Tomorrow's Baroque

"For the first time in our history," observes New Yorker Critic Harold Rosenberg in the current issue of Encounter, "the university has become the training ground for artists as well as art teachers. This is a new situation, and the more quickly its potentialities are recognized, the better." To a considerable extent, universities are beginning to deal with this situation: campuses from Yale to California have acquired staffs of practicing artists as well as art historians. Nowhere is the picture brighter than at Manhattan's Hunter College, a city-run school that has, with a minimum of fuss, assembled one of the nation's liveliest art faculties.

Shown & Known. Because Hunter is located between Lexington and Park Avenues in the very heart of New York, the college has always been able to tap well-known "names," has long had on its staff such prestigious artists as Sculptor Richard Lippold, Abstractionists AdReinhardt and (until recently) Robert Mother well. But the problem every art school must face is that very few successful or well-known artists will teach by choice; once their work begins to sell, most would rather spend the extra hours in their studios. Under the leadership of Eugene C. Goossen, 46, who took charge at Hunter five years ago, this problem has been tackled in a novel way: Goossen has concentrated on fattening his faculty with the young comers, men who, in his opinion, have outstanding talent but have yet to achieve remuneration and renown.

Since 1961, the art faculty at Hunter, including both full-and part-time teachers, has increased from 24 to 65. And in short order, Goossen's new teaching artists have made their mark in the outside world. Six out of 60 grants made by the National Council on the Arts last year to promising U.S. painters and sculptors went to Hunter teachers, a record for any U.S. art school. Half a dozen Hunter artists, including Sculptor Tony Smith (TIME, Feb. 10), were represented in the 1965 and 1966 Whitney Annuals for painting and sculpture. Recently, nine Hunter teachers had one-man shows simultaneously in cities ranging from San Francisco to Stuttgart, West Germany.

Trained & Educated. The successes of the teaching staff have an electrifying effect on the students, who now feel that "this is the place to be." This vicarious foretaste of glory is fine by Goossen, who also believes that the way to educate the artists of tomorrow is to "place the student in an environment that al lows him to discover the seriousness of what he's doing, the same as you intern a doctor by putting him in a hospital where there's life and death around him." Hunter offers a variety of artistic disciplines, from traditional life drawing to far-out constructions in plastics and wire, but the main emphasis is on a variety of liberal arts, on the theory that tomorrow's artists must be educated as well as trained.

Goossen believes that art today is essentially in a transitional stage, that the last great style was the baroque, and that "contemporary art is merely the bricks and mortar with which art will build a new order when the time is right." He hopes that his students will be among the future builders. At least there will be no shortage of volunteers: in the past five years, enrollment in the graduate and undergraduate arts faculties at Hunter has jumped from 113 to 600.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.