Think you’re the next O’Keeffe, Pollock, or Rothko? There’s a way to find out—attend the same unconventional school they went to.
NOT YOUR TYPICAL ART SCHOOL
Most art schools in New York City—Cooper Union, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, Queens College, Pratt—have highly structured programs that require certain classes and award degrees. But the Art Students League, on West 57th Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue, is nothing like that. It was founded by artists, for artists. There are no entrance requirements or exams; anyone who wants to go may sign up, pay tuition, and attend classes in drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Students don’t even have to have any prior art-making experience.
Since there’s no set curriculum, each aspiring artist invents his own program by choosing classes (as many or as few as he likes) and following a course of study with whichever teachers he prefers. Not everyone who goes to the League turns out to be a genius, but the school does boast a galaxy of art stars who studied there: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, and Lee Krasner, to name just a few.
REBELLION ACADEMY
The Art Students League started in 1875 when a group of students broke away from the extremely traditional, strictly organized National Academy of Design in Manhattan. The National Academy’s purpose was to train students to be professional artists, and its teaching methods included having them make drawings of antique sculpture and attend lectures on anatomy, perspective, architecture, and ancient history.
The League group felt that the National Academy was too boring, too conservative, and too resistant to new ideas about art. They wanted to get away from painting old-fashioned subjects (like scenes from mythology) and embrace more naturalistic subjects taken from life. And they wanted a very different kind of school, too—one based on the French atelier (or studio) system: Each room of the new school would function as an independent studio, where a class would be given by a teacher who was free to instruct his students however he saw fit, with no interference from an administrative body.
Estimated number of NYC pigeons captured and sold to shooting clubs each year: 144,000.
The Art Students League’s first home was on the top floor of a building at 16th Street and Fifth Avenue. The school’s only support came from its students’ membership fees, so the League had complete independence and got right to work setting up the kind of school it wanted. Life-drawing classes became a cornerstone; League artists believed that drawing real life (especially human forms) instead of inanimate objects—the norm at the time—was crucial to developing one’s artistic skills. This change especially benefited female artists, who had long been banned from life-drawing classes because the 19th-century art world felt it was inappropriate for women to draw nudes. The League held life-drawing classes every day of the week, the first art school in the country to do so. Then in 1878, the League’s members voted to incorporate—they became a legal entity with a charter, mission statement, financial responsibilities, and so on, instead of just a loosely organized group. But they didn’t lose their idealistic vision: The League’s charter required that out of the 12 people who served on the committee that made decisions for the school, three had to be currently enrolled students. This guaranteed that students would have a say in the way the school was run—another first for the League…and for the art world. Finally artists were empowerd to direct their own education, a principle that still guides the League today.
As more and more students enrolled, the League outgrew its space and had to move several times. Finally it joined with a few other arts associations to form the American Fine Arts Society (AFAS), which had a building large enough to accommodate everyone. In 1892 the AFAS members moved into a new French-Renaissance-style building on West 57th Street, where the Art Students League remains today.
Last Dodger to pitch a game at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field: Danny McDevitt (1957).
These days, the League isn’t the avant-garde force it once was. Newer, hipper galleries and art schools (like Black Mountain College in North Carolina) opened in the mid-1900s, and new forms of art—abstract painting, photography, minimalism—took the spotlight, pushing figurative painting and drawing into the background. But in spite of the abstract leanings of some of its alumni, like Pollock and Rothko, the Art Students League continued to focus on figure, portraiture, landscape, and still life, and today still does what it always has: make classes accessible to anyone with the desire to be an artist.
“Make no mistake about why these babies are here—they are here to replace us.”
“Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem.”
“Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.”
“Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.”
“It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”
“The big advantage of a book is it’s very easy to rewind. Close it and you’re right back at the beginning.”
“I was the best man at the wedding. If I’m the best man, why is she marrying him?”
“Dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them’s making a poop, the other one’s carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge?”
There’s no college in College Point, Queens. Its namesake, St. Paul’s College, closed in 1848.