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LEEDS Leeds is industrial city in Yorkshire. As the saying goes, with a Yorkshire accent, “Where there's muck, there's brass”. In other words, where there's industrial dirt there is money; Leeds City Hall, once a majestic and white building, was black, covered in grime and grit. The city, with factories belching smoke and soot, was grimy and industrial but rich, particularly in its educational establishments: the University and the College of Art.
After four years at Clarendon College in Nottingham, my life was to change again. At Leeds College of Art, in 1964, Harry Thubron resigned as Head of Fine Art and Ricky Atkinson was appointed as his successor. Ricky invited me to join him in Leeds but could only offer a part time position. I decided to take the risk of giving up my full time employment, to travel every week by train to Leeds. The opportunity of being part of the faculty, even part time, was a risk worth taking. Within six months, after an interview at the City Hall, I was pleased to be appointed lecturer in painting, a full time position. More interviews occurred as I became senior lecturer and, again, when I became director of postgraduate studies. I had taken on more responsibility, including being director of the gallery.
In the past years, I had been a disciple of basic design; certainly, I advanced my career through this teaching. Initially, I was an implementer rather than an innovator of basic design. However, I did introduce the concepts of basic design to my teaching in further education. As a result, a syllabus and examination of the City & Guilds was completely changed. In my first year in America, 1967/8, I lectured extensively and wrote articles on art education at Leeds. I felt that the efforts and achievements at Leeds needed greater recognition. In 1969, at my invitation, Meryle Serest visited and wrote the article “An American in Leeds”, published in Studio International (May 1969 Volume 177 number 911). I had met Meryle when at the Corcoran in Washington Dc, where she was a writer for the Arts Section of the Washington Post. We have remained good friends to this day; in fact, during the summer of 2007, we both gave talks at the Pollock Krasner Center in the Hamptons NY.
The following extracts are from the ’69 article, “An American in Leeds” and give an outsiders view of Leeds at that time. Meryle Secrest writes: “Any American observer visiting the fine arts department of Leeds College of who asks in all innocence, “What does a student need to know in order to graduate?”, is met by polite amusement. The concept that students should be judged by the techniques they have learned has been abandoned by the Leeds staff since the mid-1950s when Harry Thubron on first formulated his theories of arts education there.
“Over the years, a painstaking reassessment has produced an educational experiment at once humanistic, anarchistic, and far-reaching in its ramifications, in which the process is more important than the end result…..What is being attempted here is a way of putting the student back in touch with those wellsprings of his creative being…….. The college itself does not hint at the social and psychological goals - it is a random collection of ramshackle buildings, connected by a labyrinthine corridors and loosely congregated somewhere in the middle of a bleak black city. Nevertheless the building has its own style, even if that is no style. The college is destined to move soon into new square shaped glass and concrete quarters. I suspect that both staff and students are going to miss the serendipitous possibilities offered by their present floor plan and look back nostalgically on the bad old days.
“The students can't be mistaken for anyone else. You can spot them coming a mile away, since everyone else in this working-class town looks solid and respectable. They (the students) enjoy life whether they are cavorting seminude in some color film they have made, or presenting an evening of student events. There is a lighthearted, antic quality about their behavior, a kind of innocent spontaneity which seems to suggest that the college is achieving its goal of loosening them up…. ……a number of creative people are gravitating towards the environment that Leeds College of Art has achieved. (The writer goes on to mention: Cornelius Cardew; George Brecht; Walter De Maria; Richard Hamilton; Yoko Ono; Allen Davie; Terry Frost; Victor Pasmore; Pat Heron and many others.) …….The development of the Leeds approach is variously described as a happy accident and the careful work of a few men. …..to have begun with Thubron who settled there in the mid-50s and attracted some like minded talents. Among those who came to work with him was Eric Atkinson, an intense, introspective man who is now head of the Department of Fine Art.
“Atkinson's great gift has been to gather around him a group of equally talented men and leave them alone. They are all strong individualists and it is therefore surprising to discover how very much alike they are in their thinking about education. Robin Page calls his goals “discovering how to live sane in an insane society”. Miles McAlinden talks about the importance of empathic understanding, or “the willingness to see with your ears”. Roy Slade stresses the need for “creative anarchy”, Willy Tirr wants to produce people who will “think around corners” and Eric Taylor, the Principal of Leeds College of Art, says that they are trying to find out what the individual can achieve on the theory that the assimilation of knowledge comes through self-discovery.”
“Robin Page says …that Leeds has…. created “an environment which allows for anything, real or imaginary, to be considered as the role material of art, and in the temporary suspension of the influence of social necessity or historical art as governing factors in the search for creative directions….. We do not postulate that the art exists as a model for the art that can be made. The student is directed to selfish inquiry, materially and intellectually, and encouraged to respond to those primary clues within himself which…. will enable him to make an original contribution in a form most consistent with his true interests.”
“The two men most responsible for the first-year course are Robin Page and Miles (Mac) McAlinden. They are immensely stimulating, challenging conversationalists who bombard you with the force of their convictions. These are that the approach must be open ended and enquiring, an attitude rather than a method….They encourage students to make mistakes on the assumption that this is an essential part of the learning process. Mac says, “We believe that the only method is to ask the questions, so that they produce the answers which are their reality.” They start by presenting students with a group project to start them thinking as a team and then beyond teamwork to their individual statements. In a one-term project, they split the students into eight groups of five. Each group was to invent a tent which had to incorporate a unique expression of their personalities. Then the students were left alone. For first six weeks, the staff report subsequently stated laconically, “no tents were made and moral went down. Yet they were really finding and examining the social problems presented by working in groups”, and the results justified all of their expectations.
“Atkinson says, “In the previous way of training, a person never had his own identity. What they (the teachers) were trying to do was train the eyes and the hand, when it’s the brain that allows you to see. Now we are not trying to produce artists so much as to provide a visual education”
At Leeds, the emphasis was on questioning, discovery, inquiry, learning and knowledge. Students were given projects to start them thinking as a group then as individuals. The most dramatic aspect of the courses at that time was that there were no courses as such and neither classes in the traditional sense. A group of students would be in the studio, studying day after day, sometimes for weeks, one aspect of art. In color, the students learnt all aspects of the color circle, including discords and harmonies. The analysis of color was rigorous, both theoretical and in practice. Students began painting a still life but doing so through pure color analysis. Nature became a means to further and deeper understanding of color. After working with color, the students would study aspects of the properties and potential of line. The drawing of the figure became totally different than any other approach; the model was encouraged to move so that students had to work quickly capturing the movement of the figure. The models were posed in different ways and settings; one of the most dramatic was setting the model against a huge billboard. The eye on the poster was bigger than the model herself. In this way, students began to learn about scale and form. At other times there were attempts to at distort the figure through light, mirrors and surroundings. The intensity of these classes was obvious: both with the commitment of the faculty and with the students as the approach was one of exploration and discovery for student and faculty. Students would get involved with performance and happenings: colorful fanciful costumes; music sound and video; the possibilities were endless as the investigation of ideas and creativity continued through intense and individual innovation.
On a personal note, for the first year, I did a commute then moved to a small village outside Leeds. Yorkshire is a large county, dramatic and bleak; as was the old art school building. As Meryle Secrest had foreseen, when the College of Art moved into a contemporary, glossy building, much changed and was lost. Eric Atkinson moved to Canada; other faculty left; and I was already in America.
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