Revolution in the Classroom
April 2007
On the day classes began at Robert Henri’s new art school in New York, a procession of students toting paint boxes and canvases paraded down Broadway from the New York School of Art on 80th Street to the Lincoln Arcade on Broadway (site of the present-day Lincoln Center). The year was 1909, and the roster of students included such soon-to-be illustrious names as Andrew Dasburg, Clara Greenleaf Perry, Julius Golz, Bernard Karfiol, Walter Pach, Patrick Henry Bruce, Paul Manship, Morgan Russell and Eugene Speicher. The event marked a sea change in the world of art pedagogy, because the New York School of Art had been founded in 1896 by Henri’s great rival, the older and more conservative William Merritt Chase, for whom he had worked. When Henri defected from Chase’s school, he took the talent with him.During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chase and Henri emerged as the most influential art teachers in this country. Each taught for three-and-a-half decades at a variety of schools: Chase beginning in 1878 at The Art Students League of New York, then at the Shinnecock Summer School on Long Island, which he founded, followed by the Chase School of Art (later renamed the New York School of Art) and finally, again at the League. Henri’s teaching career began in 1892 at Philadelphia’s School of Design for Women, then progressed through the New York School of Art, Henri School of Art, the Ferrer Center and The Art Students League.
While each man was extremely successful in fashioning a following, they were exact opposites in both appearance and in the philosophy of art. While Chase, short and round, was a dapper dresser who sported a top hat, pince-nez glasses, winged collar, a gardenia in his lapel and white spats, Henri, more than 6 feet tall and slender, regularly wore a calico shirt, black cloth coat and pants that sometimes revealed worn spots at the knees. In the classroom Chase encouraged his legions by such pronouncements as, “Subject is not important. Anything can be made attractive. Aim to make an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you’ve done it.”
Henri, in a more dramatic and sometimes even poetic approach, would say, “Regard the head as a gesture. Often the rise of the forehead is as though it was a surprise. Feel the sweep back under the eyebrow. A pair of lips is not enough. It takes all the lower part of the face to make a mouth.” On another occasion he would say: “Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. Work with great speed. Have your energies up and active. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, who enrolled in Chase’s still life class at The Art Students League, remained indebted to him for his early encouragement: “I think that Chase as a personality [promoted] individuality and gave a sense of style and freedom to his students. There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exacting about him that made him fun. To interest him, the paintings had to [possess] a kind of dash and ‘go’ that kept us looking for something lively.”
Another pupil, Charles Hargens Jr. described him as “an electric spark shooting his words like darts at you.” Other students of Chase included Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Charles Hawthorne, Reynolds and Gifford Beal, Howard Chandler Christy, Marsden Hartley, Edwin Dickinson, Morton Shamberg, Alfred Maurer, Arthur B. Carles and Kenneth Hayes Miller.
Chase hired Henri as an instructor at the New York School of Art in 1902, and during the next few years numerous students who had previously been taught by Chase switched their allegiance to Henri. Among them were Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper, C.K. Chatterton and Rockwell Kent.Du Bois once remarked, “The entire New York world of painting was dominated by William Merritt Chase,” yet after attending Henri’s initial day of instruction, observed that he “set the class in an uproar. Completely overturned the apple cart; displaced art by life, discarded technique. The talk was uncompromising, the approach unsubtle, the result pandemonium.”
Hopper once told me, “Henri was the most influential teacher I had. Men didn’t get much from Chase; there were mostly women in his class. I was in the Life and Portraiture classes of Henri. He was a magnetic teacher.”
Chatterton began his third year at the school in the year Henri arrived, and noted: “Almost from the first moment, Henri became the dominant influence in the school. He urged us to study life around us and to express our own ideas. His teaching seemed revolutionary at the time. We hung on his every word.” And Rockwell Kent, after becoming a Henri student, noted that his critiques “made no pretense to such showmanship as Chase delighted in. They were earnest and, at times, impassioned.”
Like an aesthetic magnet, Henri attracted students from near and far: George Bellows left Ohio State University following his junior year, Carl Sprinchorn arrived directly from Sweden, Glenn Coleman from a newspaper job in Indianapolis, Helen Appleton Read after graduating from Smith College and Margery Ryerson came to Henri’s classes straight from Vassar.
In the fall of 1907 William Merritt Chase left the Chase School of Art and returned to The Art Students League. The New York American announced the story with the headline: “William M. Chase Forced Out of N.Y. Art School; Triumph for the ‘New Movement’ Led by Robert Henri.” The “New Movement,” already infamously labeled the “Ashcan School,” resulted in Henri urging his flock to focus on depicting the hustle, bustle and squalor of Lower Manhattan, where two-thirds of New York lived in crowded slums. Meanwhile, Chase had become part of the genteel tradition created for the middle and upper classes, producing popular portraits of the well-to-do and stunning still lifes of shimmering dead fish.
Although Robert Henri now reigned as the leading teacher at the New York School of Art, his association with it lasted just one more year. Announcing that he was owed some $800 in back pay, Henri left in December 1908 to found his own school, the Henri School of Art. There, he encouraged his flock to create quickly with slashing brushstrokes, and as a result the school’s two rooms were awash with pigment—as Stuart David later recalled, “Paint was all over the place; the students’ smocks were heavily armored with it.”
In April, 1912 Henri taught his final class at the school, turning over the reins to student Homer Boss. During the past four years Henri had become increasingly involved in organizing exhibits for all of those artists, including his students and friends, whose subject matter and styles fell outside the purview of the conservative annual exhibitions at the National Academy of Design.Through his efforts, there were exhibits in New York of “The Eight,” 1908, the “Exhibition of Independent Artists,” 1910, at the Union League, 1911, and at the MacDowell Club of New York the same year.
The legacies of William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri have endured over the decades through the efforts of their pupils, many of whom became teachers themselves. Henri, for example, returned to the faculty of The Art Students League in 1915 (a year before Chase died), where he gave lectures and taught portraiture and composition until 1927, just prior to his death.
At least 28 of Henri’s League students turned to teaching there—Peggy Bacon, Hilda Belcher, George Bellows, Walter Biggs, Arnold Blanch, Robert Brackman, Stuart Davis, Guy Pène du Bois, Peppino Mangravite, Paul Manship, Walter Pach, Waldo Pierce, Dimitri Romanovsky, Eugene Speicher and Sol Wilson.
As Henry Adams noted in his 1907 autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” This remains the sustaining legacy of these two teachers who taught thousands.
“Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri” can be seen at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Conn., through April 29.
Art critic and artist Bennard Perlman is the author of Robert Henri: His Life and Art, The Golden Age of American Illustration: F. R. Gruger and His Circle, The Immortal Eight: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show and The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies.