BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN
Summer Session July 9th to August 31st
Black Mountain College
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN [Summer Session: July 9th to August 31]. Black Mountain, NC: Black Mountain College, Volume 9, No. 1, 1951. Original edition. 16mo. Thick letterpress saddle-stitched wrappers with self mailer panel. 16 pp. 2 photographic illustrations. Catalog for Summer courses and faculty vitae. A fine, uncirculated copy.
4 x 6.5-inch stapled booklet that served as a self mailer with 16 pages covering the course offerings for the 1951 Summer session at Black Mountain College: photography, dance, drawing, design, percussion,woodworking,acting, voice, weaving and painting. Summer faculty includes Harry Callahan, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Haze-Frieda Larsen, Katherine Litz, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Joseph Fiore, Warren P. Jennerjahn, Leonard Billing, Wesley Huss, Johanna Jalowetz, and Andrew Oates.
Black Mountain College (1933 – 1957) was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role. Many of the school's students and faculty were influential in the arts or other fields, or went on to become influential. Although notable even during its short life, the school closed in 1957 after only 24 years. Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and other former faculty members of Rollins College, Black Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, attracting a faculty that included many of America's leading visual artists, composers, poets, and designers.
The center of the curriculum, we said, would be art. The democratic man, we said, must be an artist. The integrity, we said, of the democratic man was the integrity of the artist, an integrity of relationship…the artist, we said was not a competitor. He competed only with himself. His struggle was inside, not against his fellows, but against his own ignorance and clumsiness…Also just as the artist would not paint his picture with muddy colors, so this artist must see clear colors in humanity; and must himself be clear color, for he too was his fellow artist’s color, sound, form, the material of his art. But, different from pigment, bow, granite, not used up in the use; rather, made more of what he would be, a note within the symphony, the clearer for having been written; giving up, and asked to give up, nothing of himself. That was the integrity of the artist as artist. That should be the integrity of man as man. — John Andrew Rice
Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. In its day it was a unique educational experiment for the artists and writers who conducted it, and as such an important incubator for the American avant garde. Black Mountain proved to be an important precursor to and prototype for many of the alternative colleges of today.
I think art parallels life. Color, in my opinion, behaves like a man–in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others. In my paintings I have tried to make two polarities meet–independence and interdependence, as, for instance, in Pompeian art. There’s a certain red the Pompeians used that speaks in both these ways, first in its relation to other colors around it, and then as it appears alone, keeping its own face. In other words, one must combine both being an individual and being a member of society. That’s the parallel. I’ve handled color as a man should behave. With trained and sensitive eyes, you can recognize this double behavior of color. And from all this, you may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one. — Josef Albers