Art Students League

Art Students League, independent art school founded in New York City in 1875 and run by and for artists.

The Art Students League was formed almost entirely by students—many of them women—from the National Academy of Design, which was the only other art school in the city at the time and was considered the best art education in the country. The League’s founders were acting in response to a rumour that financial problems might cause the academy to close its doors, but they also were dissatisfied with the academy’s conservative and traditional bent and wanted to create a school that allowed more freedom of expression.

The League opened in Manhattan at 108 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 5th Avenue and 16th Street, and held its first classes in half a room on the building’s top floor. Within its first year, however, it expanded to a whole floor.

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The school, which offered life drawing classes every day of the week, was membership-based. There were no grades, no set courses, and no degrees offered. Instead, the League was run like a French atelier (workshop), which promised small classes and granted the instructor a studio and the freedom to teach whatever he deemed appropriate. Its first president was American painter Lemuel Wilmarth, who had studied under the French sculptor and painter Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. Wilmarth had been the director of the National Academy of Design beginning in 1870. He took a two-year hiatus to head the Art Students League (1875–77) before returning to the academy, where he remained until 1889.

When the League incorporated in 1878, it established a Board of Control that included three enrolled students, ensuring that the student body would continue to have a say in the school’s operation. In 1882, having outgrown their quarters on Fifth Avenue with almost 500 students, the school moved to 38 West 14th Street, where they leased the building’s top three floors. In the 1880s the instructors included William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox, and Thomas Eakins. In 1892, then with about 900 students and 10 teachers, the League moved into a new, permanent facility designed by architect Henry J. Hardenbergh at 215 West 57th Street. By the turn of the 20th century, a number of noteworthy artists, including Daniel Chester French, John Henry Twachtman, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Childe Hassam, and many others, had taught or were teaching at the League. As part of the democratic nature of the education offered there, students invited instructors to teach, and students could choose with whom they wanted to study. In 1916 John French Sloan—painter of American realism and member of the The Eight group of New York artists—began teaching at the League. During the 1920s his students included Alexander Calder, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and, briefly, Jackson Pollock, who had been studying with Thomas Hart Benton before Benton left.

During the Great Depression, when almost no one was unscathed by the economic downturn, enrollment at the League dropped, and the image of the school shifted, as mostly women supported by well-off husbands could afford to take art classes. The school remained afloat by generous donations from members throughout the 1930s. Despite financial difficulties, some of the best-known artists of the League’s history taught and studied there during that period: Stuart Davis taught Mark Rothko and Jack Tworkov; George Grosz instructed Romare Bearden and Louise Nevelson; Reginald Marsh taught Roy Lichtenstein; and painter and printmaker Will Barnet mentored Louise Bourgeois and James Rosenquist. Because the large number of the League’s students serving in World War II caused its funding to shrink, there was again a fear that the school would have to close. But the end of the war brought a crush of students who were able to attend classes on the G.I. Bill, which, among other things, provided grants to veterans for tuition. In order to qualify as an institution of formal education, however, the League was required to make some administrative changes, such as taking attendance.

For the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st, the League continued in its mission to be run for and by artists. It maintained a reputation for serious art education and continued to be a draw for a variety of noted artists, among them Lee Bontecou, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Helen Frankenthaler.

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