Pride of place

By Temple Ligon

I saw two 45-min. film documentaries at Duke during an art history conference in the spring of 1975. They were produced and presented by art historian Barbara Rose, and she titled one “New York School” and the other “Abstract Expressionism”. Her audience was offended that she didn’t engage them in critical debate, the way she was known to generate serious discussion at Columbia or NYU, her home turf.

What she did was compared with simply recommending a couple television programs and sit down.

Both films, though, touted an art school in the North Carolina woods a little northeast of Asheville. Black Mountain College was founded in 1933, the year the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in Germany; so the leading professor upon the opening of Black Mountain College was Joseph Albers of the Bauhaus. The last year of the Bauhaus was when architect Mies van der Rohe ran the place. Mies left Germany in 1933 not because he held moral objection to the Nazis, but he left for the USA to take a teaching job and to hustle design commissions. His Bauhaus style, severe minimalism with exposed structure, didn’t win any favor with the Nazis. Hitler preferred Greco-Roman recall.

Always intellectually indebted to the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College kept open until 1957, and it closed its books with no debt in 1962.

Today it is part of Camp Rockmont, a summer camp for Christian boys.

The basic concept of the curriculum was to teach the liberal arts through the arts.  The school stayed small, never more than 100 students at any one time.

The main founder was John Andrew Rice, who stayed in charge until 1940.

Rice and his subordinate founders were dismissed faculty members of Rollins College, then as now a rich kid’s college at the south end of Park Avenue in Winter Park, Florida.

Albert Einstein was an occasional lecturer. Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was also on the faculty. Later his wife was Helen Frankenthaler, probably the only aristocrat among the painters of the post-WWII New York School.

Before taking over the department of architecture at Harvard, Bauhaus head Walter Gropius taught at Black Mountain College.

Buckminster Fuller and his students built his first geodesic dome at Black Mountain College.

Music composer John Cage was on the faculty, as was his modern dance friend Merce Cunningham. Both joined Jasper Johns for performances interpreting the work of Marcel Duchamp.

So to share a little pride in our corner of the world, an awareness of what happened and who made it happen at Black Mountain College just two hours from Columbia is in order.

The most interesting in the avant-garde of the world’s art education was taking place for about 20 years very close by.

All this is on exhibition at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art now through January 24.

If Boston’s distance is too tough, Asheville has the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center at 56 Broadway (828.350.8484). But Asheville won’t have any of what’s on tour until January 2017. After Boston, the exhibition goes to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (February 21-May 15). The last stop of the Black Mountain College tour is the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (September 17, 2016-January 1, 2017).

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