Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  When I asked her about my going to graduate school, she immediately launched a tirade:

  You don’t need an MFA.

  You don’t need professional study.

  Uh-oh. My ambition as a problem. That had happened to me before.

  From what I could tell, her gut reaction came from a place that people sometimes tap instinctively when faced with me: “you don’t need it,” whatever it is. I’ve heard this oh so many times to say I shouldn’t be wanting to do what I want to do. Whatever it is I want, I can’t have it, because I don’t need it. (You may have heard this, too.) I had blurted out the name Yale to her as my dream graduate school, a second terrible idea. It was bad enough that I wanted to go to graduate school at all, and, now, worse that I wanted to go to Yale. She had not gone to Yale. Not only did I not need graduate school, I, the totally worst possible painter in the whole entire history of art, had no business aspiring to Yale. Ouch, ouch, and ouch. End of this conversation.

  But no reason to back down.

  I took the matter up with my friend Madeleine, a very good painter, and she talked over my situation with another artist friend, also a much more experienced painter than I. Madeleine and her friend sang me the conventional wisdom of graduate applications: portfolio is all.

  Sola fide?

  Solo portfolio.

  Madeleine cast aspersions on my portfolio: why not take another year to bulk it up? I would have none of it. I would not—I absolutely would not—give up. Even temporarily.

  Sitting outside Civic Square Building on a sunny day in the late fall, I told Madeleine why the whole matter of applications burned me so. For years, for decades, discouraging people had been telling me what I couldn’t do. Nay-saying didn’t apply only to art school. Madeleine could have been giving me the soundest advice in the world. No, it was the soundest advice in the world. Only I could not heed her reasoning. I had reasoning of my own that also made good sense.

  I told her she was not the person to tell me no.

  I told her that telling me no was up to the graduate schools I applied to. If they all turned me down the first time I applied, I’d apply again the next year. I had heard from my graduate student teachers that they had applied twice or thrice before getting in. But I wouldn’t close off my chances without even a try.

  I was emphatic.

  I told her about the Colby College senior I’d met who hadn’t applied to a prestigious PhD program because he didn’t think he could get in. Well, that’s a sure route to not getting in.

  I told her with more certainty than I really had that I knew the portfolio must reach a certain threshold, but after that, I insisted, the applicant’s personal qualities must kick in, qualities I had in abundance. I doubt I really convinced her. But I did give her pause, and she let up on discouragement.

  Recognizing “you don’t need . . .” when applied to me, I was still struck by the pervasiveness of the art-school-is-so-hard-to-get-into mantra. I—who as a student applicant got into the University of California–Berkeley, University of California–Los Angeles, Harvard, and Yale and got tenured jobs at Penn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton, and served as president of THE association of American historians the world over—had never heard such nay-saying applied to admissions. I was taking the argument all too personally, yet I knew it wasn’t aimed only at me. The notion circulates as fact, and it ramped up the significance of application and acceptance.

  How did they tell a strong portfolio from a weak one, especially when there’s artwork in galleries every day that would not make the first cut in graduate admissions? For one thing, art doesn’t appear wholesale in galleries, as in portfolio reviews. At Mason Gross I saw hundreds, literally hundreds of graduate school application portfolios. Seen by the hundreds, expertly rendered model studies reduced skill to banality. Which sank my expert fellow Mason Gross painter Jan-Vincent. For another thing, it actually is harder, I learned, to get into an MFA program in painting than to get into Princeton for a PhD in history, because MFA painting programs are smaller, but similar numbers apply.

  I was hurling myself, my old, academic, black self, against the stone wall of graduate-art-school-admission impossibility with a conviction born of defiance. No longer a mere step along the way into painting seriously, graduate school loomed before me like a wall, a mountain, an obstacle test of my personal worth.

  This is no way to make a decision, oh, jeez, no.

  But I knew enough about the difference institutions can make in evaluating personal worth, and that my personal worth in art, again, my old, academic, black self, would need all the institutional support it could gather. And there was the matter of mortality’s corruption of my judgment.

  Between trips to Oakland for my failing mother and distraught father, I somehow applied to four graduate art schools with a portfolio that included two paintings inspired by a photographic archive in the Brooklyn Historical Society, a multipanel drawing of the unveiling of the Harriet Tubman monument in Harlem, and a quilt collage I had made out of a drawn self-portrait.

  All three drawings were figurative. The two inspired by the Brooklyn photographs were acrylic on paper, 22" × 30", both with multiple figures, both in subdued colors—one using orange and a triangle of yellow with raw umber and sepia, one with diluted pink and viridian. Though they are edited in composition, their origin in photographs is evident, and the figures do not interact. The third, clearly figurative image in charcoal on 12" × 12" paper belongs to a narrative series I had drawn of the dedication of Alison Saar’s large sculpture in Harlem commemorating Harriet Tubman. In this drawing, erasures delineated space—the windows of a building, the roof of a tent—around a figure in motion that turns its back to me, the viewer.

  The fourth drawing, 19" × 24", took the form of a quilt. It was figurative, but not straightforwardly. You had to look closely to make out the human form. I collaged pieces of a skeletal self-portrait in sepia and black conté crayon onto a burnt-umber ground. Again color, again subdued. The self-portrait fragments extended beyond the ground on the right side and the bottom.

  UPPER LEFT: Brooklyn Beach People, 2008, ink on paper, 22 ½" × 30"

  UPPER RIGHT: Paper Readers, 2008, ink on paper, 22 ½" × 30"

  LOWER LEFT: Tubman Memorial, New York City, 2008, graphite on paper, 12" × 13 ¾"

  LOWER RIGHT: Self-Portrait Quilt Collage, 2008, graphite, acrylic, and conté crayon on paper, 19 ¼" × 24 ½"

  My Mason Gross teachers supported my decision and wrote letters of recommendation. My non–Mason Gross mentors helped me curate my portfolio. Columbia was a very long shot that Artist Stanley and Teacher Hanneline encouraged. I didn’t get in there. No loss. My Mason Gross lithography Teacher Barb wanted me at Mason Gross, which wait-listed me, begging me not to come. Crazy, I know. Maybe as an undergraduate I had already sucked all the juice I could from Mason Gross’s painting faculty. My boosters all expected Yale, my first choice, to accept me. But Yale’s fiery art school, in a real university that had offered me a chaired professorship in history years earlier and given me an honorary doctorate, turned me down flat. Now, that hurt. And it measured the miles separating the world of art from the world of history. Or was it universe from universe?

  I had a solid second choice, the Rhode Island School of Design, with its appealing reputation for intensity and unremitting hard work. What could be more right for me? Perfect, except for the lack of a university attached—but Brown was right up the hill. RISD accepted me, and I was then and am once again deeply grateful for that. RISD’s where I went. After three years of undergraduate study at Mason Gross and more personal-intellectual than painterly bona fides, I entered a world of serious art making, full-time art making. I would not be held back by undergraduate farting around. I surely was headed to art paradise. I really did think and feel that. I really did.

  12

  EUPHORIA

  A pretty little city, Providence, once you�
��ve moved your stuff into your first-year-painter’s studio, the curtains are up to block the afternoon sun, and the humidity has let up so you can stop sweating all the time. In the studio like a freshman in your first dorm. Imagine all the passion, all the hard work you came here for, in this space. Providence is so different from Newark, different from anything New Jersey.

  A city to savor. Even before you settle in as a graduate painter, you can be a tourist there on the weekend, when, just as it gets dark, there come tonitruous drums, Andean flutes, and Handel’s Water Music—all mythopoetical past. WaterFire.

  WaterFire sends open boats down the Providence River, each with a bonfire, some with a juggler twirling blazing batons. The black-clad people on the boats light braziers stacked with wood along the riversides, a contrast of inky violet and fiery cadmium yellow against the backdrop of night. Smartphones flash. All your feral water + fire instincts kick in, remanding you to millennia before smartphones, before email, before the internet, before houses, before clothes. It’s cool enough to wrap up in your bearskin, as your face and fingers protrude into nature’s air. WaterFire sticks you back beside the bonfires of summer camp, what they call a simpler, better time. Yes, a fine place to be, Providence.

  Providence was too far from Newark for me to commute daily, as in New Jersey to Mason Gross. I took a North Main Street apartment building full of RISD students that overlooked a brook. My place was one and a half stories up from the street, one bedroom, nice and cozy. I walked about twenty minutes to my painting studio in the Fletcher Building on Union and Weybosset Streets. First-year graduate painting students shared studios, meaning one large room divided in two, with one studio nearer the windows—mine—the other without windows but more wall space, next to the hall, Juhyun’s. We were the two non-white students in our cohort of nine.

  In my first month at the Rhode Island School of Design, I experienced something I scarcely felt during my years of harried parental worry, historical organization presidential torture, and THWP chores: contentment. I was feeling so good and so free, so liberated. My mother was safely dead, her affairs wound up. My father had sloughed off the worst of his grief and even some of his depression. He was attending noontime concerts at the University of California–Berkeley, as we used to do before he retired from the university Chemistry Department many years before. My husband agreed to my relocating to Providence, visiting every couple of weeks or so with our two traveling tabby cats. I concentrated on what I could see and the art I could make. I felt so free.

  My daily walk to my studio in the Fletcher Building, an un-Jersey commute, no train, no automobile, no parking worries, took me down Main and Canal Streets to Westminster Street over Weybosset and Union Streets. What I saw on my walk was an old city—well, in American terms—with handsome buildings dating from when Providence was a hub of finance (thanks to the Atlantic slave trade, banking, and insurance) and manufacturing (producing machinery, tools, jewelry, hand-wrought stonework), with costly decoration just for the hell of it, names and purposes cut in stone on pediments, now saddened by “Space available” and “For lease” on too many storefronts. Many of the beautiful older buildings were in use as apartments or, in the case of Fletcher, as artists’ studios. RISD’s soaring Fleet Library at 15 Westminster Street was the renovated Rhode Island Hospital Trust National Bank building.

  New-student orientation introduced me to that fabulous library, and I never left—I, who have been carting books home from libraries since time immemorial. Like every other physical space at RISD, Fleet Library is handsomely designed; RISD is not a design school for nothing. The stacks are open, so I could just pull books, any books, off the shelf, settle down on the floor or in an easy chair, and look through as many books as I could carry. Idly browsing the stacks, I discovered a row of books on the French painter–textile artist Sonia Delaunay with knock-your-socks-off color and geometry. I sat on the floor for an hour with her work, no particular goal in mind, just looking. Beyond the books in the regular collection, and of special interest to me, was the collection of artist’s books on the second floor, a place I visited often, for I saw artist’s books as my own destiny. I could do that, I reckoned, knowing I had plenty of time for learning the craft. I was free.

  Fleet Library (55,000 square feet, 155,000 volumes) is bigger in size but smaller in collections than Princeton’s Marquand Library (46,000 square feet, 400,000 volumes), a treasure of national scale. But Fleet Library does something Marquand doesn’t: it lends books to students. For instance: both libraries hold Mirela Proske’s Lucas Cranach the Elder, published in 2007, the most recent book on this pivotal Northern Renaissance painter. With the well-groomed Princeton campus outside picture windows, I could read it comfortably in Marquand. I could scan a limited number of pages to download on a flash drive or email to myself. I couldn’t borrow it.

  But from Fleet, I could check it out and take it home. Read it propped up on my tummy lying on my couch. This meant a lot, as I was making my own art inspired by Cranach and Romare Bearden, stretching out my image and my inquiry in Fleet Library’s bower.

  How I got to Cranach and Bearden is a longish story that has to do with my art and the bounty of a library I could roll around in and borrow from and investigate at leisure. And investigate at leisure I did, perhaps so much at leisure to bore you with the details I pursued in a myth that said so much about spitefulness and lust and beauty and bribery and war. Bear with me again in this spirit of unfettered pursuit in a library where my time was all my own to spend there. I had in mind somewhere down the road making an artist’s book on the subject of personal beauty, whose Western history goes back to Greek mythology and the judgment of Paris. I had discovered the erotic dimension of the story many years earlier in Hubert Damisch’s The Judgment of Paris (Le jugement de Pâris. Iconologie analytique). All on its own, the judgment of Paris deserves the artist’s book that RISD was helping me envision.

  Here’s the story. The judgment of Paris begins with the gods at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis, a pairing that does not withstand feminist investigation. Peleus, king of the Myrmidons of Thessaly, had abducted Thetis, a sea nymph, after Zeus and Poseidon, both of whom were in love with her, had decided to give her to Peleus. To give her to Peleus. She refused Peleus at first, but he bound her up while she slept, thereby convincing her to marry him. This is how making up a woman’s mind was done back then.

  Was Thetis happy at her wedding feast? Myth does not say or hint at whether that’s even a fitting question. Myth does say that Eris, the goddess of discord, had not been invited—understandably. Eris came anyway. Throwing a golden apple inscribed “For the Fairest” into the party, she sowed her discord. Three goddesses—Hera, wife of Zeus; Athena, Zeus’s daughter; and Aphrodite, the goddess of love—struggled over the apple. Zeus, husband and father, recognized an impossible decision. He handed the apple to Hermes and sent him and the three goddesses to Paris, a Trojan prince in temporary employment as a shepherd and presumably free of Zeus’s entanglement in these godly family values. Are you still with me?

  To win the golden apple, the goddesses bribed Paris with extravagant promises. Hera offered him imperial power over Asia and Europe; Athena offered wisdom and military might; Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris gave in to lust. He decided for Aphrodite and for Helen (daughter of Zeus and Leda), queen of Laconia, wife of Menelaus. Getting into Helen’s bed necessitated her abduction, the habitual means of securing a female sex partner. Abduction set off the Trojan War.

  If you want to know the rest of this part of the story, here it is: Paris killed Achilles, the war’s greatest, handsomest, bravest warrior, the son of Peleus and Thetis, with an arrow to his heel. In that same battle, Philoctetes mortally wounded Paris, whose first wife, Oenone (turns out he already had a wife), possessed means to heal him. But Oenone was still annoyed with Paris over his running off with Helen. By the time Oenone got over her chagrin, Paris had died. Oenone threw hers
elf on his funeral pyre. As we used to say in the twentieth century, what goes around, comes around.

  What a story! No wonder the judgment of Paris has attracted artists and writers since the ancient Greeks.

  Reading up on Romare Bearden in Fleet Library, I made the serendipitous discovery of a print Bearden had made, inspired by the Judgment of Paris of Lucas Cranach the Elder. I brought home the book on Bearden to scan the image for my studio wall, next to Cranach and Raphael. Studio walls were for display of what inspired us or what we wanted to borrow from or what we were working on, a kind of rotating art exhibition, our own personal musée imaginaire.

  Bearden is usually identified as an African American painter and the postwar American pioneer of the use of collage, which is correct, as far, not nearly far enough, as it goes. As an undergraduate art major at Berkeley in the 1960s, I was aware of Bearden’s early figurative work, which did not particularly move me—too muddy, too blocky in the style of the times. Give me his later collages. While taking a special interest in African American history and culture and his black artists’ community in New York, Bearden never limited his artistic vision, not in terms of subject matter, not in terms of process.

  He studied with the German expressionist George Grosz at the Art Students League.

  He pursued philosophy and art in Paris. Always interested in art in its broadest international scope, he counted André Malraux’s Musée imaginaire as a seminal influence.

  Bearden’s wide range attracted me too, so you can imagine my delight in Fleet Library on finding Bearden’s 1969 collagraph on Cranach’s Judgment of Paris, part of his Prelude to Troy series. What on earth is a collagraph?