Art: Bone & Muscle Man

As Manhattan’s Art Students League dusted out its classrooms for the opening of the fall semester last week, a spry, round-faced oldster with a head as bald as a pumpkin prepared for another whack at the job he had been doing year in & year out for the past 43 years: teaching U.S. artists how to draw the human figure. The oldster’s name, as unfamiliar to the general public as it is familiar to practically every artist in the U.S., was George Brant Bridgman. Teacher Bridgman has good reason to take his teaching duties seriously. Some 70,000 artists (including Alexander Brook, John LaGatta, Eugene Speicher, McClelland Barclay, Norman Rockwell) learned their bones and muscles in his quiet, methodical classes.

Prim and meticulous, 77-year-old Bridgman stumps up & down his classroom, glowering affably at any student who wastes drawing paper or sits a few inches out of line from the other students. Occasionally he stops to drop a sardonic remark or to redraw, in heavy accurate lines, an improperly pitched shoulder or a badly proportioned leg. Something of a Puritan, Bridgman has only recently permitted nude models in mixed classes of men & women. He treats the human body as solemnly and abstractly as an engineering problem. “Anatomically,” he says, “there’s not much difference between a man and a horse.”

George Bridgman’s career as the art world’s big bone & muscle man began in the 1890’s when he decided that the job of teaching artistic anatomy was being mishandled, even in Paris. He decided to teach himself.

Finding that there were almost no books on artistic anatomy, Bridgman began to compile his own. He wrote a whole book on the human hand, carrying around a batch of wrist and finger bones in his pocket and earnestly examining them at odd moments on subways and in restaurants. At home he kept a hand pickled in glycerin and carbolic acid, studied it for weeks until putrefaction forced him to bury it in the garden to the horror of his Negro gardener. Once a taxi driver, aware of his interest in cadavers, appeared on his doorstep with a dismembered human leg that an unidentified medical student had left in his taxi.

Bridgman spent 20 years writing his monumental Constructive Anatomy, which has sold 30,000 copies.

Every school day since 1899 Teacher Bridgman has marched with corpulent dignity through the gloomy doors of the Art Students League on 57th Street. Says he: “I have weathered the stormy days at the League when Emma Goldman, as well as other communists, lectured at the institution, shouting ‘down with the Louvre, throw it into the Seine, and the Royal Academy into the Thames. Tear down the Metropolitan Museum stone by stone and burn the works of the brush-swinging hacks that go by the name of Old Masters.’ ” When, in 1936, the League’s models staged a sitdown strike, Conservative Bridgman just sat tight. At the Art Students League, a teacher’s tenure is subject to the vote of the student body. For 43 years that student body has not been able to dispense with “Old Man” Bridgman.