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Colleges: The Artist on the Campus

6 minute read
TIME

That chap at the faculty tea, the fellow just over there by the sandwiches, the one wearing a T shirt and corduroy pants, is he — yes, he is, it’s the artist in residence! More and more, the egocentric, emotional and often nonconformist artist is being enticed into the disciplined serenity of academic life — generally to the jolting benefit of both.

In St. Joseph, Minn., Sculptor Joseph O’Connell ambles out of the surrounding woods twice weekly, leaving his wife and eight children behind, to demonstrate his method of sculpting at the College of St. Benedict, a Catholic women’s school. There he fires up an acetylene torch and shows the girls how he carves in metal, presumably leaving them with a lifelong interest in both sculpture and blowtorches. The 642 students at St. Benedict’s even enjoy a second artist in residence: Playwright George Herman (his From Sea to Shining Sea has been optioned by Manhattan’s Lincoln Center), who reigns enthusiastically over what started out as a simple new auditorium but is now a $3,000,000 Benedicta Art Center. Boasts a college official: “He adds a real touch of pizazz to the place.”

Teacher, Not Novelist. Bigger schools with more money lure bigger names in a hot new rivalry for prestige in both the creative and performing arts. Film Director Jean Renoir recently drew 400 students to his class at U.C.L.A., a figure previously reached there only by Playwright William Inge. U.C.L.A.’s theater-arts department has also snared John Houseman and Josef von Sternberg, expects to land Ingmar Bergman next fall. Its art department has had Jacques Lipchitz; its music department, Indian Sitarist Ravi Shankar, Composers Roy Harris and John Vincent — and even a whole quartet in residence, the Feri Roth chamber group.

Harvard has run through Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Aaron Copland, and the late Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings. Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Studies has attracted Author Paul Horgan. Some artists become permanent faculty fixtures, such as Yale’s Novelist Robert Penn Warren and Minnesota’s Poet Allen Tate. Saul Bellow, temporary writer in residence at Chicago, has fit so unobtrusively into the faculty that Coed Barbara Samuels observes: “For us he’s the teacher, not the great novelist.”

Applause of Juveniles. By contrast, Novelist Richard G. Stern frets at Chicago about the fact that “some faculty members consider me a bit of a sport—amusing, but not to be attended to too seriously.” He sees a danger in the classroom, where the artist is “put in a position of power and becomes more quickly satisfied, going away delighted with the applause of juveniles.” Others find the criticism of students only too candid. At U.C.L.A., Writer-Playwright Christopher Isherwood patiently answers Questions aimed at baring his soul: “What do you think about God?” “Have you changed your mind about Freud?” “How come Auden became more renowned than you?” At Wisconsin, Violinist Rudolph Kolisch is openly critical of the university’s music faculty, declares: “These music-education people do not understand music itself.”

Passive Role. Colleges have conflicting ideas on what to do with the artist once they snare him. Some insist, as does Chicago, that he carry a full teaching load. “I don’t know how much permanent value there is to just rubbing shoulders with great names,” says Chicago English Chairman Gwin J. Kolb. Ivy League and West Coast schools tend to use the artist in informal seminars, then let him work while students kibitz or wait to nail him at coffee breaks. At Wisconsin, Painter Aaron Bohrod avoids talks, just keeps his studio open. “Fascinating verbalists may not lead you to the understanding that a shrug of the shoulders can,” he says. Many colleges use performing artists primarily to direct student productions in drama, music, the dance.

A few colleges consider outright patronage of the artist as their proper role, openly subsidize the artist’s work. Of the relatively unknown but promising Niccolò Tucci, Columbia’s Writing Program Chairman John Humphries explains: “It is not a question of what Mr. Tucci can do for us, but what we can do for Mr. Tucci.” Wesleyan once discovered that an artist can be given too much freedom: one famed visitor spent his subsidized time preparing lecture notes for high-priced delivery at another university.

The ultimate value is the mingling of the professional artist, with his intense personal stake in his art, and the university, so often aridly concerned with detached theory. “It is so exciting,” says University of Southern California Music Department Chairman Raymond Kendall, “to walk into a studio in the afternoon and find two 18-year-olds playing in a string quartet with Gregor Piatigorsky and Jascha Heifetz.” At Southern Illinois University, where former Metropolitan Opera Soprano Marjorie Lawrence, confined to a wheelchair by polio since 1941, conducts an opera workshop, Professor Howard R. Long declares: “When she puts on an opera, by God, it’s an opera. I almost cry when I see these corn-fed kids belting that opera like pros.” U.C.L.A. writing students will never forget hearing Novelist Isherwood confess that there were pages in one of his novels “that even I can no longer decipher.”

The Same Goal. The mating of artist and academe may never be perfect. Cornell recently celebrated its centennial with a four-day exploration of “The Universities and the Arts” at Lincoln Center in which Cornell President James A. Perkins warned that the artist on campus must shake off his tendency to dismiss the faculty and student amateurs as “part of an offensive mass culture.” He must also face the fact that the university’s reliance “on the written word and the verbal tradition” is not always compatible with his own work “in the nonverbal media of sound, color, shape, movement or voice inflection.” The university, on the other hand, “will have to recognize the extent to which the artist has exposed his own psyche in his work, and treat such work with the restraint of the surgeon who holds the beating human heart in his hand.”

Responding to Perkins, Dancer Jose Limón, who teaches at New York’s Juilliard School of Music, pointed out that in the end “the scholar and the artist are working toward the same goal. The scholastic method, objective, dispassionate, and the artist’s egocentricity are diverse roads leading to one end: civilized man.”

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