A Lot of Old People at Art Students League
Art Students League Gathers the Fruits of Its Gifted to Mark Full Century
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March 7, 1975
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Electric current legend has information technology that a immature "conceptual" artist, one of the new brood who majored in video at a newfangled art schoolhouse, paid a visit to the Art Students League and was puzzled past an unrecognizable aroma in the lobby. "Gee, what'due south that great scent?" he asked. "Oil paint and turpentine," he was told.
The nostalgic odor of ancient fine art materials that permeates the edifice symbolizes why many students become to the league — its no‐nonsense devotion to the traditional "nuts," taught by traditional methods.
"I knew what I wanted—a real, solid core of painting and drawing that I needed to limited myself," said Larry Walden, a 27‐year‐former pupil from Washington who serves as monitor in the anatomy class taught by Robert Beverly Hale. "And I knew this was the best identify to get it."
Asked why he had not chosen one of the urban center'south more "with‐it" fine art schools, such as Pratt or the Schoolhouse of Visual Arts, Mr. Walden said: "Because the vibrations hither are very serious. At some of the other schools they're like high schoolhouse kids, smoking pot and drinking. In that location'southward a little more than maturity hither, for some reason."
I of the reasons may be the age range and occupational variety of the two,400 students who crowd the warren of studio‐classrooms deployed throughout the building's v floors and pay a bargain charge per unit of $62 a month for a basic 18¾ hours of form work a calendar week.
The gamut runs from established artists (the late Marker Rothko returned to the league in the 19‐fifties when he was already well known, to study printmaking) through nonprofessionals (Mrs. William Paley, wife of the CBS board chairman, attends a sculpture grade) to students. The majority are nether 30, merely there are a number by retirement age.
One of the latter is Andy Weisbecker, who retired eleven years ago as an electrical foreman for the Transit Potency. 3 years at the league, Mr. Weisbecker goes every day to the sculpture class taught by Jose de Creeft, and is working on his fourth stone slice, an abstract shape in marble that somewhat resembles a butterfly.
"Retirement got slow. I tried everything. Finally I thought I'd come hither, and this is my life now," he said. "Lots of people go through life looking for something—I've plant it."
'Heard It Was the Best'
At the lower‐finish of the age scale is Pam Morris, a 25‐year‐one-time painting student from Tucson, Ariz., now in her second week at the league. Dissatisfied with courses at the Academy of Arizona—"the teachers there were like baby sitters" — she came to the league because "I heard it was the best school in that location is."
"The teachers' concerns don't seem to be with giving grades, just with cognition," said Miss Morris, who was sketching from a live model in Marshall Glasier's drawing class. "Here if I don't nourish, it won't mean not getting a grade, it means I won't larn. The more liberty I take here, the more responsibleness."
'Keeping in Contact'
Mr. Glasier, a natty figure in a green beret, a plaid jacket and dissonant plaid trousers, who studied with the belatedly George Grosz, said: "Here we're only interested in instruction the arts and crafts—we can't make the creative person. Nor exercise we teach people to teach. We have matures, but some of the kids are here for occupational therapy. Or, they're kicked out of college and their mothers say, 'Don't hang around the business firm, accept up fine art.' In whatever case, they're mostly here to find out what they can exercise—and some really do."
Among the practicing artists who have returned to the school is Shirley Due west, whose large, abstruse welded‐steel and cement sculptures are placed on a number of sites in the South. She has gone to the league on and off for thirteen years to study anatomy and "keep in contact with the model," fifty-fifty though her work is abstract.
"I really come up for Hale's anatomy course," she said. "The subject is taught at other schools, but not by him. Also, the league has a certain ambiance. Information technology'due south a dwelling house away from habitation. They all know me hither and I can see friends who go back 20 years."
To John Comeaux, 32, who came here specially to attend the league after studying fine art at schools in his native New Orleans, the league'southward importance for students goes beyond the soundness of its educational activity concepts. "They should call it the Institute of Human Resources," he says. "It's a fine art school, but likewise it'due south a schoolhouse for self."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/07/archives/art-students-league-gathers-the-fruits-of-its-gifted-to-mark-full.html
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