How veterans and avant-garde art saved the California School of Fine Arts – San Francisco Chronicle

When the San Francisco Art Institute closed its doors on July 15, the city lost one of its oldest and most important cultural institutions. The 148-year-old art school on the northeast slope of Russian Hill had been struggling for years, plagued by declining enrollment and financial woes. Yet for decades, the school known as the California School of Fine Arts until 1961 was a major force, not just on the Bay Area art scene, but on the national one. The artists and movements associated with the institution include Diego Rivera, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Manuel Neri, the Bay Area Figurative School, the funk movement, and too many others to list.

But the most crucial period in the schools long history, when it transformed itself from a moribund finishing school for debutantes into a white-hot center of artistic experimentation and a force to be reckoned with in modern art, took place in just five years, from 1946 to 1950. During that time, the school played a significant role in the development of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. And remarkably, it was a bunch of World War II veterans who made that development possible.

In 1945, few expected the California School of Fine Arts to even survive, let alone become a center of cutting-edge art. Founded in 1874, the CSFA was a typical fine-arts college of its era, attracting large numbers of female students who wanted to acquire accomplishments to make themselves more marriageable. In the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Candida Smith writes in Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California, it had the reputation of having the most conservative curriculum in the state, with a faculty that steadfastly clung to the beaux-arts academic tradition.

The Great Depression and World War II hit the school hard, and by the 1940s it was on life support. Enrollment plunged, and in 1942 the schools director quit because there was no money to pay his salary. Most of the faculty soon followed. In 1944, the board of trustees considered closing the dying school and selling off the real estate.

At that moment, salvation appeared in the form of 32-year-old Douglas MacAgy, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art. MacAgy offered to run the school, on the condition that he be allowed to revise the curriculum and hire faculty as he saw fit. The board agreed, and MacAgy was appointed director on July 1, 1945. It was a momentous hiring.

MacAgy and his then-wife, Jermanyne, who was acting director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, quickly became the most important champions of contemporary art in the Bay Area. Jermanyne MacAgy staged the first Jackson Pollock exhibition in San Francisco in 1942, following that with one-artist shows by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still.

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For his part, Douglas MacAgy set about remaking the staid CSFA into a center of artistic experimentation. To make up the core of the new painting faculty, he hired four painters he had met as curator Edward Corbett, David Park, Hassel Smith and Clay Spohn. The next year, he hired Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still. In 1948, he added Richard Diebenkorn. Ansel Adams was brought in to head the photography department, with Minor White as principal instructor. MacAgy engaged Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhardt, Man Ray and Salvador Dali to teach, and even tried to convince Marcel Duchamp to come out of retirement and join the faculty.

MacAgy swept out the cobwebs at the venerable school. He got rid of its old pedagogy, which stipulated that students had to take courses in a prescribed order. He ordered that the studios be kept open 24 hours a day, so that students could work whenever they wanted. He brought in jazz musicians and poetry readings. And symbolically, he hung a curtain over the Rivera mural in the schools exhibition hall.

MacAgy was not only a passionate believer in artistic modernism, he was also sure that his avant-garde vision would attract students. As Smith writes, MacAgy was convinced that only by making the school the center for the most advanced thinking in the visual arts would it be able to survive.

This remarkably idealistic plan Jackson Pollock as a business model? would probably have crashed and burned, had it not been for perhaps the most unusual crop of new students in the history of liberal arts education in the United States: a flood of military veterans.

What led more than two million U.S. veterans between 1945 and 1956 to put down their M-1s and start studying Abstract Expressionism, or Samuel Beckett, or Karl Marx, was an epochal piece of legislation: the GI Bill of Rights. Passed by Congress in 1944, the GI Bill offered generous educational and other benefits to returning World War II veterans. Congress did not stipulate what type of education veterans would receive; in fact, it voted down a plan that would have restricted benefits to courses of study focused on employable skills. Neither politicians nor educators expected that the veterans would prefer a liberal arts education over professional training and certainly not that they would pour into art schools.

But in that era, when the military was a true cross-section of America, they did. As Smith notes, a 1946 UCLA survey found that veterans were more likely to take humanities courses than non-veterans. Veterans were driven far less by practical concerns than non-veterans: 44% of veterans in a 1946 survey of 25 institutions of higher learning said their principal aim in returning to school was self-improvement, compared to only 12% of non-veterans. The veterans also got better grades than the non-veterans.

Thanks to the GI Bill, veterans swelled the ranks of liberal arts colleges and proportionally, still more of them enrolled in art schools. As Smith points out, between 1946 and 1952, the percentage of veterans who were full-time students at the five most important art schools in California the CSFA, the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and three in Los Angeles was never less than 70%. At CSFA, veterans in 1947 and 1948 made up 74% of full-time students; in 1949, a staggering 87%.

The first veterans began enrolling in fall 1945; by the following spring term, enrollment had grown to 1,017 full- and part-time students, 350% greater than in 1944, and far greater than the schools previous high in 1929. Registration and school income increased every year through 1949.

It was a unique cohort. Smith calls it a special group of students, those veterans who, for absolutely no practical reason, turned to art when they were given the opportunity to achieve their educational dreams. When they entered the CSFA, they threw themselves into the world of art. They devoured the intense, demanding, at times quasi-religious courses offered by Still, Smith and others. And they saved the school.

In the years to come, the CSFA evolved. Still and other faculty members departed. MacAgy resigned in 1950. Abstract Expressionism was followed by the Bay Area figurative movement, which was followed by funk, which was followed by pop, and on and on, in a pattern of change as old as art itself.

The long run of the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, came to an end this year. But while mourning that loss, its worth remembering the five unique years when the schools modern era began driven by brilliant artists and administrators of vision, and by a bunch of veterans who wanted to expand their lives.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. His most recent book is Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals.

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How veterans and avant-garde art saved the California School of Fine Arts - San Francisco Chronicle