International studio (26.1905)

71/^


ART STUDENTS LEAGUE

PAINTING BY JOHN F. CARLSON, FRANK VINCENT DUMOND's LIFE CLASS

country in the art normal course for the training of
teachers of drawing and painting. This course is
to cover three years and a diploma is to be given.
HE ROCHESTER ATHEN/EUM
AND MECHANICS INSTITUTE
THE exhibition of the work of the art
students of the Rochester (N. Y.)
Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, held in
June, called renewed attention to an unusual
development in art instruction in this country.
The striking feature of this exhibition was the exhi-
bition room, made throughout by the students
themselves; to be precise, by six of the advanced
students chosen for the work because of their special
need of such practical experience. We show an
illustration of this unique undertaking herewith.
The ideas embodied in the Institute's curriculum
are neither uncouth nor startlingly novel. The
school has now enjoyed twenty years of a prosper-
ous and increasingly useful career. The ideas for
which it stands have been naturally called into
action by the great industrial development in which
this country has led the way, but they have only
gradually begun to forge to the front. With such
schools as the Drexel Institute of Philadelphia and
the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, the Rochester
Athemeum stands midway between the trades
schools which ht their pupils specifically for various
mechanical callings, and the manual training
schools, where manual work is made use of largely

for its development of mind and body, for its value
in general education rather than in application.
In the fine arts department of such a school one
naturally finds a recognition of the wider ranges of
art, and a consequent cultivation of the crafts.
As music is expression in tone and sound by
means of any device that is found pleasing to the
aesthetic senses, and literature is expression in pure
ideas through any language that is understood, so
art, in this sense, is expression in form and colour
in any material encompassing such effects. In the
fine arts course of a school, which in its regular
branches combines high school instruction with
practical instruction in wood working, blacksmith-
ing, mechanical and architectural drawing and
machine shop work, the crayon, the paint brush
and the modelling tool could hardly be considered
the only instruments available to the artist. This
revolt from a later day limitation of the sphere of
art is one with which the STUDIO has always been in
sympathy. While the new demand is being
responded to in many quarters, its effects and the
problems it raises are most frankly and adroitly
met in such an institution as the one at Rochester.
There are several most interesting points of
departure in this new style of art instruction from
the firmly established concepts of past generations.
The newer way, like any other good thing, can be
rendered ridiculous by a lack of proper balance;
and theorists have not been lacking who have
sought to supplant the solid, thorough technical
training of the atelier with an ill directed abstraction


XLIII