Go Tell It on the Mountain Artists from Josef Albers to Robert Rauschenberg gathered at Black Mountain College, leaving a legacy that a new exhibition examines. BY CAROL KINO N AN ENORMOUS HALL, someone is playing the piano while a handful of people dance in and around the audi- ence, one chased by a barking dog. All-white paintings hang from the ceiling, and towering over everything is the impressive figure of the composer John Cage, standing on a ladder and delivering a lecture on the Irelationship between Buddhism and music. Those, at least, are some of the chaotic goings-on that unfolded during Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1, the 1952 event that many consider the first happening. Yet this watershed occurrence did not take place in some studio in New York or Los Angeles. Instead, the environs resembled a mountain resort, with shingled lodges and stone cottages amid the oak, hemlock and pine trees, ringed by blue-tinged mountains and clustered around a pic- turesque lake. The bucolic location in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains was the final campus of Black Mountain College, a kind of midcentury cultural Camelot that opened in 1933 and boasts a legacy far more extensive than its 24 years of existence suggests. Black Mountain was not only a wartime refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis but was also a hotbed of progressive education where many renowned postwar cultural figures were formed. The year after Cage’s happening, for example, while Jerome Robbins was premiering a ballet in honor of Queen LEAP AHEAD A dance class in front of Black Elizabeth II’s coronation to a starched and white-gloved Mountain College’s first home in North audience in New York, Cage’s partner, Merce Cunningham, Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. would return to that same camp dining hall in North Carolina “We were all foreigners, so to speak, in that setting. It enhanced that kind of to spend weeks rehearsing with seven dancers. There, he cre- participatory, creative openness,” says ated the groundbreaking company that would later shake up former student Theodore Dreier Jr. the dance world with a choreography untethered to conven- tional compositional demands, such as narrative and music. 124 125 GREAT MINDS Below: John Cage and Merce Cunningham on a summer sojourn from the college in 1953. Far below: Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1, as mapped by his fellow teacher, the poet and potter M.C. Richards. , 1951, YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE , 1948, OIL AND ENAMEL ON CARDBOARD, INCHES, X 32 7/8 25 THE 5/8 ASHEVILLE CREATIVE TIME Above: The Displaced Table, a 1943 work by Robert Motherwell, who taught painting. Right: Student Cy Twombly’s 1951 painting, MIN-OE. Below: The Studies , 1943, TEMPERA, VENEER, WOOD, PAPER, INK, GRAPHITE, AND COLORED PENCIL ON X CANVAS, 43 1/4 Building, which students helped build in the early ’40s. THE DISPLACED TABLE DISPLACED THE “they only had one rule and that was ‘Be intelligent.’” —alice seBrell COLOR FIELD Clockwise from top: Students walk from the campus barn; Robert Rauschenberg’s 1956 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: JOEL OPPENHEIMER AND FRANCINE DU PLESSIX BLACK MOUNTAIN GRAY, COLLEGE painting Small Rebus; writer Francine du Plessix Gray as a student. Above: Growing, OPENING SPREAD: COURTESY OF WESTERN REGIONAL ARCHIVES, ARCHIVES STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, ASHEVILLE,WESTERN NC. CLOCKWISE THIS PAGE, REGIONAL FROM TOP ARCHIVES, LEFT: COURTESY ARCHIVES OF STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, ASHEVILLE, NC; © ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION/LICENSEDWILLIAMS, NEW YORK, JONATHAN NY; VAGA, BY PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON, © 2015 D.C., THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; PHOTO JOSEF BY BREITENBACH, COURTESY OF WESTERN REGIONAL ARCHIVES, ARCHIVES STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, ASHEVILLE, NC; © 2015 THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK CLOCKWISETHIS PAGE, FROM TOP LEFT: ROBERT MOTHERWELL, BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION, COURTESY OF BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM + ARTS CENTER; OF ELAINE ESTATE DE KOONING; COURTESYREGIONAL MASATO NAKAGAWA, OF WESTERN ARCHIVES, ARCHIVES STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, ASHEVILLE, NC; WILLEM DE KOONING, a 1940 picture by Josef Albers. “I’m still 32 X 2 INCHES, 1/8 LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM GIFT OF ART, OF ROBERT H. HALFF THROUGH THE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART COUNCIL,DEDALUS FOUNDATION, LICENSED © 2015 ART BY MUSEUM RESOURCE, ASSOCIATES/LACMA NEW YORK, AND NEW AND YORK; © CY VAGA, FOUNDATION; TWOMBLY COURTESY OF WESTERN REGIONAL ARCHIVES, ARCHIVES STATE NORTH OF CAROLINA, ASHEVILLE, NC; DRAWN FOR WILLIAM FETTERMAN IN 1989; ANNI ALBERS, BLACK-WHITE-GOLD 1, 1950, COTTONGOUACHE ON JUTE, PAPER, X 21 INCHES, 1/8 17 AND BOTH METALLIC © THE RIBBON, JOSEF AND 25 ANNI X 19 INCHES; ALBERS KNOT 2, FOUNDATION/ARTISTS 1947, RIGHTS SOCIETY NEW YORK, TIM NIGHSWANDER/IMAGING 4 ART; COURTESYREGIONAL WESTERN ARCHIVES, ARCHIVES STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, ASHEVILLE, NC learning what he taught me,” Rauschenberg said later. Below: Students in Albers’s 1944 summer class on color theory. WOVEN TOGETHER Along with her husband, Josef, Anni Albers fled Germany after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school, where they had been teaching. They arrived at Black Mountain College in 1933, where she founded the weaving department. Below: A 1947 gouache by Anni Albers, Knot 2. Right: Her textile piece, Black-White-Gold I, from 1950. ABSTRACT IDEAS Clockwise from above: Willem “Black Mountain was so de Kooning’s 1948 piece Asheville; an untitled work from the same sexually open. Marriages would year by his wife, Elaine, who was a coMe there and Break up.” student; summer program director Buckminster Fuller with a model. — dorothea rockBurne 126 Black Mountain wasn’t limited to performance. Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933–1957, at Berlin’s some kind of art experience, which is not necessar- membership in a deep-pocketed clan: He came from a summer art and music sessions, initiated by Albers, another faculty member, the composer David Tudor; Josef Albers, the great Bauhaus teacher who fled Nazi Hamburger Bahnhof, which explored the creative ily the same as self-expression, the student can come line of wealthy German-American industrialists, and began in 1944, a dizzying array of instructors arrived, together with Cage and others, they soon estab- Germany for the United States and arrived at Black contributions made by German refugee artists and to the realization of order in the world,” they state an aunt, Katherine Dreier, had founded the Société including the art critic Clement Greenberg, the chore- lished the fabled commune the Land in Stony Point, Mountain as a professor in 1933, sent students like intellectuals who converged at the school during the in the catalog for the first year. “The direct result of Anonyme, an artist-led museum, in New York in 1920 ographer Agnes de Mille, the gamelan composer Lou New York. And Olson, who ran the school in the ’50s, painters Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly out Nazi era. A new book, The Experimenters: Chance and the discipline of the arts is to give tone and quality to with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.) Harrison and the photographer Harry Callahan— forsook his wife and child for his student paramour, into the fields and woods to gather rocks and leaves for Design at Black Mountain College, was published last intellectual discipline.” Revered alternative educator “The teachers who were at Black Mountain were most long before they became well known. who bore him a son. their studies of color, material and abstract form. His December. John Dewey, a friend of Rice’s, visited frequently and there because they really believed in freedom and That same year, in keeping with its democratic As for the founders, Nicholas Fox Weber, the execu- wife, Anni Albers, who would later be the first textile “Today Black Mountain seems so avant la lettre, so was supportive of their efforts. education,” says abstractionist Dorothea Rockburne, convictions, Black Mountain became the first col- tive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern proto-Beat, proto-hippie, so completely off the known Their mission, Molesworth says, was to prepare who heard of it as a teenager in Montreal and began lege in the South to integrate, 20 years ahead of the says in his 2009 book, The Bauhaus Group, that Josef Art in New York, ran the weaving workshop. Willem of the region but also of the nation,” says Eva Díaz, “a student to be a member of a democratic society”— saving money to attend, which she finally did, from Civil Rights Act. The first African-American student, was probably having an affair with Dreier’s wife, de Kooning taught at Black Mountain in 1948 while the book’s author. In a contemporary art world riv- and that ambition only intensified as war drew near. 1950 to 1954. She took science with the physicist Alma Stone Williams, was a pianist; the painter Jacob Bobbie, a dancer who’d studied with Isadora Duncan, his wife, Elaine, studied painting, before he returned eted by the idea of experimentation, she adds, “Black That same year, the Nazis had forced the closure of Goldowski, but her most profound connection was Lawrence came to teach two years later. and that Ted and Anni were likely lovers too. (“Based to New York to found the fabled abstract expression- Mountain is often invoked as a touchstone.” the Bauhaus, the radically experimental and highly with the German mathematician Max Dehn, with Rauschenberg arrived as a student in 1948, the on the photos Josef took of Anni and Bobbie together ist hangout known as the Club; drips of paint from The school’s interdisciplinary outlook is like cat- influential art school in Berlin.