International studio (36.1908/1909(1909))

WORK BY PUPILS

PUBLIC EVENING DRAWING-SCHOOL
NEWARK, N. J.

P

UBLIC DRAWING-SCHOOL OF
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

THE rapid increase of art interest in
schools where students are taught ac-
cording to artistic principles is markediy apparent
in the Public Drawing-School of Newark, New
Jersey, where an added thirty per cent. of door
space has been recently taken to accommodate the
growing number of students.
The modest name of this school might have been
descriptive of it in its earlier years, but it does not
no-;<v express the wide scope of its activities. It
bhgan by teaching elementary drawing twenty-hve
years ago, and remained a drawing-school for about
half that time. Then the spirit of modern indus-
trial art, with its complete regeneration of old-time
idea and methods, entered in, and since that day the
school has been growing and developing in every
direction. To-day it gives an industrial art course,
a general art course, a mechanical course and an
architectural course, the first two of three years'
and the two latter of four years' length.
The courses given at this school are the same
as are given at many other hne art schools in all
parts of the country, but it is its methods which
diSerentiate this school from others. The plan

of learning hrst the laws of design and composition
as applied to all objects and materials, and later
taking up different materials and creating articles
out of them by the application of these laws, is
not new, and is in vogue, more or less, in other
schools; but it is rarely carried out as fully as has
been done in the Newark school. In the indus-
trial art course, two years are spent in the study of
design, elementary drawing, industrial design,
drawing from objects, modeling and historic orna-
ment, and only in the third year the students take
up tools. Then they are taught to manipulate
different materials, leather, metal, wood and clay,
and to work in jewelry, learning the use of tools,
and applying the principles previously learned to
the manufacture of articles in all these different
materials; for the student is required to pass
from class to class, and to take up one material
after another, making some article in each, during
his third and hnal year.
No fad is allowed to direct the work. Each de-
sign of a pupil is passed upon by the teachers of
art and design, and by the teachers in the material.
The school has outgrown four buildings within the
past ten years. It has over nine hundred students,
in thirty-four classes, in both day and evening work,
and eighteen instructors.

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