Art schools
Drawing for art's sake
Martin Gayford
One morning earlier this year, I dropped into the Royal Academy Schools, where there was a life class in progress. The model — named Zoe, appropriately for a representative of life — sat on her throne, the students around squinted, mea- sured and drew in charcoal on their easels, under the rigorous direction of Norman Blarney RA. It was a scene which would have been familiar to anyone who went through art training in the last two or three centuries, and immediately recognisable to Leonardo or Raphael. In art schools today, however — it may come as a surprise to learn — this kind of life class is becoming increasingly rare.
It is enthusiastically championed in a few art schools — several outside the State sys- tem. But a despondent and circumstantial piece in the Royal Academy Magazine con- cluded that serious life drawing was peter- ing out. 'If they want to learn to draw' it quoted one teacher as saying, 'they can go to China.' In many schools, one gathers, after perhaps a perfunctory encounter with charcoal and model in the first year, stu- dents settle down to expressing themselves — one working on an anti-patriarchalist video project, another filling plastic bags with nail-filings, the next arranging dead fish.
From being at the centre of art training, life drawing has rapidly dwindled to a bare survival on the periphery. Where it is taught, it often tends to be in an 'anything goes' fashion. And anyway drawing is widely regarded as archaic, irrelevant, pointless. Students who want to draw seri- ously may be actively discouraged, or even told to seek psychiatric help. Another art school teacher was quoted recently as say- ing he didn't teach drawing because such knowledge tended to damage his students' career prospects. The new orthodoxy is that art is about 'concepts', not 'skills' (i.e. old-fashioned drawing, painting, modelling and carving).
Does this matter a damn? The old aca- demic system was rigid, and could be dead- ening. Sickert poured derision on it. Courbet, when he briefly ran an art school, tethered an ox in the middle of the room in place of the model. Matisse considered the instruction in the Beaux Arts fashion, `deadly for the young' and the professors of drawing, 'pompous ignoramuses'. But this process did produce wonderful artists, even if they became wonderful partly through a process of reacting against, even unlearn- ing, their academic training. (`At last' Toulouse Lautrec remarked towards the end of his life, 'I don't know how to draw.') But rebels or not, it is hard to think of a major modernist artist of any kind who did not go through the academic mill. Even the abstract masters — Mondrian, Klee, Pol- lock — started like that, and one suspects that without that discipline bf hand and eye, that ingrained sense of proportion, their work would have been empty. The critic, Robert Hughes, argues that the trou- ble with '80s whizz kids like the American painters Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat is precisely that they did not go through this sort of art school 'boot camp.' `The cack-handedness is real.' Similarly, he suggests a would-be representational painter like Eric Fischl is handicapped by training in Californian 'life-classes' of the 1970s, which were 'an absolute zoo ... they didn't teach technique.' By not teach- ing its skills, Hughes concludes, art educa- tion can destroy a tradition. Which may begin to explain why we have so much bad art around today.
Maybe. Like the debate on teaching 'I'm afraid the Royal Suite is a single bedroom.' grammar in schools, this is a slippery and elusive issue — and also one which gener- ates much heat. Unfortunately, there is no broad agreement, even among those who love it, about what good drawing is. David Bomberg, a major figure in 20th-century British art, came to believe passionately that academic draughtsmanship was actual- ly bad for artists — 'hand and eye disease' he called it. The truth is surely that there is no one method — every good artist draws in a different way.
`We had to kill the life class stone dead', a celebrated painter and veteran of art edu- cation told me. And for a while, he insisted — with the right sort of teaching — the new art education had really worked. But eventually students had begun to think that they could paint pictures, 'with a bloody joint in one hand, and a girl on one knee'. The trouble is, he concluded, 'you need the discipline'.
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