Date: 22-01-1991
Owning Institution: Royal College of Art
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999        
Subject:   20th Century      

THE ROYAL College of Art recently announced ''The reintroduction of drawing, as a discipline''. That this should qualify as news may surprise some people. Drawing ''reintroduced''? Where had it gone? And how come drawing, for centuries the bedrock of fine art education, had disappeared from Britain's most famous college of art and design in the first place?

Bryan Kneale, formerly the RCA's Professor of Sculpture, is its first ever Professor of Drawing. The draughtsman's contract seems, on the face of it, a favourable one. A new Department of Drawing has been created and spacious drawing studios built, with the assistance of funds from Rowney, on the seventh floor of the Royal College. In this eyrie, overlooking the rooftops of SW7, Kneale presides over the classic mise-en-scene of art education - a naked woman sits on a kitchen chair, under intense scrutiny from about half a dozen pencil-wielding students - and answers questions about the role of drawing in British art schools.

He thinks that ''drawing has perhaps been neglected in the recent past''. That is an understatement. The fact is that drawing from observation all but vanished from British art schools in the 1960s and 1970s. It per-sisted in a few places: most of the Scottish art schools; in London, at the Slade, where the strength of Wil-liam Coldstream's influence, even after his death, ensured its survival. These were exceptions. Ron Bowen, Senior Lecturer at the Slade, says that ''Observation simply ceased to be of interest to most students and tutors. Even here, where the life class has remained central in the education of students, its role was chal-lenged.''

This requires explanation. First, then, a historical outline; a quick sketch, in black and white, of the de-cline of drawing in art schools.

For more than 300 years, artists were trained in essentially the same way. First, the student or apprentice would draw from plaster casts; later, they would be allowed to draw from the living model. This reflected a fundamental consensus about the forms and functions of art, which may be said to have underpinned the development of Western painting and sculpture from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. As Robert Hughes has written, ''If Jacopo Pontormo had walked into the life class of one of the big teaching ateliers of Paris in 1890 he would have seen immediately what was going on''. Take him to 1991, and an institution like Goldsmiths' School of Art, and the time-travelling Mannerist would be completely mystified.

The notion of cultural repudiation, the rejection of all previous artistic models or practices, lay at the heart of modernism. By the 1960s this had acquired, paradoxically, the force of a convention: an orthodoxy of the unorthodox, which had finally penetrated the citadel of the art school. Students and their tutors were dedicated to pushing back the frontiers of the avant- garde. They discovered the vast new territories of Conceptual Art, Land Art, Performance Art - and a thousand other kinds of art to which the old, academic discipline of drawing from observation seemed as irrelevant as a flint arrowhead to modern warfare.

These are big tendencies, oceanic swells in the history of modern culture. Although it raises interesting questions, the Royal College's new Department of Drawing cannot be described as more than the tiniest of countercurrents. So far, Kneale has noticed that ''very few painters and sculptors are making use of my de-partment''. It has been most popular among RCA students of applied arts such as Architecture, Industrial Design or Textiles; and there are few signs that fine art students elsewhere feel a burning need for the disci-pline of the life class. The Dean of Goldsmiths', Jon Thompson, says that ''we used to run a life class until last term, but the numbers dwindled to the point where it was not economical to continue. There's hardly any call for it''.

Those who argue that drawing from observation should be taught at art school are liable to be branded as reactionaries, throwbacks to the despotic ancien regime of art education. Bryan Kneale is at pains to em-phasise that he is no such thing. He would like students ''to approach the drawing of the model from as many different viewpoints, physical and philosophical, as possible. It won't be a reissue of the plumb-line orthodoxies of the 1950s life class, or any other form of dead academicism. I might subject the students to that occasionally - but only as a way of helping them to understand the implications of drawing the figure according to certain systems.''

Kneale won't be cast in the role of art school Canute attempting to stem the tide of cultural depravity. But he has his biases. He feels that the recent revival of interest in Minimal and Conceptual Art (in which the graduates of Goldsmiths' under Jon Thompson, incidentally, have played a large part) may have blinded impressionable students to other possibilities. ''Drawing is fundamental to art: it's the fingerprint, the basic mark, the me myself. It is an essential weapon in any artist's armoury. Think of Picasso, or Giacometti, any of the great modern artists; they all drew, incessantly. But many students now seem almost afraid to do anything as direct as paint and draw. Many of them spend half their time trying to get sponsorship: they need 50 television sets or 10,000 telephone directories . . . It's all to do with planning, thinking, making strategies - they aren't learning a language of self-expression that will last them a lifetime.''

They know, of course, that they don't have to. Drawing is, indeed, ''a language of self-expression'', the medium of spontaneity and impulse. But think of Andy Warhol or the Minimalists, who created an art from which all nuance, all sense of personal touch, was ruthlessly purged. These are among the major players in recent art history; and drawing, as Kneale conceives of it, is alien to their work.

Life drawing fell out of favour in late modernist circles for different reasons. Jon Thompson, who attended life classes at the Royal Academy Schools in the 1950s, speaks for a whole generation when he says that ''there's this pretence that what you are being taught is some neutral skill, but the opposite is true. It took me years to unlearn the lessons of the life class, which is an ideologically loaded tool for making students conform to a certain philosophy of art.''

He has a point, but it can be overstated. This may have been true of life classes in the atelier of Ingres, where the entire purpose of study was to prepare an artist for a career in Neoclassical history painting (''Drawing,'' said Ingres, ''is the probity of art''); and it may have been true of the Royal Academy Schools in the 1950s, where it was made worse by the fact that the prevailing ideology of the life class had lost virtually all connection with the world of art outside the art school. But to teach drawing from observation is not nec-essarily to indoctrinate, to straitjacket the student in ''a certain philosophy of art''.

Drawing is a medium, like any other, and how it is taught depends on the teacher. (''I think it is very im-portant to make the subject exciting and varied,'' says Kneale. ''We will encourage drawing from imagination, for example; we will explore caricature. It's not just going to be one thing.'') The same is true of drawing from observation and how it is taught. It has acquired a bad reputation, largely perhaps because so many of those now in charge at art schools (like Jon Thompson) were taught it prescriptively or insensitively. but that does not mean that it is in itself a bad thing. It seems unlikely that the human figure will ever disappear from painting and sculpture, and as long as it remains then it would seem logical that art schools should offer some form of grounding in figurative drawing.

''The instinct to draw has been there since Cro-Magnon man,'' says Kneale. ''It's not going to go away just like that. I find it amazing when people say that life classes can actually hamper a student's development - it's as if one were to say that the ability to walk, or speak, were a disability . . .'' He is interrupted by an assistant who wants to know whether ''the greyhounds are coming in today''. ''No, no greyhounds today,'' answers Kneale. ''Next week.'' Now all he has to do is persuade some fine art students to turn up.

ANTHONY GORMLEY
''LIKE YOUR handwriting, or the way you walk, your drawing will expose your inner self. For me drawing is about liberation, but for a long time it was about confrontation, about seeing how good I could be at making a copy of something. That seems to me now a denial of its great potential. I'm not very keen on the idea of what people like to call the discipline of the life class. The dogma of the life class is a prescription for the distancing of experience: you are stuck in a room looking at a naked body with which you have no connection; you're treating the body as if it were dead, so how can you expect drawing, which of its essence is a carrier of feeling, to come alive in those circumstances? Joseph Beuys's drawings are wonderful because they are so alive: these membranes of sensibility in which thoughts and feelings meet. I love the idea of this white sheet of paper as a filter, that catches things from levels of perception and consciousness that could not otherwise be seen.''

NICOLA HICKS
''AN ENTIRE generation of artists felt at odds with the way they were taught art: they were taught to draw academically, and it just made no sense to them and had no bearing on what they were trying to do. They then became the tutors and professors in art education - and that's when I got to art school, at the end of the 1970s. At Chelsea School of Art, I fought to get a life class going; now I force myself to do life drawing regularly, even if I don't feel like it. It is like an athlete training: your eyes are a muscle, and if you do life drawing the simple fact is that you get better at seeing. People are frightened of going into a life class because they think it might somehow damage their individuality to do something so academic. But look at Matisse, Picasso, Miro - they were all absolutely brilliant at academic drawing. The better you can get that line, academically, the better it's going to be when you come back to free drawing. It's just a fact. I'm not saying that you have to be gifted as an academic draughtsman, though. I've just been to the exhibition of Joseph Beuys's drawings, who wasn't the tiniest bit interested in the academic thing, and I was completely uplifted and elated.''

EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
''IN a great technological age, I think that the drawing - because it is simply the mind and the hand and a piece of paper - assumes even more importance than it has had in the past. I think of drawing as a kind of tool, perhaps the most basic tool of creativity: if you're not drawing from the cast or the model or some other motif, you can be drawing from your imagination, giving form to ideas. I think the question of whether drawing from observation should or shouldn't be compulsory at art school is a bit of a red herring. Modern art now covers such a broad band of activities that either to insist that students should or should not do life drawing, say, would be stupidly dogmatic. The issue is choice. During the most radical period, when the life model wasn't there any more and the casts were all sold off or whatever, a generation of artists weren't given that option. That's the main reason why I would welcome the new department at the Royal College, but I think history is important too - at the Royal Academy Schools, for instance, they have kept all their casts, like the cast from the Laocoon that was drawn by William Blake; I like to feel that that world, which so much great painting and sculpture came out of, is still there in some form.''