Art Students League of New York

From the 19th century to the present, the League has counted among its attendees and instructors many historically important artists, and contributed to numerous influential schools and movements in the art world.

Founded in 1875, the League's creation came about in response to both an anticipated gap in the art instruction program of classes at New York's National Academy of Design for that year, and to longer-term desires for more variety and flexibility in education for artists than it was felt the Academy provided. The breakaway group of students included many women, and was originally housed in rented rooms at 16th Street and Fifth Avenue. When the Academy resumed a more typical but liberalized program in 1877, there was some feeling that the League had served its purpose, but its students voted to continue its program, and it was incorporated the following year. Influential board members from this formative period included painter Thomas Eakins and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Membership continued to increase, forcing the League to relocate to increasingly larger spaces. The League participated in the founding of the American Fine Arts Society (AFAS) in 1889, together with the Society of American Artists and the Architectural League, among others. The American Fine Arts Building at 215 West 57th Street, constructed as their joint headquarters, has continued to house the League since 1892. Designed in the French Renaissance style by one of the founders of the AFAS, architect Henry Hardenbergh (in collaboration with W.C. Hunting & J.C. Jacobsen), the building is a designated New York City Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, an increasing number of women artists came to study and work at the League many of them taking on key roles. Among them was Wilhelmina Weber Furlong, accompanied by her husband Thomas Furlong. The avant-garde couple served the league in executive and administrative roles and as student members throughout the American modernism movement. Alice Van Vechten Brown, who would later develop some of the first art programs in American higher education, also studied with the league until prolonged family illness sent her home. The painter Edith Dimock, a student from 1895 to 1899, described her classes at the Art Students League: In his official biography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, Norman Rockwell recounts his time studying at the school as a young man, providing insight into its operation in the early 1900s.

• Illustration — Advertisement in The International Studio (magazine) of 1914 The League's popularity persisted into the 1920s and 1930s under the hand of instructors like painter Thomas Hart Benton, who counted among his students there the young Jackson Pollock and other avant-garde artists who would rise to prominence in the 1940s. In 1925 to celebrate their golden jubilee (fifty years), the League organized an exhibition which included the work of members, students and instructors. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney gave a reception at which Charles Dana Gibson was toastmaster. Between 1942 and 1943, many of the League's students joined the armed forces to fight in World War II, and the League's enrollment decreased from 1,000 to 400, putting it in danger of closing in mid-1943. In response, five hundred artists donated $15,000, just enough to keep the League from closing. In the years after World War II, the G.I. Bill played an important role in the continuing history of the League by enabling returning veterans to attend classes. The League continued to be a formative influence on innovative artists, being an early stop in the careers of Abstract expressionists, Pop Artists and scores of others including Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Joseph Glasco, Al Held, Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly and many others vitally active in the art world. In 1968, Lisa M. Specht was elected first female president of the League. The League's unique importance in the larger art world dwindled somewhat during the 1960s, partially because of higher academia's emergence as an important presence in contemporary art education, and partially due to a shift in the art world towards minimalism, photography, conceptual art, and a more impersonal and indirect approach to art making.

As of 2010, the League continues to attract a wide variety of young artists, and its focus on art made by hand, both figurative and abstract, remains strong. Its continued significance has largely been in the continuation of its original mission, which is to give access to art classes and studio access to all comers regardless of their means or technical background.

From 1906 until 1922, and again after the end of World War II from 1947 until 1979, the League operated a summer school of painting at Woodstock, New York. In 1995, the League's facilities expanded to include the Vytlacil campus in Sparkill, New York, named after and based upon a gift of the property and studio of former instructor Vaclav Vytlacil.

The list of Art Students League of New York alumni includes: • Pacita Abad • Harry N. Abrams • Herbert E. Abrams • Edwin Tappan Adney • Olga Albizu • Karin von Aroldingen • Ai Weiwei • Gladys Aller • Grimanesa Amorós • William Anthony • Edmund Archer • Nela Arias-Misson • David Attie • Milton Avery • Norio Azuma • Elizabeth Gowdy Baker • Thomas R. Ball • Hugo Ballin • Will Barnet • Nancy Hemenway Barton • Saul Bass • C. C. Beall • Romare Bearden • Tony Bennett • Theresa Bernstein • Brother Thomas Bezanson • Thomas Hart Benton • Ilse Bischoff • Isabel Bishop • Jerzy Bitter • Meredith Bixby • Dorothy Block • Leonard Bocour • Harriet Bogart • Abraham Bogdanove • Lee Bontecou • Henry Botkin • Louise Bourgeois • Harry Bowden • Stanley Boxer • Louise Brann • D. Putnam Brinley • Emma L. Brock • James Brooks • Carmen L. Browne • Jennie Augusta Brownscombe • Edith Bry • Dennis Miller Bunker • Jacob Burck • Feliza Bursztyn • Theodore Earl Butler • Paul Cadmus • Alexander Calder • Chris Campbell • John F. Carlson • Kathrin Cawein • Robert Cenedella • Paul Chalfin • Ching Ho Cheng • Minna Citron • Margaret Covey Chisholm • Walter Appleton Clark • Kate Freeman Clark • George Henry Clements • Henry Ives Cobb, Jr. • Claudette Colbert • Willie Cole • John Connell • Margaret Miller Cooper • Sylvie Covey • Russell Cowles • Allyn Cox • Ellis Credle • Richard V. Culter • Mel Cummin • Frederick Stuart Church • Joan Danziger • Andrew Dasburg • Charles C. Dawson • Adolf Dehn • Dorothy Dehner • Sidney Dickinson • Burgoyne Diller • Yvonne Pène du Bois • Helen Savier DuMond • Ellen Eagle • Marjorie Eaton • Alice Righter Edmiston • Sir Jacob Epstein • Marisol Escobar • Joe Eula • Philip Evergood • Peter Falk • Frances Farrand Dodge • Ernest Fiene • Irving Fierstein • Louis Finkelstein • Ethel Fisher • Wilhelmina Weber Furlong • Helen Frankenthaler • Frederick Carl Frieseke • Wanda Gág • Dan Gheno • Charles Dana Gibson • Helena de Kay Gilder • Edward Giobbi • William Glackens • Joseph Glasco • Elias Goldberg • Michael Goldberg • Shirley Goldfarb • Peter Golfinopoulos • Adolph Gottlieb • Blanche Grambs • John D. Graham • Enrique Grau • Grace Graupe-Pillard • Nancy Graves • Clement Greenberg • Stephen Greene • Red Grooms • Chaim Gross • Lena Gurr • Bessie Pease Gutmann • Channing Hare • Minna Harkavy • Marsden Hartley • Julius Hatofsky • Ethel Hays • Gus Heinze • Al Held • Carmen Herrera • Eva Hesse • Al Hirschfeld • Itshak Holtz • Lorenzo Homar • Winslow Homer • Thomas Hoving • Paul Jenkins • Burt Johnson • Donald Judd • Joan Kahn • Matsumi Kanemitsu • Deborah Kass • Alonzo Myron Kimball • Ruth Kligman • Torleif S. Knaphus • Belle Kogan • Lee Krasner • Anne Kutka (McCosh) • Ronnie Landfield • Adelaide Lawson • Arthur Lee • Abby Leigh • Lucy L'Engle • Alfred Leslie • Roy Lichtenstein • Dorothy Loeb • Tom Loepp • Michael Loew • John Marin • Reginald Marsh • Knox Martin • Donald Martiny • Mercedes Matter • Louisa Matthiasdottir • Peter Max • John Alan Maxwell • Roderick Fletcher Mead • Hildreth Meière • Evelyn Metzger • Felicia Meyer • Eleanore Mikus • Emil Milan • Lee Miller • David Milne • F. Luis Mora • Walter Tandy Murch • Reuben Nakian • Louise Nevelson • Barnett Newman • Isamu Noguchi • Sassona Norton • Frank O'Connor • Georgia O'Keeffe • Mary Orwen • Roselle Osk • Tom Otterness • Betty Waldo Parish • Clara Weaver Parrish • Betty Parsons • David Partridge • Phillip Pavia, • Roger Tory Peterson • Bert Geer Phillips • I. Rice Pereira • Jackson Pollock • Fairfield Porter • Edith Mitchill Prellwitz • Henry Prellwitz • Robert Rauschenberg • Man Ray • Charles M. Relyea • Frederic Remington • Priscilla Roberts • Norman Rockwell • Esther Rolick • Louise Emerson Ronnebeck • Herman Rose • James Rosenquist • Sanford Ross • Mark Rothko • Glen Rounds • Luis Alvarez Roure • Peter Rubino • Morgan Russell • Abbey Ryan • Sam Savitt • Concetta Scaravaglione • Louis Schanker • Mary Schepisi • Edith Schloss • Katherine Schmidt • Emily Maria Scott • Ethel Schwabacher • Joan Semmel • Maurice Sendak • Ben Shahn • Nelson Shanks • Nat Mayer Shapiro • Henrietta Shore • Jessamine Shumate • David Smith • Tony Smith • Vincent D. Smith • Robert Smithson • Louise Hammond Willis Snead • Armstrong Sperry • Otto Stark • William Starkweather • Frank Stella • Joseph Stella • Inga Stephens Pratt Clark • Harry Sternberg • Clyfford Still • Soichi Sunami • Katharine Lamb Tait • Minerva Teichert • Val Telberg • Robert Templeton • Patty Prather Thum • George Tooker • Kim Tschang-yeul • Wen-Ying Tsai • Luce Turnier • Cy Twombly • Jack Tworkov • Edward Charles Volkert • Charles Wadsworth • Ruby Walworth • Adele Watson • Emmett Watson • Nan Watson • Alonzo C. Webb • Sybilla Mittell Weber • Davyd Whaley • Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney • Adolph Alexander Weinman • J. Alden Weir • Jerry Weiss • Stow Wengenroth • Pennerton West • Urquhart Wilcox • Anita Willets-Burnham • Ellen Axson Wilson • Gahan Wilson • Louise Waterman Wise • Sarah A. Worden • Alice Morgan Wright • Russel Wright • Koho Yamamoto • Art Young • Marie Zimmermann • Philip Zuchman • Iván Zulueta • Enrique Fernández Morales