MORE LECTURES
My first lecture at an educational institution was at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In October 1967, I was invited to talk by President Joe McCullough who had visited Leeds College of Art the previous year and was the most impressed with the teaching and philosophy. Accordingly, I gave my first college lecture in Cleveland. I remember the lecture because I was nervous and just before I was about to go on stage had visited the bathroom. In my haste, I left my trouser fly undone. Joe told me to zip up, so I was grateful to him not only for his invitation but for saving me embarrassment.
The lecture was on the British art education, much more avant garde and risqué than my presentations to the conservative clubs of the English Speaking Union. Not only was cotemporary art shown but also the work of students at Leeds. The foundation studies in line, color, shape, form and basic design were shown with colorful slides of happenings and events. These images were in stark contrast to traditional and academic teaching. Although Leeds students did figure studies, these were dynamic drawings of expressive line and frenzied gesture. The students did events using the figure with costume and color, in tableaus that dealt not only with the figure but with flagellation and fornication. The work was experimental, energetic and extreme, exploring and breaking boundaries in art.
The talk seemed well received, particularly by students of Cleveland Institute and it’s President Joe McCullough, who was most enthusiastic. Unbeknown to me, at end of October, there was the annual meeting of the National Association of Schools of Art. Joe shared his enthusiasm for my talk with other members who were college presidents and university deans. I began to receive phone calls from them with invitations to lecture at colleges of art and university art departments from coast to coast. I organized these lectures and travel myself without any secretarial or administrative assistance. I lectured in over thirty educational institutions in almost as many weeks. I tried to schedule my lectures geographically, giving a few talks within a day so when the institutions were near one another. In California, I gave three lectures in one day, thanks to flying by helicopter, then air taxi and limousine. Of course, as the saying goes “only in LaLa land”.
What is remarkable in the giving all these lectures is the fact that I organized the lectures and travel myself. In those days, I had neither secretary nor assistant except for my teaching assistant, Elliott Thompson. I was most fortunate for Elliott was mature, reliable and knowledgeable; being a retired Federal Government employee who had studied art in Paris. With confidence, I could leave my classes under his supervision whenever I had to be away. However, I usually arranged my lectures around my limited teaching schedule at the Corcoran.
So with an atlas and telephone, I went ahead and organized lectures at colleges and universities departments of art; often by word of mouth. I had many remarkable experiences and met wonderful people. However, my overall impression of arts education in the United States was that it was academic in the worst way and of yesteryear. How could a nation that was sending rockets into outer space have art schools still teaching perspective rather than perception? My recollections and opinions are summed up in the article “Up the American vanishing point”