Return to Black Mountain - Book Review - Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by John P. Bowles

Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, edited by Vincent Katz, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002; 328 pages, $75.

Black Mountain College occupies a near-mythic position in the history of American modernism. In 1933, the year it was founded, Josef and Anni Albers brought their particular vision of the Bauhaus to the United States, and soon invited emigre artists like themselves to teach at the school they had joined in southwestern North Carolina. It was amid this community of exiles in 1944 that Arnold Schoenberg and his followers met to develop their approach to 12-tone music. Black Mountain is also the legendary place where, in 1952, composer John Cage staged the event so often referred to as "the first Happening," and where Robert Rauschenberg met and began collaborating with Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham. The college would also become the base camp for Charles Olson's pursuit of a new American poetics. Previous accounts have claimed as Black Mountain's primary legacy a series of stellar instructors, astonishing collaborations and momentous events. The four essays by various hands in Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art inquire into the special circumstances that made a residency there so productive for so many "artists, composers and writers.

Crucially, Black Mountain engaged students and instructors in a process of experimentation rather than a set curriculum, encouraging them to learn not only with each other but also from one another in collaborative projects. Poet and critic Vincent Katz, in an article that comprises the bulk of the volume, stresses that this was the intention of John Andrew Rice, the school's founder, a former Rhodes Scholar much influenced by procedures at Oxford. Rice envisioned an educational collective run by its teachers with input from the students instead of directives from a governing board. Students at the deliberately nonaccredited school took the courses they wanted and, when they felt ready to graduate, requested a comprehensive examination to be administered by someone outside the college. Marcel Breuer served as examiner for the first four graduates in 1940. The college was not planned as an art school--courses were always offered in science and mathematics, sometimes taught by artists--but Rice believed the arts held a central place in a liberal arts education. Within such a loose structure, the arts thrived.

Rice's ideals afforded instructors and students an uncommon degree of independence, but the college required individuals capable of implementing his aspirations. Katz constructs most of what amounts to an institutional history of the college from biographical vignettes of various key people who passed through. The strength of this approach is that it allows him to demonstrate what each instructor brought to Black Mountain. Anni Albers, for example, developed the Bauhaus respect for craft, materials and the handmade, elevating the weaving workshop to a rank of unusual importance. Katz has gathered photographs of men and women weaving diligently at Black Mountain to demonstrate the impact of Albers's rejection of the Gropius hierarchy that celebrated architecture but marginalized "women's arts." Katz outlines Albers's belief, shared with her husband, that craft and creativity encouraged serf-confidence and independence--a powerful antidote to the culture of conformity.

Katz also interviewed former students to determine the influence various instructors bad on them. Three of these students--Kenneth Noland, Rauschenberg and the late Ray Johnson--provided exceptional insight into the Black Mountain legacy. In the late 1940s, each studied with the earlier generation of teachers (e.g., the Alberses, painter Ilya Bolotowsky) but then reconsidered what they had learned after exposure to new instructors involved in Abstract Expreasionism and the artistic possibilities of chance operations. Noland describes the importance of the classes in geometric abstraction he took from Bolotowsky, but also says that he learned a more spontaneous approach to painting from Helen Frankenthaler and Elaine and Willem de Keening. Noland is an important figure in Katz's history because the Color Field paintings for which he later became famous are a unique synthesis of the two prevailing styles of painting taught at Black Mountain, pointing to the school's lasting influence after it closed in 1956.

Rauschenberg is the only artist discussed at length in this book who is seen primarily through his interactions with others. In Katz's account, be is Susan Weil's lover and husband, attending classes with her and learning to make photograms from her, and he is a precocious student in whose work Cage finds useful confirmation of a path 'already chosen. Rauschenberg and Weil attended Black Mountain during the 1948-49 academic year. When they returned in the summer of 1951, it was with Rauschenberg's friend Cy Twombly. In Katz's account, however, once Rauschenberg and Weil decide to break up that summer, we learn nothing more of Rauschenberg's personal life or of the fact that he and Twombly were at the beginning of their two-year-long relationship as lovers. (1) Rauschenberg hardly rates a mention in Katz's discussion of Twombly.