Waiting for the Creative Moment

HISTORICALLY artists have always worked quite successfully in garrets and brothels. Somehow these places seem to enhance the creative experience. Yet there has always been some doubt as to whether an artist could survive in a university, especially a liberal arts university.

Approximately 20 years ago Harvard faced this dilemma. Previously the University had paid scant attention to the creative arts. Harvard's first art history course was given by Charles Eliot Norton in 1874. A few sporadic courses in painting and sculpture had been offered in the Fine Arts department. But it was not until 1954 that the University felt it was important enough to appoint a committee to study the practice of the arts at Harvard.

Its mandate was "that a careful study be made to determine the future course of the arts at Harvard." Reinterpreted it meant that the committee should determine how to fit the creative arts into Harvard's highly academic curriculum.

Yet even today, as Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts celebrates its tenth anniversary, the question is being asked again. This time around, however, it seems to be formulated a little differently. Now the question is, how can what have been the arts at Harvard be made more creative?

In 1954, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, President Pusey appointed a five-member committee which included as its Harvard members John N. Brown '22, a former Overseer, Francis Keppel '38, the dean of the Graduate School of Education, and George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology. The recommendations of what came to be known as the Brown Report were three-fold: a new department of design should be created for concentration in the visual arts, its curriculum should emphasize two and three dimensional design, and an arts center should be built. The content of the curriculum was to become the most controversial of all recommendations.

There are numerous ways to teach art. The typical art school approach stresses techniques, such as the use of oil paint, a charcoal crayon or a lithographic press. Alternatives include allowing students to work in teams with a series of visiting artists on specific projects. Or they can be left completely alone with certain equipment to do as they please.

The Brown Report opted for a fourth approach--instruction in design theory. The committee members recommended that Harvard teach those fundamental principles of design which they felt underlay all art.

From the very start the Brown Committee made it clear that it was not in the least bit interested in training professional artists. The new center was not going to be an arts or craft hall for ceramicists and weavers. It was not going to provide the opportunity for students to work at a variety of hobbies. Rather it would serve to make art conform to Harvard's intellectual standards.

The Brown Committee seized upon an appropriate analogy--the role of the scientist in the University. Just as the experimental laboratory work of the scientist had become academically respectable, so artistic experimentation would become respectable. Art would be rid of its "mental inferiority" because it would be made intellectual. Professors would teach students design theory in a series of controlled experiments in the studio.

The Faculty set up a standing committee, chaired by Jose Luis Sert, dean of the School of Architecture, to implement the recommendations of the Brown Report. The Committee on the Practice of the Visual Arts (CPVA) then took charge of building Carpenter Center and further defining its educational philosophy.

TO A CERTAIN extent there existed external pressures to make art academic through a series of high-structured studio exercises. According to Eduard F. Sekler, Hooker Professor of Visual Art and now director of Carpenter Center, opposition to the idea of studio arts at Harvard was prevalent. In testifying before a Faculty committee on the creation of a new department, Sekler recalls being asked "And what is the discipline of your department?" And even though the building had been constructed and in use for five years, it was not until 1968 that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences agreed to grant this new department of design the status of a concentration.

However, the CPVA itself was very much opposed to the idea of the Harvard student as a bohemian artist creating freely in the studio. They felt something had to be taught. And they agreed with the Brown report that it should teach design principles.

There was the feeling that Carpenter Center's role was to educate all Harvard students on visual matters. Underlying it was the belief that "visual illiteracy" accounted for much of the visual squalor present in the American environment, from its cities to its eating utensils. The task of the new design center was to make Harvard students more visually sensitive while they were still undergraduates. Then during their careers in business, industry, and government, when faced with decisions involving visual judment, they would be properly equipped to make them.

The CPVA decided that the new department would be concerned with "visual studies." In a statement to the Faculty Sekler described visual studies as the "manipulation of forms and media in a spirit of purposeful exploration, sometimes to an expressive end, but not necessarily with an aspiration towards the production of works of art--though not excluding that possibility which might come, on rare occasions, as a crowning reward." Clearly, the future government official would not feel out of place in the new department. Art would never be expected of him, merely the acquisition of skills of visual expression.

The inspiration of the new department was in part derived from the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus had as its core certain basic courses in the principles of design that included experiments in texture, color, and form of paper, and precluded the creation of works of art. One of the department's first Faculty members came from Illinois Institute of Technology, a Bauhaus that had been reconstituted in this country in the '40s. In addition, the CPVA was heavily composed of architects and architectural historians who were knowledgeable in the ways of the Bauhaus and undoubtably found them quite applicable to Harvard's program.

Conveniently enough, there already existed a series of basic design courses taught as part of the undergraduate concentration of architectural sciences. The Arch Sci department occupied a small building by the Charles River. Since this concentration was to be phased out and gradually replaced by courses in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), the obvious thing to do was to make its courses the core curriculum for the new Carpenter Center. And in fact, when Carpenter Center offered its first program in 1963, approximately half of its courses had been taken over from the old Arch Sci department.

In effect the faculty of the Arch Sci department was transferred to the new Center, too. This was fortunate in light of budgetary considerations: since some of the staff teaching down by the river already had tenure through other departments, Carpenter Center would only have to support them on a half-time basis.

THOSE PEOPLE who worried at the time that Carpenter Center was to become an "adult nursery school" with lots of courses in "finger-painting" were appeased. Emotional release would not be tolerated. And realism was effectively nixed due to the influence of the Bauhaus. "Everything was to be scientific, nothing emotional," recalls James S. Ackerman, professor of Fine Arts and a member of the CPVA. Harvard would teach a language of vision, nothing more. According to Sekler, "In 1960 it seemed the most valid way of going about it."

The format of the design courses during the first few years of the Center's existence consisted of a series of assigned exercises that were intended to clarify certain principles of design. They dealt with such problems as the interaction of color, figure-ground relationships, the modulation of a two-dimensional surface, and color transparencies.

"There is an analogy with language," noted Sekler. "Obviously the person who is going to write poetry in the end must first learn grammar, syntax, and orthography." The logic was that if a person was going to create a work of art, he must first learn such principles as color theory. Instead of waiting for a burst of inspiration, the point was to select a problem, work on it methodically, and in the end the creative moment would arrive.

A crisis was not long in forthcoming. Students who had no intention of being artists most likely found it a great deal of fun to take an introductory design course and do assigned exercises with color-aid paper and tongue-depressors. Yet the VES concentrators themselves began to express real dissatisfaction.

As last year's juniors began to search for thesis topics, according to one student, they found themselves "unprepared to do a large, individual, self-motivated project." Clair L. Marino '73, a VES concentrator, described herself as being "theoried-out." "You didn't even know what to do with a paintbrush," she said.

As a result, a group of concentrators drafted a letter last year to certain VES Faculty. They complained that at Carpenter they found" 'art' being taught as 'design' in a series of experiments." The letter went on to say that although courses on color theory and the psychology of art were offered, there were no courses in painting, sculpture, etching, or on the economic and moral position of the artist. They wanted to see art "taught by artists, not architects, designers, art historians, or Harvard graduates from other fields."

THE COMPLAINTS focussed on basically two issues. First, the students objected that Carpenter Center did not encourage the development of verbal skills in dealing with art, whether through discussions or written pieces. Secondly, they felt that the creative, self-expressive component of their work was understressed. They found the distinction between exercises and a full-fledged artistic statement increasingly difficult to tolerate.

In a questionnaire administered in May, 1972, well over half of the concentrators claimed that the VES department was too theory-oriented. Only 8 per cent said that it was too creation-oriented. Approximately three-quarters claimed that they would like to see the department changed. The verdict--the department should move in the direction of creativity, away from principles and jargon. This meant less-structured studio courses and the introduction of many desired courses in painting and print-making into the VES curriculum.

These sorts of criticism obviously strike at the very ideological foundation of the Center. To ask that it offer courses in painting is almost heretical given its professed anti-art school attitudes. As one student remarked, "Teaching painting would be like teaching Communism." And to ask the department to become more creation-oriented in general is to fly in the face of its expressed statement of purpose. Art was always going to be a happy by-product, if it was ever achieved at all, at Carpenter Center.

Whether the department will respond to these criticism remains to be seen. However, as a result of a VES student-faculty committee on curriculum review, certain changes appear to be in the offing.

For example, an open tutorial system was proposed to allow each concentrator to choose his own project and pursue it at his own pace. The curriculum review committee also requested that course descriptions be revamped to make them more explicit, and that some advanced theory courses be changed to include sections on painting.

In addition, the department is now considering a large introductory lecture course, VES 1, in order to expand its offerings for the non-VES concentrator. The course would be comparable to Fine Arts 13 and would introduce students to a range of concerns from a small-scale visual analysis to an environmental design project. It is tentatively scheduled for 1974-5.

Whether further concessions to student desires will be made remains to be seen. Certainly some of the larger issues are still unresolved.

In a letter to the VES curriculum committee last year, Rudolf Arnheim, professor of the Psychology of Art, said that Carpenter Center should not continue to convey the impression that understanding "figure-ground relationships" and "complementary colors" are the objectives of its teaching. Instead, Arnheim said, it should shift its emphasis from teaching visual tools to asking what these tools can be used for, especially in terms of self-expression.

In addition, students want Carpenter Center to incorporate such things as print-making and life-drawing, traditionally the domain of the art school, into its curriculum as courses for academic credit. In the past, painting and ceramics courses have been diffused throughout the University as extra-curricular House activities.

Perhaps the opportunity for reform ultimately rests on the hiring and firing of Faculty. Ackerman, who was appointed last Spring as chairman of the committee on the status of the arts at Harvard, believes that VES faculty appointments, except for tenured administrators, should be limited to two or three years to ensure a turn-over within the department. Currently appointments can run for as long as seven or eight years.

Unfortunately for the department, all these clamors for change come at a time of increased budgetary restrictions. At present, the department has three-halves tenured positions which are shared by three professors. The rest of its money comes from the unrestricted funds of the Dean's office. Thus when the belt is tightened, other more heavily endowed departments do not feel the pinch as much as Carpenter Center does.

Students are demanding more equipment, more visiting artists, and new courses all of which require money. Therefore, none of these things is likely to come in the near future.

Yet the attitude around Carpenter Center is optimistic. People feel that things are changing. A report on the status of the arts at Harvard is slated to be published later this month. Impending is the appointment of a new department chairman. President Bok even sent in his own presidential committee to assess the situation at the Center.

Eric Martin, a lecturer on Visual Studies and chairman of the curriculum review committee, observed recently that "Carpenter Center is now seeing what it can be and losing its ancient hang-ups." Conceivably the next ten years will see more changes in the arts at Harvard. Perhaps then the creative moment will arrive, not by accident, but by design.