Venus (1970), 305

Woman with Bicycle (1979), 305

Mason, Frank, 34, 256–257, 332–333, 372

Jennifer in Picture Hat (1986), 256 Self Portrait with Palette and Large Sombrero (1978), 256, 257

Masses, The (magazine), 80 Masson, André 242

Matisse, Henri, 148–149, 150, 174, 175, 200, 250–251, 300–331, 316, 386 Matta, Robert, 248 Matter, Mercedes, 213 Mattson, Henry, 87 Matulka, Jan, 160, 189, 196, 200, 201 Maverick Festival (Woodstock, New York), 159 Mayan temples, at Chichén Itzá, 216 Mayhew, Doug, 378 Mayhew, Richard, 291, 356–357 L ove Bush (2000), 357 Maynard, Arthur, 34 McBride, Nast & Company, 102 McCay, Winsor, 76 McDonald, Mark, 219 McHugh, Joseph, 30 McKenzie, Mary Beth, 362–363

Self-Portrait (Matisse print) (1991), 363 McMahon, John, 359 McNeil, George, 200 McNulty, William Charles, 77, 142, 231, 306 McSorley’s saloon, 241

Meaning of Social Security, The (mural), 128, 129, 130–131, 218 “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” (Benton), 192 Meert, Joseph, 192, 212 Meière, Hildreth, 104–105

Self-Portrait (1912), 104 Menninger Clinic, 142

Merchant Seamen’s Club, 141 Merritt, Florence Merritt, 25 Merritt, Georgina, 25 Merson, Luc-Olivier, 37 Mesoamerican iconography, 249 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, The, 219 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 36, 37, 73, 100, 139, 155, 165, 191, 203, 219, 229, 251, 272, 380 commemorative show, 15 Mexican Folkways (magazine), 216 Mexican Mural Renaissance, 174, 212, 216–217

Mexican Mural Renaissance: 1920–1925, The (Charlot), 219 Mexican Prints at the Vanguard (exhibition), 219 Michel, Sally, 198, 276 Michelangelo, 37, 73, 138, 139, 146 Midtown Galleries, 271 Milgrim’s (women’s clothing store), 340 “Miller method,” 63

Miller, Kenneth Hayes, 62–63, 108, 110, 112, 114, 120, 136, 139, 156, 159, 171, 178–179, 194, 204, 240, 266, 270, 288, 289 T he Fitting Room (1931), 62 Miller, Robert, 208 Miller, Ruth Blanchard, 142 Millet, Jean-François, 57 Millions of Cats (Gág), 136 Millman, Edward, 290 Mineo, Sal, 313 Minnelli, Liza, 280 Miró, Joan, 242 Mitchell, Joan, 275 Mitchill, Edith, 47 Miyamoto, Kazuko, 350–351 String Around a Cylinder of My Height (1977), 351

Miyamoto, Kazuko, Woman in a Box (1966), 351 Model with a Hat (Delaney), 246, 247 Model, Lisette, 360 Modotti, Tina, 216 Moffatt, Frederick C., 247 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo, 201 Mondrian, Piet, 308 Monir Museum, 277

monitors, 90, 101, 152, 160, 167, 217, 222, 231, 256, 266, 292, 378 Montclair Art Museum, 245 Montessori, Maria, 78 Montgomery bus boycott (1956), 278 Morgan, Wallace, 142 Morris, George L. K., 218 Morrison, George, 249, 268–269

T hree Figures (1945), 268

Morrison, John George. See Morrison, George Mostel, Rhoma, 378

Motherwell, Robert, 248, 308

Mowbray, Harry Siddons, 26, 29, 36, 40, 55, 62 Moy, Seong, 262–263, 381, 380

P rints of Seong Moy, The (exhibition), 263 Refuge (1949), 263

“Murals for Tomorrow” (Shahn), 130 Museum of Living Art (NYU), 242 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 13, 14, 130, 169, 219, 242, 251, 272, 208, 322 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), exhibitions Cubism and Abstract Art, 222 Good Design exhibition, 221

Indian Art of the United States (1941), 242 Nineteen Living Americans (exhibition), 149 Museum of New Mexico, 67 Museum of the American Indian, 249 Musick, Archie, 192

My Adventures as an Illustrator (Rockwell), 103

Nakamizo, Fugi, 142

Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), 195

National Academy of Design, 18, 20, 32, 37, 50, 52, 78, 98, 146, 175, 203, 208, 224, 269, 288

a nd the Art Students League, 12

National Association of Women Artists, 78, 208

National Audubon Society, 203

National Cartoonists Society, 134, 180

Gold Key award, 135

National Competition for Direct Carving, 208

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 108, 152

National Endowment for the Humanities, 108 National Medal of Arts, 233

National Museum of American History, 39 National Museum of Women in the Arts, 277 National Police Gazette (newspaper), 171 National Sculpture Society, 78

National Wildlife Federation, 203

National Women’s Caucus for Art, 277

National Youth Administration, 291 Natural Way to Draw, The (Nicolaïdes), 124 NBC (broadcast network), 107

Negarestan Museum Park Gardens (University of Tehran), 277 negative space, and visual weight, 222 “Negro Artist and Modern Art, The” (Bearden), 232 Nell, Tony, 66 Nelson, Paula, 290, 292 Nesch, Rolf, 380

Nevelson, Charles, 178

Nevelson, Louise, 62, 124, 178, 269, 277, 322, 384

Lunar Landscape (1959–60), 178

New Deal, 131, 218

New Deal Art Project, Treasury Section of Fine Arts, 150

New Masses (magazine), 136, 141

New School for Social Research, 192

New Vision, The (Moholy-Nagy), 201

New Woman, 23, 106

New York Call (magazine), 106

New York City Department of Social Services, Harlem office, 232

New York Herald Tribune (newspaper), 280

New York School of Design, 340

New York School, 298

New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 82, 226. See also Comstock’s raid New York Times (newspaper), 206, 237, 269, 281, 289, 305

New Yorker (magazine), 138 , 140, 180, 270, 319

Newman, Arnold, photography for Life, 122–123

Newman, Barnett, 132, 152, 160, 164–165, 264, 297, 308, 322

Onement I (1948), 164 , 165

Nicolaïdes, Kimon, 77, 124–125, 178–179, 196, 202, 204, 220, 250, 326

T he Natural Way to Draw, 124

Ninth Street Show (exhibition), 311

Nippon Club, 126

No Title (The Ugly American) (Télémaque), 14 Noda, Masaaki, 378

Noguchi, Isamu, 174, 216

Nordstrom, Ursula, 286

Northwest Coast painting and carving, 242, 249

Nulla dies sine linea (ASL motto), 138, 276

O’Connor, Francis V., 192

O’Higgins, Pablo, 174

O’Keeffe, Georgia (Patsy), 21, 66–67, 90–93, 121, 224, 346

Obama, Michelle Robinson, portrait of, 392, 393

Ojibwe people, 269

Okada, Kenzo, 341

Oldenburg, Claes, 335

Olds, Elizabeth, 144–145

Bootleg Mine, Pennsylvania (1936), 144, 145

Unemployment Line (1934), 144

Open Sketch classes, 278

Operation Rehab exhibition, 305

Opportunity Gallery, 198

Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life (cover), 232

Orloff, Lillian, 249

Ormai, John, 130

Orozco, José Clemente, 214, 216

Ossorio, Alfonso, 271

Other Side of the Rainbow, Being the Adventures of Old-Fashioned Jane, The (Bone), 39

Ozenfant, Amédée, 218

Paalen, Alice [Rahon], 258

Pachner, William, 291

“Painting at Woodstock: The Work of a Group of American Landscape Painters” (Harrison), 86

PaJaMa, 184–185

Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1915), 37 Panoras Gallery, 299

Parboosingh, Karl (née Karl Coy), 306–307

Parsons, Betty, 213, 270–271

Parsons Gallery, 251, 258, 270, 308–309, 311

Parsons School of Design, 114, 274

Parsons, Schuyler Livingston, 270

Partisan Review, 218

Pavia, Philip, 213

Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale), 163

Peabody, George, 174

Peddle, Caroline, 46

Pedrosa, Adriano, 376–377

Peirera, Lenio, 378

Pellettieri, Michael, 378, 380, 381

Pène du Bois, Guy, 146, 171

Penfield, Edward, 42–43, 66

Pennell, Joseph, 142, 166–167, 176, 177, 184 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 76, 78, 348

Pereira, Humberto (Hubert), 200–201

Pereira, Irene Rice, 200–201 Machine Composition (1935–37), 200 Personette, Joan, 340–341 Peterdi, Gabor, 380 Peterson, Roger Tory, 202–203 Pevsner, Antoine, 223 Philadelphia School of Design for Women, 76 Philipp, Robert, 332, 362

Phillips Collection, The, 110, 198 Phillips, Duncan, 110–111, 198 Phillips, Eleanor, 110 Phillips, Marjorie, 110–111

Emerging from an Air Raid Shelter (1941), 110, 111

Photography, 240–41. 284, 336–38, 360, 380 Picasso, Pablo, 148–149, 150, 175, 197, 200, 242, 251, 252

Guernica (1937), 304

Picken, George, 204

Pittsburgh (now Carnegie) International, 322 PJ Carney’s, 373

Plate, Walter “Bud,” 290, 291 Pleissner, Ogden, 34

Pollitzer, Anita, 93

Pollock, Charles, 192, 212, 213

Pollock, Jackson, 132, 161, 165, 192, 212–213, 247, 248, 251, 269, 275, 297, 304, 309, 372 Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 229–230

Pompeiian murals, 191

Ponce de Leon, Michael, 378–381

Pop Art, 305, 334–335, 342, 345, 354 Pope, Arthur, 206

Popular Shop, The, 30

Porter, Fairfield, 192, 206–207

Cityscape (1945), 207

Porter, James, 206 Porter, Ruth, 206

Post-Impressionist painting, 32

Pousette-Dart, Nathaniel, 382

Pousette-Dart, Richard, 382–383, 385 “Irascibles” (photograph), 382

Pratt, Bela, 46

Preissler, Karen, 378

Preminger, Otto, 253

Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980), 203 Primitive Art (Boas), 249

“Primitive Art and Picasso” (Graham), 161

Priscilla, Louis, 299

Prismatic Palette, 35

Prohibition, 227

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 372–373

Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), 108, 144 Pusey, Mavis, 348–349

Homage to New York City, 349 Putnam, Peter, 320 Putnam, Wallace, 198

Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 36

Pyle, Howard, 66, 100, 103, 162

Pyle, Katharine, 39

Rankin, Doris, 64

Raphael, 57, 279

Rastafarian movement, 306, 307

Rauschenberg, Robert, 304, 308–311, 312, 319, 320

Ceiling + Light Bulb (c. 1951), 308, 309 22 The Lily White (c. 1950), 309, 310, 311 Ray Johnson’s History of Betty Parsons Gallery (exhibition), 270

RCA album covers, 299 Reagan, Ronald, 233

Redford, Ann, 116 Reed, Alma, 216 Reed, John, 111

Rees, Samuel, and family, 144 Reeves, Ruth, 112–113

Dress (Front) (c. 1930), 113

“ Three Ideas for Negligees Suggested by Museum Documents” (1918), 112 Regionalism, 192, 216–217

Rehberger, Gustav, 370–371

Rehn (Frank K. M.) Gallery, 198

Reilly Method, 34 Reilly, Frank J., 34, 77, 172–173 Reinhardt, Ad, 309

Reis, Bernard, 275

Reis, Rebecca, 275

Reiss, Winold, 174

Rembrandt, 56, 146, 166–167, 191, 240, 279 Remington, Frederic, 100

Reminiscences (Saint-Gaudens), 46, 48

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 37 Reuther, Walter, 218 Review (magazine), 273 Rice, Dorothy, 201 Rice, Nita, 201

Richmond, Agnes, 80–81

Beulah, Beulah B, and Rosie (1925), 80

Cornelia Chapin (1940), 81 East and West (1947), 81

Lilias (1950), 81

T he Young Tennis Player (1918), 80

Untitled (1903), 80 Untitled (1906), 81

Ridgewood Art Institute, 34

Riebley, Anna, 82, 85 Rijsoord, 25

Riley, Robert, on Cashin, 237 Rivera, Diego, 129, 174, 216

Rivera, Sophie, 360–361

Anthony Hernandez (1978), 361

Rivers, Larry, 275, 344

Rivington School, 351

Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, 348

Robinson, Boardman, 110, 156, 159, 171, 206, 212

“Hit by a Bursting Shell” in The War in Eastern Europe (Reed), 110

Robinson, Theodore, 12 Rockefeller Center mural, 129 Rockwell, Jarvis Waring, 98 Rockwell, Norman, 34, 98–103

But In His Duty Prompt at Every Call, He Watched, He Wept, He Prayed And Felt for All “Deserted Village” (1911), 102

T he Deserted Village, 100–101 Figure Drawing (Art Students League) (1912), 99

I Meet the Body Beautiful (1960), 99 i llustrations for Founders of Our Country (Coe), 101–102 i llustrations for Tell-Me-Why: Stories About Mother Nature (Claudy), 102 My Adventures as an Illustrator (autobiography), 103

No Doubt She Told Him Her Opinion of It, Why They Were So Very Confidential Together Behind the Curtain (1912), 102–103 Rodin, Auguste, 156

Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History (Jamestown, New York), 203 Rogers, Annie Lucasta “Lou,” 106–107 “Bubbles” (January 4, 1913), 107 “Conquering And Still Yet To Conquer!” (November 9, 1912), 106 Rohland, Paul, 86 Romano, Sal, 302 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 204 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 128, 388 Rose Fried Gallery, 305 Rosen, Charles, 88 Rosenberg, Jane, 372–373

Courtroom Sketch of Donald Trump (April 4, 2023), 373 Rosenquist, James (Jim), 334–335 P resident Elect (1960–61/1964), 335 Rosenson, Olga, 142 Rosenthal, Doris, 116 Rosso, Medardo, 388 Rothko, Christopher, 387 Rothko, Mark, 149, 165, 190–191, 198, 213, 276, 308–309, 344

Abstraction (c. 1944/46), 190, 191 Rothkowitz, Marcus. See Rothko, Mark Rouault, George, 306 Roxy Theatre, 340 Roxyettes, 340 Royal Academy (Munich), 20 Rubens, Peter Paul, 56, 192 Rush Hour: New York (Weber), 149 Rush, Olive, 66–67

Russian Constructivism, 223

Russo, Jillian, 294

Ruta, Peter, 218

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 18, 108, 367

Ryerson, Margery, 119

Ryther, Martha, 217

Saarinen, Eero, 163, 221

Saatchi, Charles, 384

Saddest Story, The (Ford), 354

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 18, 30, 37

m ixed life class controversy, 44–49

Reminiscences, 46, 48

Richard Watson Gilder, Helena De Kay Gilder, And Rodman De Kay Gilder, 19

Saito, Takako, 324–325

Etching Boxes (1968), 324–325

Saks Fifth Avenue, 280

Salmagundi Club, 51

Salon d’Automne, 126

Salons of America, 126

Saltus, J. Sanford, 51

Samuel M. Kootz (gallery), 308

San Antonio, Texas, 352–353

San Carlos Academy, 216

Sanchez, Emilio Bernabe, 272–273

Tres Puertas, 273

Sandler, Irving, 304

Sanger, Margaret, 107

Santa Fe Indian School, 67

Santa Fe Opera, 67

São Paulo, Brazil, 284

Sargent, John Singer, 22

Sartain, William, 32

Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 100

Schabbehar, Ann, 276, 277

Scharf, Ferdinand, 261

Scharf, William, 386–387

T he Ark of Disappointment (1995), 386

Schille, Alice, 66

Schiller, Friedrich, 371

Schmidt, Katherine, 80, 94, 114, 116, 120

Almeda’s Daughter (1937), 80

Schnakenberg, Henry, 120, 152

Schneemann, Carolee, 124

Schwartz, Dorothea, 114

Scorsese, Martin, 253

Scribner’s (magazine), 43

Scribner’s Monthly (magazine), 18–19

Scuderie del Quirinale (Rome), 313

Sekula, Sonia, 309, 258–259

Untitled (1946), 259

Seligman, Kurt, 380

Semeiology (exhibition), 249

Semmel, Joan, 342

Sendak, Maurice Bernard, 286–287

Self Portrait, 287

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. See GI Bill

Shahn, Ben, 128–131, 218, 388

Bronx Central Post Office mural (1938–39), 129

detail of Bridge Builders [Study for Public Works panel, The Meaning of Social Security Mural] (with John Ormai, 1941), 131

Jersey Homesteads mural (1936–38), 129

Meaning of Social Security, The (mural), 128, 129, 130–131

P ublic Works [from The Meaning of Social Security Mural, West Wall] (1940–42), 129, 130

Shahn, Bernarda Bryson, 388 Shahn, Jonathan, 388–391

Head of a Man (1990), 388, 389 Shaw, Samuel T., 50–51, 226

Sheppard, Eugenia, 280 Sherbell, Rhoda, 208

Shermund, Barbara, 134, 180–181

“Mother, Had You Known Many Men When You Married Daddy?” “No, Dear.”

“Well, I Think That’s a Shame!” New Yorker (December 3, 1927), 180

“Of Course It’s A Woman— They Don’t Do Landscapes In Marble.” New Yorker (October 29, 1939), 181 Shermund, Henry, 180 Shermund’s Sallies (newspaper cartoon), 180 Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, 325 Shinn, Everett, 85

Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, 22 Shiomi, Mieko, 325 Shirlaw, Walter, 20 Sidney Janis (gallery), 308, 322 Sinbad (Dumm), 135

Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 216, 302 Six Painters and the Object exhibition, 313 Sloan, Helen Farr, 154–155 Sloan, John, 31, 80, 85, 108, 114, 118, 126, 132–133, 138–139, 140–141, 152, 155, 160, 165, 171, 174, 146, 196, 202, 204, 240–241, 288

Gist of Art (book), 132

Helen at the Easel (c. 1947), 154

“Sloanian nuts,” 132

Slusser, Jean Paul, 87 Smith, Anita M., 87

Smith, David, 132, 149, 188–189, 196–197, 200, 201, 322, 380

Smith, Duncan, 164

Smith, Emily Vaupel, 291

Smith, Howard, 107 Smith, Leon, 66

Smith, Robert, 249

Smith, Tony, 222–223

Sketchbook #2, 222

Sketchbook #5, 222 Smithson, Robert, 328–329

Smithsonian Institution, 39, 108, 203

Social Realists, 147

Society of American Artists, 19, 50, 52 Society of Decorative Art, 22 Society of Illustrators, 373

Society of Independent Artists, 126, 132

Soglow, Anna (née Rosen), 141 Soglow, Otto, 130–141 Soglow, Tona, 141

Sohmer Building (West 23rd Street), 50 Soho, 368

Sonnets from the Pekinese (Johnson), 134

Sousa, John Philip, II, 180 South State Street (project), 222 Southwestern pottery, 249

Soyer, Moses, 367

Soyer, Raphael, 108, 146–147, 214, 258, 368 Homage to Thomas Eakins (1963–65), 108 in the City Park (c. 1934), 146 Sōzō Biiku Undō (Creative Art Education Movement), 324

Spagna, Vincent, 198 Speare, Caroline, 86

Speicher, Eugene, 34, 88, 90, 106

Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (1908), 90, 91 Spencer, Niles, 114, 118 Spiral (artistic alliance), 356, 368 Sprung, Sharon, 392–393

Michelle Robinson Obama (2018), 392, 393

Squire, Maud, 66

Stable Gallery, 304

Stallings, William S. (Sid), Jr., 219 Stamos, Theodoros, 350

Steckel, Anita, 342–343

Anita of New York Meets Tom of Finland series (2004–05), 342

T he Bush Follies series (2008), 342 Discretion (1963), 342, 343 Giant Animals series (1977–79), 342 Mom Art exhibition, 342 Steffen, Bernard, 293 Stein, Gertrude, 149, 150

P icasso’s portrait of, 149

Steinberg, Saul, 271

Steingrimsdottir, Hoffy, 378

Stephen Radich Gallery, 346, 347 Sternberg, Harry, 168–169, 204, 210, 242, 244, 254, 261, 266, 302, 304, 348

Dance of the Machine #1: The Present (1935), 168

Sterne, Hedda, 309 Sterne, Maurice, 244

Stettheimer, Carrie, 57 Stettheimer, Ettie, 57 Stettheimer, Florine, 54–57

Nude Self-Portrait (A Model) (1915), 56 Nude Study, Standing with Hand To Shoulder (1895), 55

Portrait of My Sister, Carrie W. Stettheimer in A White Dress (undated), 55 Stevenson, Harold, 312–313

T he New Adam (painting), 313 Stewart, Frank, 233

Still, Clyfford, 213, 309

Stone, Sylvia, 302

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 22 Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere (2024 Venice Biennale), 376–377

Straus, Lionel, 50 Stravinsky, Igor, 67 Studio Museum (Harlem), 369 “Subway to Brooklyn” (Dinnerstein), 278 Suffragist, The (publication), 107 Summers, Janet, 378 Sun Yat-sen, 195 Supremes, the, 280 Surrealism, 189, 201, 258 biomorphic, 248, 249

Surrealist automatism, 248

Symbolic Realism (exhibition), 289 Syracuse University Art Galleries, 263

Tatti, Benedict M., 208

Taylor, Frances Henry, 290

Taylor, Prentiss, 183

Télémaque, Hervé, 13–14, 344–345

Toussaint Louverture in New York (1960), 344

Tell-Me-Why: Stories About Mother Nature (Claudy), 102

Temkin, Ann, 14 Ten, The, 276 Terry, Hilda, 134

Thayer, Abbott Handerson, 162

Third Street Settlement Music School, 78 Thomas Fogarty Award, 100 Thomas, Peggy, 294

Thomason, Frances, 150

Thompson, Marguerite, 208

Thurber, Edna, 87

Tichenor, Bridget Bate, 266 Tiffany, 37, 281

Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 221

Tiffany & Wheeler, 22

Time (magazine), 74, 227

Tintoretto, 192

Titian, 56, 192, 279, 332

Titus, Amie Baxter, 50

TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), 384

Tolegian, Manuel, 213

Tonalist style, 86

Tonetti, Mary Lawrence, 271

Tooker, George, 185, 266–267, 289

Coney Island (1947–48), 266, 267

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 42

Town & Country (magazine), 280

Trafton, Howard, 252, 253

Trask, Spencer, 174

Treviño, Jesse, 352–353

Mi Vida (1971–72), 352–353

Trotsky, Leon, 118

Tsang Kin Chiang, 194

Tsang, Georgette. See Chen, Georgette Tschacbasov, Nahum, 276

Tucker, Allen, 37

Turner, Charles Yardley, 24

Twachtman, John Henry, 64

Twain, Mark, 22

Twombly, Cy, 304, 311, 320

Tworkov, Jack, 308, 311

ukiyo-e prints, 55, 120

Uncle Sam, image, 61. See also Flagg, James Montgomery, What Are You Doing for Preparedness? (1916)

Union Square (neighborhood), 217

United States

Constitution, 19th Amendment, 80

Post Office Department, and Comstock’s raid, 82–85

Social Security Administration, 128

Veterans Administration (VA), 294

University of Hawai’i, 219

University of Iowa, 219

University of Tehran, 277

Van Ardoy, Patricia, 378

Van Dyke, John Charles, 42

Van Eyck, Jan, 37

Van Gogh, Vincent, 126, 222, 240 Van Vleck, Natalie, 80 Vanderbilt Gallery, 50, 224 Varian, Dorothy, 116 Vasari, Giorgio, 16 Velázquez, Diego, 20, 56 Venice Biennales, 276, 313, 376–377 Venus (Martin), 305 Versace, 280 Verve album covers, 299 Vicente, Esteban, 298 Vickrey, Robert Remsen, 287–288 T he Labyrinth (1951), 289 Victoria and Albert Museum (London), 277 Vietnam, 352, 353 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Fellowship Committee, 320

Vogue (magazine), 234, 280, 282 Volkmar, Charles, 30 Von Schlegell, William, 164, 244

Vytlacil, Vaclav, 222, 223, 242, 244–245, 248, 254, 262, 282, 299, 304, 308, 334

W. & J. Sloane, 112 Wakefield Gallery, 271 Waldorf (hotel), 224, 227 Walker, Challis, 208 Walker, Hudson, 290 Wang Meng, 314 Wang, C. C., 314–317 L andscape after Wang Meng (undated), 314, 315 Still Life (1956), 316 War in Eastern Europe, The (Reed), 111 War Veterans’ Art Center, 169 Ward, Edmund F., 100 Warhol, Andy, 276, 280, 281, 335 Warner family, 70–71 Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, 296 Watanabe, Torajiro, 126 Watson, Barrington, 307 Weber, Max, 146, 148–149, 191, 212 Weber, Wilhelmina, 189 Weegee, 227

Weil, Susan, 309, 311 Weinberg, Jonathan, 313 Weinman, Adolph Alexander, 46 Weir, Julian Alden, 24 Weisgard, Leonard, 286 Weston, Edward, 216 Weyhe Gallery, 137 Wheeler, Candance, 22 Wheeler, Lucy Dora, 22–23

Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night (1886), 22, 23

Wheeler, Steve, 242–243, 248, 249

L aughing Boy (1949), 242–243

Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 286

Whistler James McNeill, 32, 166–167, 177, 231

White, Charles, 169, 214, 302

Whitman, Walt, 22

Whitney Museum of American Art, 120, 200, 269, 322

Whitney, Sarah Senter, 156, 159

Whitten, Jack, 368, 369

Wickey, Harry, 165, 168, 210

Wild at Art (film), 374

Wilde, Oscar, 22, 24

Wilder, Billy, 253

Wilke, Hannah, 342

Willard Gallery, 368

Willard, Marian, 368

William Zorach Memorial Scholarship, 208

Williams, Ouida Bramwell, 368

Willis, Elizabeth May, 91

Willoughby de Eresby, Timothy (Lord), 313

Wilshire Boulevard Temple, 70

Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, 142

Winter, Alice Beach, 80

Winter, Charles Allan, 80

Wisconsin State Capitol, mural commissions for, 68

Wolsk, Tristan, 378

Woman Citizen (publication), 107

Woman’s Journal (publication), 107

Woman Voter (publication), 107

Woman with Bicycle (Martin), 305

Women in the Making of Art History (exhibition), 277

Women of Plymouth (mural), 40

women, as students at the Art Students League, 219

Women’s Wear (publication), 112

Wood, Grant, 219

Woodhouse, Betty Burroughs, 37

Woodman, Edith, 37, 46, 139

Woodstock Art Association, 181

Woodstock Artists Association, 182, 183

Woodstock artist’s colony, 276

Woodstock School of Art, 89

Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, 86–89, 120, 182

Woodstock Summer School, 16, 290–293, 322, 356

Woodstock, New York, 181 Woollcott, Alexander, 134

Work Progress Administration (WPA), 67, 144, 174, 184, 201, 246, 264, 318, 368

Federal Art Project, 142, 177, 211, 212, 217, 218, 262

Treasury Section of Fine Arts, 204

World War I, 31, 88, 110–111, 112, 126, 160

World War II, 11, 81, 89, 110–111, 174, 218–219, 291, 294, 304, 313, 328, 352, 386

World’s Columbian Exposition (1893, Chicago), Women’s Building, 22, 38, 40, 66

World’s Columbian Exposition Commemorative Presentation Medal (1892–94), 48

Wright, Mary Einstein, 158, 159 Wright, Russel, 156–159 sculpture of Wright at the Art Students League, possibly a self-portrait (c. 1921–22), 157 Wrolsen, Jean, 290, 291, 293 Wyeth, Andrew, 289 Wyeth, N.C., 162, 386

Yaddo, 174

Yektai, Manoucher, 276 York, Lewis E., 289 Young, Mahonri, 126, 135, 136

Zadkine, Ossip, 246, 294 Zallinger, Rudolph, 163 Zalon, Bernard, 378 Zhang Hongtu, 384–385

P ing-Pong Mao (1995), 385

A Walking Man (1983–84), 385 Zigrosser, Carl, 137 Zimmermann, Marie, 72–73

Box (c 1910–20), 72

Zorach, William, 208–209, 220, 294, 326

Affection (1933), 208, 209

Zorn, Anders, 22

Board of Control

President of the Board

ROBIN LECHTER FRANK

Vice Presidents of the Board

YOKO COHEN

JACK HOWARD-POTTER

Board Members

STEPHEN DURKEE

CHARLES “CHICK” FOXGROVER

DEBBIE GOAN

JON GREENFIELD

DANIEL KALIN

SANDRA KAMERMAN

JOHN KNEAPLER

STEPHEN ROSENTHAL

PETER STAMAS

Artistic/Executive Director

MICHAEL HALL

OPPOSITE: THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE’S BOARD OF CONTROL, ASSEMBLED FOR A MEETING IN THE AMERICAN FINE ARTS SOCIETY OFFICE IN 1950. ON THE BACK WALL ARE PORTRAITS FROM THE LEAGUE’S COLLECTION: FORMER BOARD PRESIDENT JOE EVANS BY ALFRED QUINTON COLLINS, AND GEORGIA O’KEEFFE BY EUGENE SPEICHER. PHOTO: ARNOLD NEWMAN, UNTITLED, 1950, GELATIN SILVER PRINT. ARNOLD NEWMAN PAPERS AND PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION, HARRY RANSOM CENTER, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, ARNOLD NEWMAN/ARNOLD NEWMAN COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES, © ARNOLD NEWMAN PROPERTIES/GETTY IMAGES.

THIS BOOK WAS PUBLISHED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH

ANNIVERSARY OF THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

EBOOK EDITION —PUBLISHED BY THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE

The Art Students League of New York 215 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 212-247-4510 artstudentsleague.org @aslnyc

ISBN: 979-8-9907703-3-1

Library of Congress Control Number : 2024910042

Copyright © 2025 the Art Students League

Individual authors, artists, photographers, and estates maintain copyrights over their work therein as indicated. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce material included in this publication. Any oversights will be corrected in a future edition.

Cover art includes a reproduction of a print of the Art Students League by Fredrick Brosen

STEPHANIE CASSIDY

Editor, Head of Research and Archives

JJ LOONAM

Director of Communications

REED SEIFER

Designer

MARTIN L. FOX

Copyeditor

MARK L. HINELINE

Indexer

Gratitude to the Wyeth Foundation for American Art for their generous support of this book.