A Pedagogical Point of View for the Visual Arts at Culver Academies

Like it or not, competition defines the human condition.  At Culver Academies, students compete in the classrooms, the athletic fields, and the barracks and dormitories (for rank and privilege).  Beyond Culver, of course, nations compete through trade and diplomacy or through warfare.  For some two hundred years, the Industrial Revolution and its socio-economic fallout influenced the course of world history, pitting Adam Smith against Karl Marx in a competition of ideas.  In the 15th century, the Florentines initiated what art historians later defined as the Italian Renaissance with a competition to design and cast in bronze the doors of their Baptistery.  In subsequent decades, Italian artists and scholars celebrated various forms of paragone--the competitive rivalry between drawing and color, between painting and sculpture, between contemporary Italian art and the art of Greco-Roman antiquity, and between art and nature itself.  In the competition between rival cities in Italy at the time, the Florentines perhaps justifiably asserted the primacy of drawing through the legacy of Michelangelo, but who could doubt the superiority of color when viewing the sublime paintings of Titian in the city of Venice? 

Today, a younger generation of realist painters and sculptors competes with their Modernist predecessors.  Defining themselves as heirs to the 19th-century academic tradition, these neo-realists, as many critics now call them, often ignore or even reject the achievements of Bonnard, Matisse, and Giacometti, among many other extraordinary painters and sculptors of the Modernist era.  This current fashion for realism has restored the plaster cast to its former position as a vital element in visual arts education, but the competition between recent trends in the visual arts and Modernism has little to do with the acquisition of plaster casts at Culver Academies.  The presence of a full-scale cast of the Venus de Milo (some seven feet tall), for example, does not affirm the victory of realism over abstraction.  On the contrary, Culver’s splendid collection of plaster casts and reproductions of drawings and paintings from various Old Masters define the inclusive character of our visual arts curriculum in terms that Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide might describe as “the best of all possible worlds.”  Plaster casts and other cultural artifacts now occupy an important curricular place at Culver Academies because they teach our visual arts students that genuine artistic achievement from any period shares many essential characteristics.  The competitive spirit rightfully endures, perhaps, but the true challenge is not to privilege one aesthetic while rejecting all others; rather, my objective is to assimilate the best practices of exemplary artists and to recognize the fundamental relationships that are common to all great works of art in Western Civilization. 

As students begin to look beyond superficial styles in their search for immutable artistic values, they simultaneous merge thought with labor in the production of their own artwork.  Indeed, the continuing appeal of such antiquated materials as charcoal, paint, and clay amid the current avalanche of technological innovation surely derives from the unique blend of intellectual and physical activity that lends so much meaning to the artistic process.  By valiantly struggling to reconcile and absorb seemingly disparate points of view through thought and action, my visual arts students develop the spiritual integrity that leads to genuine artistic merit.  The competition, then, is not between one approach or style and another but rather between one’s current artistic self and the artist one may become through practice, reflection, and above all courage.