THIS QUARTER
11
it is said that Professor Gropius has not always enjoyed his present
degree of security and glamor at Harvard, and that in the beginning
it was only student pressure that kept
him
there at all. Similarly the
students at Yale initiated a progressive agitation which secured Mr.
Harrison (of Harrison and Fouilloux) as an instructor in the School
of Architecture, and they got M. Femand Leger for a lecture-series
as well. It is disheartening, therefore, in the face of these hopeful
signs, to come upon the losing battle carried on by students at Cooper
Union for the preservation of their courses in modem and abstract
painting.
Cooper Union is familiar to most New Yorkers as an antiquated
caravanserai on lower Fourth Avenue, huge, dingy, and hideous.
Actually it is a large school of Art and Science, handsomely endowed
by the Coopers and the Hewitts, which offers completely free tuition
to hundreds of acceptable students. It is thus hardly a place where
one might expect to find advanced methods of instruction, yet acci–
dents may strike in tbe most unexpected quarters. So it was that under
an indifferent directorship, a couple named Harrison, who had long
been making an intelligent study of modem methods in art-instruc–
tion, applied for positions on the faculty; their personalities proved
agreeable (that being the director's chief criterion), so Mrs. Harrison
was given classes in fabric-design, Mr. Harrison in painting. It soon
became evident that the new teachers were approaching the problems
of plastic creation in a way that was quite new to Cooper Union while
the students were interested as they had not been interested before.
They attended exhibitions uptown, and began talking to the director
of Cezanne, the Cubists, and other painters of whom he had never
heard. It is to
his
credit that he remained open-minded, and supported
the Harrisons when they later asked for the services of Mr. Tumbull–
ostensibly as an instructor in the technique of tempera-glazing. No
one as yet seemed to mind that Turnbull himself was an abstract
painter of considerable attainments who had made a study of Bau–
haus methods, and proceeded to introduce the mysterious subject of
esthetics into his classrooms.
Naturally the Cooper Union students did not proceed to win
e Prix de Rome or other Beaux-Art prizes. However, an alert in–
lligence could have noted more subtle signs of progress. Mrs. Har-
. n's textile-classes were given a beautiful show at W.
&
J.
Sloane's
t won wide ·and favorable recognition; and at the same time the
useum of Living Art director began advising his friends to attend
e annual exhibitions of the Harrison and Turnbull pupils. The
rustees (particularly Mr.
J.
P. Morgan) eyed the shows with
oomy suspicion, but no one cared very much, as owing to the munif-
