Why Art Schools Matter
David Carrier

Renaissance artists were trained by being apprenticed to some established master. In that culture, becoming a painter involved mastering a trade. Humanist intellectuals mostly had little concern with the practice of painting and sculpture. But then, starting in the seventeenth century in France, everything changed. In the Academy, art students learned how to draw from plaster casts, to use color and, finally, to work from live models. Under the old regime, the French sent their most gifted graduates to Rome, where these young men could study the masterpieces of antique sculpture and Renaissance painting. Later, other countries (including the United States) imitated this system, establishing their own Roman academies, which exist still today.

This system of training presupposed that the skills of an artist could be taught. In that way, the Beaux-Arts Academy was like a present day university. Just as the skills of an art historian can be taught in classes, so too, in this tradition, students learned how to be artists. And, to continue my parallel, just as academic training culminates in the dissertation that sustained book-length original writing required for a doctorate, so too did the academy prepare artists for careers by giving a final exam, which involved creating original works of art. This academic training system depended upon a relatively stable tradition of art-making. Certainly Jacques-Louis David’s paintings differ from those of Nicolas Poussin, but learning the basic skills of a seventeenth-century master provided a good starting point for the Neo-classical artist.

In the mid-nineteenth century, however, this system broke down. Ingres was a contemporary of his bête noire, Delacroix, but in many ways he seems now closer to Raphael than to the French modernists who were born during his lifetime. Art schools could still train perfectly competent Salon painters, but they had less to offer revolutionaries like Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh. Hence the tendency of avant-garde artists to rebel against and work outside academic institutions.

Already, of course, Romanticism anticipated this problem, for once the artist was thought to create without following rules, as Immanuel Kant said in his third critique (1790), then it was no longer clear what training schools had to offer. Jackson Pollock was a pupil of Thomas Hart Benton, whose ponderous figurative paintings hardly provided the model for Pollock’s breakthrough abstractions. When many of the Abstract Expressionists, in turn, became teachers, the next generation of students were making minimalist sculpture, earth art or doing performances. For three or four generations, the life of the American art world has been defined by such frequent dramatic innovations. What could the great Charles E. Burchfield, who graduated from the Cleveland School of Art in 1916, have taught Richard Anuszkiewicz, such a different artist, who received his B.F.A. in 1953? And, looking closer to the present, what could teachers of Anuszkiewicz’s generation have to say to Dana Schutz, who received her B.F.A. in 2000?

Once a style of art becomes taught, it becomes academic, which is to say that younger artists are certain to reject it. Robert Mangold, Class of ’60, once told me how much he learned when, during his years at the Institute, he saw the Abstract Expressionist pictures in the Carnegie International. But, of course, even from the start, he worked in a very different style. George Kubler speaks of the importance of the entry point, that moment when an artist enters the art world. Your entry point determines what skills will be required for success. Just by virtue of being born earlier, David Deming, Class of ’62, had a very different entry point from April Gornik, who studied here from 1971 to 1975.

One reason that the American art world continues to be exciting is that for half a century, each new generation of artists find serious ways to make it new. Skilled executions of paintings or sculptures in older styles do not attract attention. Once someone is old enough to be a faculty member, it is a sure thing that his or her style of art-making will no longer attract the best students. And so, once the art world was committed to continuous radical innovation, then the goals of art schools became hard to define. I see this in my own everyday life, for my chair is divided between teaching art history at Case Western Reserve, and teaching art students at the Institute. Working with future art historians, I have a relatively clear sense of what to expect. But in an art school, the situation is different. Who am I to tell a student that she should not make art that disconcerts my colleagues and me?

For at least fifty years, many of the most interesting young artists started by disconcerting their teachers. I feel comfortable grading an art history essay. A successful student paper needs to be well written, show knowledge of the literature and be visually sensitive. But in the studio classes, I am often uneasy when asked to evaluate student work. (Talking about it is easier.) After all, there is plenty of fashionable art in the Chelsea galleries that bores or frustrates me. We critics do not share any generally accepted criteria for evaluating contemporary art. I enjoy talking with Saul Ostrow because so very often we disagree. And so, it really is dishonest to pretend that we can objectively evaluate student art.

Universities provide job training, while art institutes, at least in the painting departments, really have a totally different goal. Being an artist is not a job. If recent history shows anything, it is that only art that is radically disconcerting is likely to be of lasting value. What, then, can art schools do? One of their legitimate concerns is to provide students with a liberal education, with a special concern for art’s history. Almost all of the successful artist-revolutionaries had well-developed intellectual interests. But beyond that, we need to think about what we can learn from our history. What, exactly, should the hard working studio faculty be trying to accomplish? And how can we who teach art history support our colleagues?

In an extraordinarily original recent book Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art, the art historian Joachim Pissarro discusses the ways in which the achievement of these artists depended upon communities. He is the great-grandson of Camille Pissarro, and a friend of Johns and Rauschenberg. When you are trying to do something very original, Joachim argues, what is most valuable are sympathetic friends. If even one other person can understand what you are doing, then, with luck and determination, you may gain enough self-confidence to keep going, and so be able to reach a larger audience. Pissarro describes four painters who became friends after leaving school, but his analysis is a great model, I would argue, for the contemporary art school. We need to provide young artists with a community, a supportive group of other students and faculty who can encourage experimentation. Let us provide an environment in which our students feel free to experiment, knowing that challenging original art requires new criteria.