Charles Bein (1891-1966): Graduate and Professor, Tulane School of Architecture--Belatedly
Acknowledged
Two Tulane graduates live in Charlottesville where they are longtime friends:
James Leslie Kelly of New Orleans, who graduated in engineering at Tulane in 1954,
later acquiring his PhD at LSU in Chemical Engineering and Roulhac Bunkley Toledano
(Newcomb 1960) who studied art and architectural history under Alfred Moir along with
painting and printmaking under Ida Kohlmayer and James Steg. Recently Kelly, a
relative of New Orleans native, Charles Bein, yet another Tulane graduate and a
professor at the Architecture School, inherited a number of Bein’s paintings and an
extensive collection of scrapbooks and newspaper clippings about Bein and his
successful career in the arts. This mass of art and manuscript material, as well as Mallard
and Seigneuret furniture from Bein’s Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi residence along with
the Tulane connection, captivated me when I saw them.
Subsequently, Jim Kelly showed me the handsome Mexican silver service that
had been in Bein’s house, reminiscent of the work developed and popularized by Bein’s
friend William Spratling. News clipping with articles on Bein by his good friends
William Spratling and Lyle Saxon revealed that Bein had gone to Mexico with Spratling,
so well known as the man who revitalized and transformed the silver tradition among the
Indians at Taxco, Mexico. More clippings elucidating the amazing life of the architect
and artist Charles Bein sent me to Tulane Architecture School, the Louisiana Rare Book
Collection and the Southeast Architectural Archives where little information was
available beyond the architecture school’s publication Talk About Architecture and a web
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site partially based on that information. John Shelton Reed, who wrote Dixie Bohemia, A
French Quarter Circle in the 1920’s published by LSU Press in 2012, had corresponded
with the Kellys, exchanging important information on Charles Bein. The Historic New
Orleans Collection provided another jack pot; they have a well-organized and extensive
file on Charles Bein relative to his ten years as founding director of the Arts and Crafts
Club at the old Seignouret- Brulatour House and Courtyard on Royal Street. But the
Kellys own collection here in Charlottesville was quite enough to make me want to
clarify the founding history of the “Tulane School of Technology” of which an
architecture section had been a part since 1907, due to the efforts of William Woodward,
and of Charles Bein’s role therein.
Charles Bein was a 1912 graduate of Tulane University where he took as many
courses related to architecture that he could in the “School of Technology.” Would-be
architects studied first in engineering and “technology” after William Woodward of
Newcomb Art School renown established the “School of Technology” for the school year
1907-1908 and brought in Samuel Labouisse, Moise Goldstein and Allison Owen to join
the faculty to try to build an architecture school for Tulane. That year, 1912, when
Charles Bein graduated from Tulane, Nathaniel Courtland Curtis was appointed head of
the burgeoning architecture department. William Woodward and his brother Ellsworth
came over to the new department from Newcomb Art School to teach drawing and
architectural history. Indeed, William Woodward is most often credited with the founding
of the official school of architecture at Tulane. Although the 1912 Architecture School
was barely that, Bein was able to get into Columbia’s graduate school in architecture, and
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afterward he studied at the Atelier Heimann in Munich and the Atelier Colarossi and
Académie Grande Chaumière in Paris.
Bein returned to the United States in 1917 to head up the new Tulane School of
Architecture, replacing Nathaniel Courtland Curtis, educated at Auburn in Alabama
where he had married the president’s daughter. By 1919 Tulane began to develop
architecture into something to rival the University of Virginia’s new school of
architecture, established in 1919. Albert Bledsoe Dinwiddie, a graduate of the University
of Virginia, with three degrees from the institution, had become president of Tulane by
1918 and was well aware of the need for Tulane to rival the University of Virginia, his
alma mater. Despite some rave reviews throughout the city according to local
newspapers, three years later, Bein gave up as chairman and professor at what he called
the Tulane School of Architecture in order to become an artist.
The newly minted artist, Bein, went to New York and in February of 1925 was
“having a first one man show in the New Gallery” of his paintings. Irene Cooper wrote in
a New Orleans newspaper about a 1925 exhibition of Bein’s work.
“Mr. Bein has handled his subjects with feeling and an indisputable knowledge of
technique. Mr. Bein was named in the New York Times only a few months ago as one of
the five foremost water colorists in the United states and one senses the touch of the
master in these pictures executed with skill and sureness.”
Jim Kelly’s scrapbook held an undated article by Lyle Saxon, a personal friend of
Bein’s, from The Times Picayune that explained a bit about the fledging school of
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architecture at Tulane at that time. Entitled Tulane’s College For Architects Has High
Rank. Increasing Number of Students Makes Two Professors Necessary, the article
revealed the terrible lack of funding for the Tulane School of Architecture.
“There has been much comment lately about the remarkable work done by
students in architecture at Tulane University. The last three years have seen great changes
at this department of the College of Technology, and the work done by students has
received favorable notice in Northern and Eastern universities.
“And, now, just as this department has reached such a successful period of
development—a development reached in spite of great odds caused by lack of finance--
comes the news that the head of the department [Charles Bein] has resigned from the
staff of the college.
“To continue the work of this department it will be necessary to provide a sum
sufficient to pay two men to take his place; for the increasing number of students has
made at least two more instructors necessary.
“Tulane must be saved. Five instructors have resigned because they were offered
better situations elsewhere and because they felt that they could no longer live on their
salaries at Tulane. . .Professors are paid less than plasterers and bricklayers. . . .Loyal
Louisianians must rally to Tulane’s help.
“The College of Technology, of which the School of Architecture is a part, is
headed by Douglas Anderson. Charles Bein is the head of the School of Architecture
[within the College of Technology]. William Woodward is professor of free hand
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drawing, and Colonel Allison Owen gives a course in the history of architecture. Richard
Kock [Koch], considered one of the city’s coming architects among the younger men,
offers a course in criticism of design. . . . ”
Tradition in New Orleans has it that when the University of Virginia School of
Architecture was established in 1919, headed by Fiske Kimble of Boston who graduated
from Harvard and had a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Tulanians became
jealous and determined to forge ahead with a bona fide architecture school. That is when
William Woodward who also taught at Newcomb Art School, Colonel Allison Owen and
Richard Koch stepped in, once more, by the fall of 1920, to be paid less than “plasterers
and bricklayers.”
Bein gave up his position on the faculty of the newly established architecture
school early on, by 1922, to become an artist and art instructor. Bein’s friend and
associate at Tulane, William Phillip Spratling, who also taught architecture at Tulane as
well as sketching at the School of Art at the Arts and Crafts Club traveled down to
Mexico where he found his true métier at Taxco working with silver and retraining the
natives in the art and craft of silver making. Bein followed Spratling to Mexico in 1925
along with Caroline Durieux and Natalie Scott to hear the new head of the Middle
American Research Institute at Tulane, Frans Blom, lecture. Bein returned to Mexico to
paint at Orizaba in 1930.
Meanwhile in 1927 he had begun serving as the first director of the Arts and
Crafts Club at the old Seignouret-Brulatour House and Courtyard at 520 Royal Street.
[Undergoing research and restoration by the Historic New Orleans Collection at this
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time] Then, after developing one of the most important institutions in the art and culture
of New Orleans and the South, Bein resigned in 1936 after ten years of fruitful work at
the Arts and Crafts Club to devote full time to painting. According to a New Orleans
newspaper, May 21, 1936, “Resignation of Charles Bein as director of the Arts and Crafts
Club, a position he has held since 1927, to devote further time to painting was announced
Saturday by Mrs. Harry Kelleher, secretary of the board.
“Mr. Bein, a native of New Orleans, joined the faculty of the club’s school at 520
Royal street in 1926 when the school was conducted by a committee headed by Horace
Russ. He taught design and the history of painting. In 1927 he became chairman of the
committee and director of the institution, amalgamating classes which formerly had been
held separately and enlarging the curriculum.
“Mr. Bein is known as an artist for his work in water color, pastel and oils, and
particularly for his decorative flower painting. He studied at the Art Students League in
New York, [when he was studying architecture at Columbia], in Paris and other European
centers. He has exhibited in New York and Chicago, and several years ago won the
Blanche Benjamin prize here for painting.”
Charles Bein became the first director of the New Orleans School of Art at the
Arts and Crafts Club (1922-1951) in 1927. Classes at the school on Royal Street under
Bein’s direction included painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking pottery and
architecture. The objective of the Arts and Crafts Club according to artists and professors
at Newcomb College Art School, Will Henry Stevens and Ellsworth Woodward, was “to
attract artists and to revitalize the oldest part of New Orleans.” The first issue of the “Arts
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and Crafts Review” was dedicated to Charlie Bein. Mary Basso, who soon married
Mississippi and New Orleans artist and teacher John McCrady, was the editor. The
impressive dedication to Bein confided: “To one from whom in daily contact we have
learned the true meaning of nobleness; to one who has typified all that is denoted by
unselfishness; to one who has been in every sense of the word a teacher and a friend, we
the students of the New Orleans Art School dedicate the first issue of our school paper.”
Saving the Vieux Carré was part and parcel of the objective of the scores of artists
and writers, both native and new to New Orleans, who came after the first world war
through the 20th century to the country’s most picturesque and lively neighborhood. Lyle
Saxon wrote in November of 1923 in a clipping preserved in Bein’s scrapbook,
“Architects from distant cities have come to New Orleans to study these old houses and
to note the detail of their construction, and each and every one of them has found
something to interest him. One admires the wrought iron of the balconies, which clings to
the mouldering walls like strips of raveled black lace; others study the oddly shaped
windows, the heavy doors, the double-arches or the winding stairways.
“And those who know the French Quarter will be interested in these sketches by
William P. Spratling, instructor in architecture at Tulane University, for they are not only
faithful records of out-of-the-way places, but they have a decorative value of their own. It
seems to me that Mr. Spratling understands the spirit of the old New Orleans, and he has
given it to us through the medium of these pencil drawings.”
Frederick Oechsner wrote in The Morning Tribune of New Orleans, Wednesday,
May 18, 1927. “Mr. Bein is a native of New Orleans and a graduate of Tulane University
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in the School of Architecture. Following his study at Tulane he went to the Columbia
University School of architecture and while there attended classes at the Art Students
League. In the summer of 1922 he studied art in Munich and the following winter in
Paris. In the summer of 1923 he journeyed through Spain and Italy and down to Tangiers.
The fruits of this jaunt (consisting of about 12 oils and 20 or 30 water colors) were
exhibited at the Arts and Crafts club and later at the New Galleries in New York in
January of 1924. Last year he had an exhibit in Chicago under the auspices of the
Chicago Galleries association of which he is a member. During the past winter Mr. Bein
has been a member of the faculty of the New Orleans Art School conducted by the Arts
and Crafts club with which he has been associated since its organization.
“In 1927 Bein won the Blanche Benjamin award offered annually for the past four
years, since 1923 at the Delgado Museum for the best painting of a Louisiana landscape.
Conrad Albrizio and James Gibert were honorably mentioned. In the first year of the
competition Charles Woodward Hutson was the winner, while in 1925 Paul Frolich,
Philadelphia artist, won and Weeks Hall in 1926. . . . The winner, Charles Bein, has been
doing criticisms for the Art section of The Morning Tribune.” (Item-Tribune, May 15,
1927)
Charlie Bein’s obituary in the Times Picayune, June 26, 1966 explains the
combination of artist and architecture as well as Bein’s role in the successful
establishment of both the Tulane School of Architecture and the Art School of the Arts
and Crafts Club. “Educated in New Orleans public schools, Mr. Bein was a graduate of
Tulane University and took post-graduate work in architecture at Columbia University.
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After working in architectural offices in New York, Mr. Bein returned to New Orleans to
become acting head of the School of Architecture at Tulane University.
“Mr. Bein became head of arts and crafts at the New Orleans Art School.
Following his retirement, Mr. Bein turned to painting. He had many exhibits of his art
work in New York, Chicago and New Orleans, doing most of his painting at Bay St.
Louis, Ms.” The Kelly collection contains Bein’s will; tellingly, he left “stocks, bonds,
security or cash then remaining in the National Bank of Commerce of New Orleans to the
National Museum of Art in Washington D. C. subject to the condition that the proceeds . .
. shall be used . . . to acquire a work or works of art, paintings, sculpture, ceramic or
bronze.” This was before the establishment of the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art.
It is ironic to realize that both the University of Virginia’s founding father, Fiske
Kimball and Charles Bein, a major developer of the Tulane School of Architecture, gave
up architecture to work in the art field.
Roulhac Bunkley Toledano, 434-825-0332; [email protected]
100 South Street West, Charlottesville, VA. 22902
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