The Art Students League of New York, Highlights from the Permanent Collection, featuring some seventy -five paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, will be on view at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, from December 15, 2007 through February 3, 2008. As one of America’s oldest art schools -- established by and for artists -- 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.

In the League’s historic building on New York’s West 57th Street, 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, from late 19th-century figure drawings to 1930s social realist prints to pop and abstract paintings, and works by contemporary students and instructors. Inevitably, the works also capture events and trends in the nation’s history.

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.” These drawings were often displayed on the classroom walls as educational aides and entered the collection. 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.

Over the decades, the collection registered the shifting interests and styles of teachers and students. Charles Courtney Curran’s Woman Reading and Allen Tucker’s October Cornfield reflected Americans’ turn-of-the-century interest in the subjects and style of French Impressionism. Later, John Sloan’s satirical etching, Connoisseurs of Art, 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. Years of study in Paris had exposed Matulka to Cubism and Surrealism. Students David Smith, Burgoyne Diller, and Dorothy Dehner found his advocacy of modernism compelling. At the same time, the League faculty included artists who focused on explicitly native subjects and worked in realist styles.

The Depression-era focus on both the dignity and the de-humanizing aspects of labor emerge in Harry Sternberg’s print Steel. 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. Collagist and painter Leo Manso, who exhibited with Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Adolph Gottlieb in the 1940s, focused on the “distillation of the landscape experience,” embodied in After the Storm. Charles Alston and Norman Lewis, African-American artists who taught at the League, gave the collection examples of their abstract work as well. René Robert Bouché, an instructor, became famous for magazine illustrations.

Sculpture has been an integral part of the League’s program since its inception and is represented in this exhibition by the humanism of William Zorach’s mother and child and by contemporary sculptor Rhoda Sherbell’s portrait of Aaron Copland. Among the present generation of artists in the exhibit are printmaker / instructors William Behnken and Michael Pellettieri and students Sam Goodsell and Roberto Franzone.

The League has enabled generations of individuals the chance to learn from experienced, professional artists in studio settings. This exhibition presents some of the high points in that history. The Art Students League of New York, Highlights from the Permanent Collection is courtesy of The Art Students League of New York; Tour Development by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Missouri

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