Every weekday morning at artist Bruno Surdo’s School of Representational Art, students work at easels before a nude model posed in the classical mode.
A few of the students at Surdo’s school, located on the cluttered 7th floor of a vintage brick building in River North, have degrees from conventional art schools. At Surdo’s, the students begin by making charcoal drawings to develop their visual perception, drawing and painting from plaster casts and then working in oil paint, moving from monochromatic palettes to full color.
It’s a tradition that dates to the Parisian ateliers of the 19th Century, and, to some, it’s as old-fashioned as the quill pen and the horse-and-buggy.
But Surdo, who studied at a similar school, Atelier Lack in Minnesota, found such art training “so thorough, so concrete” that he wanted keep the flame going in Chicago.
“We’re not trying to change the art world,” he said. “We’re just trying to fit in. Many people, especially your common person, appreciate realism.”
Drawing and the representation of the human figure are not at the center of art training anymore, and the change cannot be attributed entirely to the usual whipping boy, computer technology.
It’s history. The classroom model of instruction supplanted the old apprenticeship system in art schools, noted Howard Singerman, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Virginia and author of “Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University” (University of California Press, 1999).
Art schools have added courses in humanities and social sciences, as well as in new mediums of art. Programs fit the individual needs of the students, whether they are studying drawing, photography or video.
“It’s the job of professional schools and university departments, whatever their field, to keep up with the most recent developments,” Singerman said. “So art schools and studio art departments in universities have had to come to terms with conceptual art or abstract expressionism, even if individual faculty members are cranky about it. It’s their job.”
At the California Institute of the Arts, students are required to take a number of courses designed to sharpen their visual awareness and give them the skills they need to make their desired art. But those courses may or may not include drawing.
“In the old academies, when there was little doubt that large-scale figurative paintings were the highest form of art, a rigorous program of drawing was the sure way to get to that,” said Thomas Lawson, dean of the school of art at Cal Arts.
“This has certainly been lost to us for a very long time now. Art today takes many forms from drawing to video to multi-part installation to performance.”
An artist working on the Internet, Lawson noted, “would need programming skills more urgently than drawing skills.”
Realist art has never disappeared entirely, but it has hardly been fashionable in important contemporary art circles. Indeed, some art schools and university art departments may even discourage it.
At the School of the Art Institute, dean Carol Becker said, “If a student is a terrific representational painter and they’re looking with all the sophistication you need to bring to those forms now, we would be interested.
“Let’s say they’re really reproducing classical images of women, nude women being gazed upon who don’t seem to have agency, there would be questions about what they’re doing. What representation of gender are you portraying? They could pursue it but they would definitely be interrogated about their motive.”
Rodney Carswell, an abstract painter and professor of art at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said, “If there’s a student who is very centered on the figure, by all means they would have room to do that.
“But the faculty would typically challenge them in terms of what’s already been stated in realism and [warn] that technical accomplishment is not enough.
“The observational tradition is not as strong as it used to be, and I think we segue into art about ideas more quickly.”
But studio art majors at UIC still are required to take drawing courses to graduate.
At the School of the Art Institute, it’s a different story. Students there may or may not take classical drawing. Although they must fulfill requirements in two-dimensional design, those courses could be printmaking, photography or painting.
“The drawing requirement is always being put back and taken away,” Becker said. “Now students come in with portfolios in photography, portfolios in video and film. Do they need traditional drawing to be a filmmaker? There are faculty who vehemently argue that they do and other faculty who will argue that they don’t.”
And the debate is not confined to teachers and administrators.
William J. Andersen, a painter who completed a master’s degree in fine arts at the School of the Art Institute last month, said that “the avant-garde art crowd has lost belief in the value of skill, especially in classical type drawing, while the general public hasn’t.
“I personally feel drawing should be a large part of an artist’s vocabulary. Even if you rebel against that knowledge or don’t use it in the specific way you learned it, you can use it for other means like composition, how to create spatial illusion. It has taught me how you see and how everybody sees.
“If everyone is just making art and we don’t have any connection with each other about how we see or how we experience things, then I think art is really elusive.”
America’s colleges and art schools educate hundreds of artists each year (187 institutions offer master of fine arts degrees), but there is no consensus about the curriculum required to train professional artists.
“There was once consensus, but not any longer,” said Singerman.
But Singerman maintains that’s not a bad thing. “I think that’s completely appropriate. I don’t think it’s clear anymore what skills an artist needs to have or what skills can make an artist.”
Singerman noted that with myriad art forms now available, art schools and university art departments that want to be competitive must be able to teach digital media, film, video, installation and performance.
“It would be irresponsible for an art school or department to try and shield their students from the present,” he said. “And so you can have schools where students go from drawing in the studio in front of a posed nude and three hours later they’re running a video camera.”
Ruth Weisberg, dean of the school of fine arts at the University of Southern California, described her job as “a balancing act,” incorporating cutting-edge technology while retaining tradition.
“It’s so important for our students for their rather brilliant careers: Web site design, animation, special effects.”
But she cautioned against the common misunderstanding that the commercial art world and the fine arts world are separate. “The boundaries are more permeable,” she said.
“Many artists that have gallery careers are also very interested in high technology,” she said. “Figurative skills can contribute, for instance, to your viability in animation, or they can contribute to a fine arts career, where you’re exhibiting in galleries and museums.”
Weisberg considers schools such as Surdo’s in Chicago and the more prominent New York Academy of Art, which has the only graduate art program in the nation based on the study of the human figure, as a movement in reaction to technology.
“You have more high tech for very sound reasons,” she said. “But you also have, among both artists and the public at large, a corresponding desire to have things that are more human, things that can be touched, rather than [viewed] on a screen.”
In any case, technology and burgeoning hybrid art forms put tremendous pressure on arts administrators.
“We’re adding all this new technology, but we’re not really getting rid of the other things we do,” said Joe Deal, a noted photographer and provost of the Rhode Island School of Design. “These new tools fill up our curricula rapidly, and students are learning, for example, how to make photographs the old way as well as learning how to make digital photographs.”
While painting students still employ oil paint on stretched canvas, Deal noted that the computer opens up other dimensions. “With the available software programs, a student can scan drawings and manipulate them on the computer, so that the computer becomes a kind of drawing tool, an aid for students using otherwise very conventional materials.”
It’s now possible to teach drawing using a computer instead of traditional pencil and paper. Even that is controversial.
“One of our crosstown rivals allows their students to learn to draw on the computer or by hand,” USC’s Weisberg said. “I think that’s ridiculous. Everybody benefits from learning to draw directly and you’re much better on the computer later if you learn to draw by hand.”
Michael Aurbach, professor of art at Vanderbilt University and vice president for committees of the College Art Association, said, “Doing art on the computer is sort of like learning French kissing on telephone. Something gets lost in the translation. It’s not the same.”
Art history isn’t quite what it used to be, either. It has been subject to the same scrutiny as the literary canon for emphasizing white male artists to the exclusion of women and non-Western artists. Consequently, most art history survey books now include people of color, women and non-Western perspectives.
“A lot of art history has drifted away from [studying] the object,” noted Aurbach. “It is being used as a springboard to talk politics, social issues.”
Aurbach believes the education process has been watered down by abandoning the canon. “The canon with all of its problems still has been a very effective teaching system,” he said. “When I have students now that come in and don’t know the difference between a medieval work and a baroque work, it scares me because I need that vocabulary of style sometimes to discuss things.”
But art history has not completely fallen by the wayside, even if its content shifts. At Chicago’s Columbia College, which maintains a traditional curriculum, students simply must take a separate course in non-Western art in addition to two standard art history courses.
“It’s typical of our time in history that artists don’t work in just one medium or with one material, but draw on different techniques and materials,” said Mame Jackson, chairman of art and art history at Wayne State University.
“A lot of the art in our time is not art for art’s sake, but it’s art that is sometimes engaged with social and political issues. So that courses in other areas like philosophy, history, political science and special areas like women’s studies, Africana studies are very much a part of the art curriculum at a university.”
It’s no different at the School of the Art Institute, where students are required to take a large number of liberal arts courses, including history, philosophy, science, mathematics and literature.
“We want them to be educated citizens so that they can function in society, not stand apart from it,” Becker said. “I want to see our students challenging our society, intellectually and in every way. They need verbal skills to go out into the art world. If you train artists just to be makers and not thinkers, then they’re going to have a hard time.”
In her essay, “Re-imagining Art Schools,” Becker made a salient point:
“Students cross disciplines, moving in and out of forms. Often the medium is not as significant to them as the ideas they are struggling to actualize through that medium. Even the notion of making a specific piece of art oneself has evolved. Appropriation, collaboration and technological advances have transformed the romantic hands-on/lone-artist model of art production.”
Little wonder then that classical drawing has been de-emphasized despite the strong argument about how well it trains the eye.
“It has nothing now necessarily to do with making art,” Singerman said.
