THE SCHOOL
Corcoran Gallery and School of Art, located across from the White House & Executive Building.
The studios of the Corcoran School of Art were in the basement of the gallery. The marble floors of the museum atrium were edged with huge colossal slabs of opaque glass, discolored over the years to a greenish hue. The result was that the light was like that of a dingy aquarium. The intention of the architect Ernest Flagg, who designed the building in 1899, was for the natural light from the skylights on the roof to filter, through the upper and lower galleries, into the basement of the art school. The Corcoran must have been the only art school to have its studios not in the attic but in the basement its the dark corridor. That hall way had tables, chairs and a coke machine and was the cultural meeting place for faculty and students. That hall is where cultural conversation took place for there was no where else in the school or nearby to meet. The Corcoran is located across the street from the White House and Executive Offices. Parking was and is an ongoing problem. To have an art school with rebellious artists and straggly students was and is an anomaly for its location.
The facilities and equipment of the school were poor if non existent. After my days at Leeds College of Art, I could not believe the poverty of the place and the abysmal teaching. I was amazed to wander through some of the classes in that dingy dark basement. One class was called “European landscape 101”. In this class, students copied in pastels from postcards with scenes of Europe, unreal as was the teaching of perspective, pencil shading, anatomy and similar outdated academic topics. Obviously, I was going to change that in my class.
The Corcoran School had no full-time program and was not accredited. The classes varied from amateurs to aspiring artists. A large faculty, some fine artists, were paid miserably and treated badly by the Dean. Later, I found that the school provided income and badly needed money for the museum.
My first class was large, nearly fifty students, ranging in age from 18 to 80, many had come, curious to study with a Brit. I was going to teach the basics of shapes, form, line, color and texture. My first statement to that class is worth quoting. I said to my students, “For the next fortnight, I do not want you to use the rubber. You will draw on cartridge paper and at the end of the fortnight; we will use drawing pins to put the works on the wall for critique.” I looked at the class and there was complete silence, nothing happened. In the back of the class, a beautiful young girl gestured for me to follow her outside.
The student, in her twenties, was a State Department employee. She had lived and worked in London and, fortunately for me, understood the difference between English and American English. She explained to me that no one knew what I was saying because a fortnight was two weeks, a rubber was a prophylactic, cartridge paper was white paper and drawing pins were thumb tacks. In this way, I gained my first lesson in American English.
When we went back into the studio, the class was still sitting in dumb silence. I said, “Here is what I want you to do. In the next two weeks do not use the eraser, please draw on white paper and we will put the drawings up with thumbtacks at the end of two weeks.” There was a collective sigh of relief.