Exhibition - The Art Students League of New York Highlights From The Permanent Collection

As one of America’s oldest art schools, The Art Students League of New York has attracted outstanding talents as teachers and helped prepare others who left their mark on twentieth-century American art. There Georgia O’Keeffe studied with William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter worked under the guidance of Thomas Hart Benton, and Louise Nevelson enrolled in the classes of George Grosz and Hans Hofmann. The school’s permanent collection documents its distinguished history and reflects art movements of the last 125 years.

The League was founded in 1875 by art students who were dissatisfied with the educational opportunities at the National Academy of Design in New York. As it evolved, the school reflected practices at the prestigious French art academies, such as the independence of each instructor within his studio or atelier. By 1920, the League was the country’s most prominent art school, inspiring similar institutions in other American cities and attracting students from every state.

The school’s permanent collection began as a learning resource. A friendly patron donated a set of etchings by James McNeill Whistler. League students fortunate enough to travel and study abroad were asked to share some of their figure drawings done there — called “exile donations.”

Other works were acquired through scholarships awarded to outstanding students. Norman Rockwell’s 1911 charcoal illustration of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, for example, was most likely a class assignment that earned him a year’s tuition at the League; in exchange, the drawing became the League’s property. Over time, additional strong student works were acquired for the collection as a “record of what had been accomplished.”

The collection also benefited from the generosity of League instructors such as Chase. Allen Tucker, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Frank Vincent Dumond also donated works to the League.

Over the decades, the collection registered the shifting interests and styles of teachers and students. Charles Courtney Curran and Allen Tucker reflected Americans’ turn-of-the-century interest in the subjects and style of French Impressionism. Later, John Sloan’s satirical etching drew fire from those who found such subjects crude; the same critics would later use the term “Ashcan School” to describe the candid images of city life done by Sloan and his compatriots.

By the late 1920s, growing student interest in European avant-garde movements prompted the League to hire artists from abroad, including Hans Hofmann, George Grosz and Jan Matulka. Students David Smith, Burgoyne Diller and Dorothy Dehner found Matulka's advocacy of modernism compelling. At the same time, the League faculty included artists who focused on explicitly native subjects and worked in realist styles. Well into the 1940s, the interest in native subjects endured in the work of such League instructors as printmaker Martin Lewis and Reginald Marsh, who found inspiration in the crowds at Coney Island.

Artists/teachers working in abstract styles and with non-traditional materials are also represented in the collection. Charles Alston and Norman Lewis, African American artists who taught at the League, gave the collection examples of their abstract work as well.

This exhibition is courtesy of The Art Students League of New York. Tour Development by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Missouri

Sponsored by National City Bank and Dr. Louis A. and Anne B. Schneider Foundation

Date: May 10 – July 6, 2008