Thanksgiving by Famous Artists.
The strange middle path of Norman Rockwell's correspondence classes.
There are many ways to become a professional artist across American history. We’ve talked about certificate culture, from the early Academies to the dawn of the MFA; we’ve talked about putting in the hours in atelier and apprenticeship. But strangely, it takes Thanksgiving time to remind me of a third way, even though that alternate path has been everywhere of late: the correspondence class. Strange mostly because during the pandemic, all art classes became correspondence classes—I took one at the Art Students League of New York and while it wasn’t bad, it mostly underscored that we were hungry for just about any relief from isolation. Thanksgiving brings this to my mind because somewhere in the back of my brain I hold a spare bit of trivia that I have never fact-checked or explored: Norman Rockwell, shortly after painting the most revered painting of Thanksgiving and one of the most famous American paintings, started a correspondence school for artists.
And he called it The Famous Artists School.
II. Freedom From Class.
That’s how it stayed with me, anyway, until I started noticing alums of the Famous Artists School here and there, and finally I had to dig into it. The truth is both weirder and less weird than I suspected.
The turn of the twentieth century was a rum time for illustrators: printed matter ruled mass media, and there were plenty of magazines and newspapers running illustrations — but photography was not yet up to the task of filling those pages. A talented draftsman — that is, a rapid draftsman — could do well by publishing sketches on the scene or portraits and painted illustrations for the more expensive magazines. This was the bread and butter of the Ash Can School — painters of real life who all had day jobs in newspapers. And this was the time of J.C. Leyendecker, Howard Pyle, and N.C. Wyeth — the Golden Age of America illustration.
With so much work and so many workers, the community of working illustrators needed a quality control mechanism, and so in 1901, a group of nine artists and one coal-dealer1 formed the Society of American Illustrators.2 All of the founders and many of its early members were classically trained — Frank Vincent duMond taught at the Art Students League; Otto Henry Bacher studied in Munich, palling around Whistler and Robert Blum—and they were all practicing popular illustrators as well. Charles Dana Gibson, he of the Gibson Girl, was an officer of the Society, and James Montgomery Flagg, the League artist responsible for Uncle Sam wants YOU!, were internationally famous for their illustrations. There was a lot talent, plenty of jobs, and the Society helped network them.
By the end of World War II, the economy had shifted, and so had the membership at the Society of Illustrators. There were more and better-illustrated magazines than ever before, but the rise of photography threatened the traditional work of an illustrator. A raft of young men returned from the war eager to flood the workforce — and with GI Bill money for re-training in hand.
This was a wild time for higher learning in America. The Art Students League converted its gallery spaces into classrooms to meet demand. Schools across the country swelled with new students. The makeup of the Society of Illustrators shifted: where once the rule had been classical training in Europe, now there was a surprising number of members that were also semi-professional boxers.3 One part-time pugilist understood the math perfectly: there was far more money in education than in working as an illustrator. Albert Dorne investigated how the Society could capitalize upon this, but because of its charter it couldn’t be a school. So Dorne started his own, in the only space he had available: nowhere at all.
Dorne’s idea was to produce correspondence classes that students across the country could take by mail. In order to be eligible for GI Bill money, he needed a legit faculty, so he recruited anyone he could at the Society. This is how Norman Rockwell entered the fracas—he may not have provided anything but his name, but he apparently assented to the use of his trademark in the school’s advertising. And once he had this crack team assembled, a name for this enterprise suggested itself: The Famous Artist School.
If this is sounding like a grift, it’s not entirely clear that it started out as one. It’s a striking historical moment of career advancement for a huge number of people, all at once, and our institutions of higher learning strained to absorb it. Around the same time, Brooklyn College started transmitting classes by radio—the transmitting tower by Fort Green Park erected for this purpose still stands today. College by radio sounds a little wacky, but not wackier than college by Zoom, right? Anyway, however it began, it got grifty pretty quick. Picking almost at random from their advertisements:
“When James Ryan took the Art Talent Test he was a clerk, ‘stuck’ in a low-pay routine job. Today he’s an illustrator at Hughes Aircraft—and also pours out a steady stream of well-paid free-lance art work in his spare time . . . Virginia Bartier, a farmer’s wife and mother of three, now sells just about everything she paints.”
Sure she does. And all you need to do is write for the free aptitude test to find out which of these fabulous courses will propel you to stardom, etc. The school was a success in that it made money, but it’s hard to know how many were served, leaving aside how well, because the Famous Artists School was basically just selling pamphlets, not matriculating students. If making money means success, the venture was successful, and Dorne built on that success with a Famous Photographers and Famous Writers schools in the 1960s.
That kind of overreach, followed by bad press,4 and profligate spending by Dorne did the school in by 1972. It’s hard to know who took the classes, but one interesting progeny of this whole bizarre experiment goes back to 1948 when it was just Dorne and Rockwell in a room. That year, they took on the young correspondent, John Buscema. Buscema was a Brooklyn kid taking classes everywhere he could — the Brooklyn Museum, Pratt Institute—while he trained for a side career as a boxer, so he was just right for the Famous Artists School. Within a year, his professional career in sequential art had begun. Buscema worked with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Stan Lee to create and chronicle every character in the Marvel Universe.
Buscema was one of the most gifted illustrators to lift a pen. He produced as many as three full comic books each month, for decades; most artists struggle to get one title done per month. It’s hard to see how he wasn’t going to make it, Famous Artists or nobody—the man had the touch. But Buscema didn’t learn nothing from Dorne and co.: by the time the Famous ventures were folding, Buscema was writing his own book: How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. It’s straight out of the Dorne playbook, complete with irresponsible promises of power and glory. But the instruction on drawing the human form in action is up there with with the great books on dynamic anatomy—Buscema just had a knack for visual communication. I don’t know how many copies it has sold, but suffice it to say that its impact cannot be measured.
And there you have it folks, from Norman Rockwell to Albert Dorne to John Buscema in one unbreakable chain, and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is what I’m thankful for. Pass the gravy and have a happy Thanksgiving,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Because behind ever great artist group, there is one scion of mining interests . . . It’s tempting to dig deeper here, but we have so much ground to cover . . .!
This is one of those leitmotifs in American art history: a field is unregulated so when it gets saturated, those with the most invested in the game step up to make the barrier to entry a little more expensive — and keep the field unregulated by pesky government agents.
Anyway, I’m surprised.
Jessica Mitford’s take-down in the Atlantic in 1970 is a delight, and inevitably titled, “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers.”