In the mountains of North Carolina there was once an experimental college that changed the course of 20th century American Modernism. If that’s not an unexpected statement, I don’t know what is. Though you may not have heard of the institution, you may know some names that were associated with it in its heyday. It was called Black Mountain College and it was about 12 miles east of Asheville. It was founded in 1933 by a handful of faculty members who had been fired from Rollins College—a liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida—for refusing to take a loyalty oath to that institution.
That was also the same year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and the Nazis forced the famous Bauhaus art school to close. Many of its faculty fled to the United States and some wound up at Black Mountain. Probably the most famous one of those was painter Josef Albers who began running the art department and was one of the school’s guiding lights from the time he arrived.
In writing about the early days of the college, Frederick Horowitz noted that chief among the things that Albers brought with him was the idea that art was an experience—not a commodity. Asked by a student upon his arrival at the College, “What are you going to teach?” he famously replied, “To open eyes.”
Horowitz wrote that Albers insisted that a sound education meant “learning to balance respect for other people with the obligation to think for oneself.” Consequently, art became seen as a communal endeavor with students often working together with faculty on each other’s projects. Educational philosopher John Dewey, who served on the school’s advisory council, called the College “a living example of democracy in action.”
The art-as-experience ethos suffused the college and many artists who either taught or studied there—a list that includes Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Robert Motherwell, and Willem DeKooning—all went on to vivify their paintings with action, turning their artworks into the tangible record of an experience.
It certainly wasn’t just painters who were there. Buckminster Fuller taught there and created his first geodesic dome with a group of students in 1949. If you’ve heard of “happenings” which were countercultural events in the 1960s, famed composer John Cage created the first one there at Black Mountain College.
“In the annals of 20th-century American art, few legends loom quite as large as that of Black Mountain College,” said the New York Times in 2015. Though the college closed in 1957, it ensured that much of the art of the 1960s and 70s would have a public face and a public conscience.
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For a short time, the mountains of North Carolina were once the center of the American avant-garde. -
Picasso, whose name is almost a synonym of artist, has a reputation that isn’t entirely dependent on his artistic abilities.
