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The Arts at Black Mountain College
It was at Black Mountain College that Merce Cunningham formed his dance company, John Cage staged his first "happening," and Buckminster Fuller built his first dome. Although it lasted only twenty-four years (1933-1957) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College launched a remarkable number of the artists who spearheaded the avant-garde in America of the 1960s. The faculty included such diverse talents as Anni and Josef Albers, Eric Bentley, Ilya Bolotowsky, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Goodman, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Charles Olson. Among the students were Ruth Asawa, John Chamberlain, Francine du Plessix Gray, Kenneth Noland, Arthur Penn, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Snelson, Cy Twombly, Stan Vanderbeek, and Jose Yglesias. In this definitive account of the arts at Black Mountain College, back in print after many years, Mary Emma Harris describes a unique educational experiment and the artists and writers who conducted it. She replaces the myth of the college as a haphazardly conceived venture with a portrait of a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. Proceeding chronologically through the four major periods of the college's history, Harris covers every aspect of its extraordinary curriculum in the visual, literary, and performing arts.
343 pages, Paperback
Published March 7, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 27, 2014
"...real art is essential life and essential life is art."
--Joseph Albers
Lasting only 24 years, Black Mountain College had an oversized impact on the arts in the United States in the mid-20th Century.
Harris' book is a good counterpart to Vincent Katz' book "Black Mountain College", which I read at about the same time. She focuses much more on educational philosophy and the details of the college's expansion and disintegration; Katz's book is more detailed about the individual personalities involved and the work they produced. I learned a lot more about Black Mountain's actual process from Harris' book.
My thoughts here probably take ideas from both. It's clear that while intensity and spontaneous creativity were vital to the inventiveness and openness of the work, the lack of organization and discipline kept the continuity of the college as a viable educational institution constantly in doubt. Bitter schisms between members of the community were a chronic problem. Yet at the same time the students and faculty worked productively and reciprocally to both nurture and provoke in ways seldom experienced in education before or since.
The tension, perhaps, is necessary, but strong leadership is necessary too. As long as Joseph and Anni Albers were involved with Black Mountain, the balance of discipline and receptivity remained strong. Charles Olson, though a creative force, disliked the details of administration and also teaching(!), was distrusted by the faculty, and allowed an atmosphere of decay and disrespect for women to flourish.
I think the high point for the school was the time in the late 1940's and early 1950's when the old refugee-and-Bauhaus guard mingled with the new young American imagination. Everything was going on, but it was still under control. The collaboration between different disciplines spawned new ways to make and see visual, performance, and written art, not just as individual creations in time, but as a continuing process of exploration.
I also came away from Harris' book with a feel for the changes always happening in U.S. educational philosophy. The 1930's was a time for progressive education, an alternative to learning designed purely for practical training, more democratic and more flexible. Since then we have swung back and forth, and now seem to me to be at a low point in conservative numbers crunching, parroting facts instead of thinking, with no place for community, social concerns, or the arts. But history give me hope that change will come again.
When former Black Mountain students were surveyed about their educational experience, responses were both positive and negative. Yet "Most agree that even a year of learning without the pressure of grades and required courses made later studies more meaningful."
We are currently living in a black/white either/or society. Compromise and tolerance for the ambiguity of the space in between seems non-existent. It's difficult to find that balance, that center, and hard to keep. But at least we could, like those idealists who were Black Mountain College, try.
--Joseph Albers
Lasting only 24 years, Black Mountain College had an oversized impact on the arts in the United States in the mid-20th Century.
Harris' book is a good counterpart to Vincent Katz' book "Black Mountain College", which I read at about the same time. She focuses much more on educational philosophy and the details of the college's expansion and disintegration; Katz's book is more detailed about the individual personalities involved and the work they produced. I learned a lot more about Black Mountain's actual process from Harris' book.
My thoughts here probably take ideas from both. It's clear that while intensity and spontaneous creativity were vital to the inventiveness and openness of the work, the lack of organization and discipline kept the continuity of the college as a viable educational institution constantly in doubt. Bitter schisms between members of the community were a chronic problem. Yet at the same time the students and faculty worked productively and reciprocally to both nurture and provoke in ways seldom experienced in education before or since.
The tension, perhaps, is necessary, but strong leadership is necessary too. As long as Joseph and Anni Albers were involved with Black Mountain, the balance of discipline and receptivity remained strong. Charles Olson, though a creative force, disliked the details of administration and also teaching(!), was distrusted by the faculty, and allowed an atmosphere of decay and disrespect for women to flourish.
I think the high point for the school was the time in the late 1940's and early 1950's when the old refugee-and-Bauhaus guard mingled with the new young American imagination. Everything was going on, but it was still under control. The collaboration between different disciplines spawned new ways to make and see visual, performance, and written art, not just as individual creations in time, but as a continuing process of exploration.
I also came away from Harris' book with a feel for the changes always happening in U.S. educational philosophy. The 1930's was a time for progressive education, an alternative to learning designed purely for practical training, more democratic and more flexible. Since then we have swung back and forth, and now seem to me to be at a low point in conservative numbers crunching, parroting facts instead of thinking, with no place for community, social concerns, or the arts. But history give me hope that change will come again.
When former Black Mountain students were surveyed about their educational experience, responses were both positive and negative. Yet "Most agree that even a year of learning without the pressure of grades and required courses made later studies more meaningful."
We are currently living in a black/white either/or society. Compromise and tolerance for the ambiguity of the space in between seems non-existent. It's difficult to find that balance, that center, and hard to keep. But at least we could, like those idealists who were Black Mountain College, try.
July 15, 2008
Review a list of alums - de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Franz Kline, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, etc, etc - and you won't be surprised of the central role art played in education at Black Mountain Arts College. Equally important however was the hewing of logs, foundation laying for new buildings, the clearing of rough weeds. Imagine all those Expressionists of the New York School, first confronting appalachian wilds.
The book is recommended for its history of progressive education in US. Interesting to learn of the philosophical motivations behind the faculty - before WWII they did the groundwork for a progressive educational tradition...that today seems nearly lost. What sense of duty did the artist-educators feel to leave the Bauhaus, say, for North Carolina?
Who knows, but Henry Miller said: "The most interesting college I visited was Black Mountain College in North Carolina; it was the students who were interesting, not the professors." Well (60,70 years later) duh. Though you still get a sense of Black Mountain in Asheville or Penland School. I was in that area recently, with this book (a coincidence arranged by the NYPL reserve system lottery), and I dreamt it might still be possible to run off and start a woodsy arts colony - long as there's plenty of manual labor involved.
The book is recommended for its history of progressive education in US. Interesting to learn of the philosophical motivations behind the faculty - before WWII they did the groundwork for a progressive educational tradition...that today seems nearly lost. What sense of duty did the artist-educators feel to leave the Bauhaus, say, for North Carolina?
Who knows, but Henry Miller said: "The most interesting college I visited was Black Mountain College in North Carolina; it was the students who were interesting, not the professors." Well (60,70 years later) duh. Though you still get a sense of Black Mountain in Asheville or Penland School. I was in that area recently, with this book (a coincidence arranged by the NYPL reserve system lottery), and I dreamt it might still be possible to run off and start a woodsy arts colony - long as there's plenty of manual labor involved.
July 19, 2020
Black mountain bible!
March 28, 2010
A great capture of the history of the college. I'd like to add this to my personal collection.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews