Art Schools Get Dinged by the School of Hard Knocks

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is truncating its art school, and it’s not the only one.

T his past weekend I was in Philadelphia to see the very good Mary Cassatt exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ll write about it in a week or so. The zenith of my visit, though, was Lynnewood Hall, the Gilded Age manse — no, best to call it a palace — where the Widener family lived. At 120,000 square feet, this hunk of rough diamond owned, as of last year, by a not-for-profit, is to be restored as a house museum fit to be called America’s Versailles. I’ll write about it in a few weeks once I parse the many undiscovered stories Lynnewood’s walls present, some epic, some esoteric.

Enough teasing. Today I’ll write about art schools, a topic I haven’t tackled over the years. Very sad indeed is the news that the art school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia announced that it’s shuttering its degree programs next year. The University of the Arts, also in Philadelphia, announced the same week that it was closing, and closing the next day! Its president has already slipped the surly bonds of Earth and flown by night. I don’t know much about the University of the Arts except that Camille Paglia, always worth reading, taught there. I’d love to have been one of her students for a semester or two.

PAFA, though, is another kettle of academic fish now on Death Row. It’s America’s oldest and most distinguished art school, the vision of two artists of early America, painter Charles Willson Peale and sculptor William Rush, and the place where art and philosophy comprise body and soul. While I was in Philadelphia, I visited the school. Its 1876 Venetian Renaissance Revival building is closed this summer and into the fall for renovations to its HVAC system. Buildings, especially historic gems like PAFA’s, need to be maintained. I visited its impressive Modernist building next door, once a showroom for new, high-end cars but now gallery and art-school space. In the Hamilton Building, named after the donor who paid to renovate it into art space, there were three shows, none, alas, with enough octane to generate more than a sputter here and there. PAFA has one of our best collections of American art. We expect vroom, vroom, vroom.

The place is in a slough, which is bound to happen even to the most glorious of institutions, as is PAFA.

PAFA is central to the story of American art. It was established in 1805 as the first school and museum of fine arts in the United States. Heading the art program was Thomas Eakins, famous for his pedagogy, notorious for his forced resignation. Many of the Ashcan artists went there. American art is as old as New England gravestone carving, which is sculpture, but in Philadelphia, Americans got serious about art as a cause, as beauty, and as a thing to cherish.

Winslow Homer’s operatic, violent Fox Hunt is there. In 2006, PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art together bought The Gross Clinic, by Eakins, for $68 million. It’s an icon and a great painting, but the deal was an awkward one — the two museums had trouble raising the money — and the idea that it had to stay in Philadelphia was more specious than not. Still, it’s at PAFA, part of the time, and an impressive opus. Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington at Princeton, from 1779, belongs to PAFA, as do John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, from 1809–14 and America’s first painting of a nude, George Bellows’s splendid North River, from 1908, and Young Thomas and His Mother, from 1893, by alumna Mary Cassatt.

None of these heavy hitters is on view. Many are in Albuquerque for a PAFA treasures exhibition that’s been on the road since January and runs until 2026. It’s a six-venue tour.

PAFA’s art school isn’t closing altogether. The MFA program is gone at the end of the coming academic year, but PAFA and the University of Pennsylvania will continue to offer a joint art major for undergraduates. Who knows how long Penn will pay for two art campuses. Art teaching and learning will still happen, we’re told, for children and adults taking art classes here and there. Nothing fails like failure. PAFA’s very good art faculty is already fleeing hither and yon. Soon, only a husk of a 220-year-old institution will be left.

The rack rate for undergraduate tuition at PAFA is $41,000 a year. For students who are neither loaded nor in privileged categories — DEI types — that’s pricey. During the Covid mass hysteria, when schools closed willy-nilly for many months, art students in many places demanded tuition refunds. Art can’t be taught virtually, as younger students especially said, showing an Aristotelian command of logic. Artists need studios. Teachers and students need to be present. Covid and, earlier, the 2008 financial crisis cast a pall, souring what young people think about careers not in STEM or financial services, or pushing money back and forth. Inauspicious demography looms, too. We’ve been in a baby bust for the last 20 years. The PAFA acceptance rate, according to U.S. News and World Report, is 84 percent. About half the students leave without a degree. Student-loan debt for graduates averages about $22,000.

There’s a very good non-residency MFA program at PAFA geared to older students, some of them part-time artists who’ve organized their studio needs to accommodate a combination of distance learning and summer, in-person, and short classes in Philadelphia. It takes longer for a degree, but it works. Alas, PAFA isn’t interested in degree programs anymore.

PAFA wouldn’t tell me whether or not enrollment had dropped. The place wasn’t zapped, Death Star–style, like the University of the Arts, which seems to have gone bust slowly and then immediately. “At this time,” PAFA’s press consultant told me, “the institution is focused on the future, not the past.” Fair enough. PAFA’s getting out of the school business, more or less. Where does this leave it?

For one thing, it’s left with a president who made $335,000 in 2022, plus $38,000 in nontaxable compensation. Eric Pryor came to PAFA in January 2022 from the Harlem School of the Arts, where he was the director. He’s “skilled at guiding through transitions,” said the press release announcing his appointment. Though PAFA faculty I know tell me they had no idea the school would be gutted, it’s likely the trustees hired Pryor to wield the axe.

With a very truncated school, PAFA doesn’t need a president running an art school and a museum. It needs a museum director. That’s the only intact part of the institution. Now, PAFA doesn’t have a museum director, and its chief curator just left to go to the Toledo Museum of Art. Its remaining curator has a Ph.D. in anthropology and, as far as I can tell, focuses on African-American art. PAFA announced in 2023 that it would reinstall and reinterpret the collection. I dread the abominations that await us. Would that it were a crime to assault art with deadly rhetoric. Intellectually and creatively, PAFA’s unmoored.

PAFA had an unusually overwrought experience during the Black Lives Matter upheaval in 2020. Weeks after the mostly peaceful George Floyd and BLM riots, over a thousand PAFA faculty, students, alumni, and staff as well as local artists signed a petition demanding that PAFA hire more black teachers, probe racist undertones in the collection, diversify the collection, fire David Brigham, PAFA’s longtime president, restructure its board, and endorse BLM’s agenda. Brigham caved, and did so faster than a speeding bullet, declaring “PAFA’s solidarity with the movement and its principles.” Alas, within weeks, he was out, taking a job directing the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Brigham started at PAFA as the museum’s director. During his years as president, running both the art school and the museum, he eased the pathological state of competition and resentment fostered almost entirely by the art school. Though PAFA’s historic foundation, the art school lived in the better-known and glitzier museum’s shadow. As much of a diplomat as he is, Brigham couldn’t navigate waters as irrationally roiled as 2020’s.

PAFA, like every institution that embraced DEI, is a lesser place. On its website, next to the section on mission and values, is its diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging page, now higher education’s bible. Next to that is a link to a 30-page PDF on Title IX and the Women Against Violence Act. What that’s got to do with kindling the spirit of the Muses is left unsaid. It could hardly be inspiring to realize that the place judges talent by quota or race or time needed with stress-relief puppies.

What would Picasso or Delacroix or Ingres have made of constipated priorities like these? Smart, visionary young people want to be provoked and dared.

They don’t want to know about committees of snoops. Good artists are by nature renegades. What PAFA is aiding and abetting isn’t the making of good artists. Pop ramblings about race and injustice make for people good at picketing.

I’m not an investigative reporter but don’t need to channel my inner Scooby Doo to see why PAFA’s trustees want to get out of the school business. In 2020, surly, ignorant, entitled students at PAFA demanded a decisive role in what art the place added to its collection. Given the extent of BLM agitation in 2020, demographics, and the costs of running an art school, the trustees grasped Urtica dioica — no, not some higher principle but the stinging nettle — and here we are.

Layers of Liberty: Philadelphia and the Appalachian Environment is one of two big exhibitions on view at PAFA. It considers mostly the commodification of natural resources in the Pennsylvania Appalachians using art from PAFA’s permanent collection. It’s not a bad show, and I love that it displays permanent-collection art usually living in storage. It’s big, though, occupying immense galleries in the building that was once a car showroom, and repetitive. Without a museum director or a chief curator to say no, the curator, Ali Printz, indulged herself.

Extraction is a dirty word. “Anthracite coal basically built Philadelphia,” Printz told WHYY, the city’s NPR station, in a moment of fake-history smog. If only we’d left Appalachia’s spiritual beauty alone, she waxes. Well, then we’d all be poorer, I wax in return. And “everything that [J. D. Vance has] put forth is vapid,” adds Printz, a West Virginian. She’s an artist, and I like artists. The exhibition doesn’t offer much interpretation, so the whirl of grinding axes doesn’t distract from some real gems like a landscape watercolor by George Benjamin Luks from the late ’20s, a large photograph of a coal pile by Alfred Leslie from 1983, and a Modernist waterfall from 1923 by Hugh Henry Breckenridge. Franz Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre. His slashing black forms started with his childhood memories of strip-mined hills.

How much better would PAFA had looked and felt if these galleries displayed a few of the thousands of delights not currently in Albuquerque? Layers of Liberty is, at its coherent best, a densely arranged one-gallery show. It didn’t need to happen now. It’s plain lazy to keep these things hidden for a screed. I felt the same way about Philadelphia Revealed: Unpacking the Attic, the show occupying the first floor of the Hamilton Building. It’s a history show drawing from a collection of Philadelphia artifacts owned by Drexel University and once part of the now-defunct Philadelphia History Museum.

It’s charming and often bracing. Manacles said to have been worn by John Brown as he walked to meet his maker are on view, as is lighter fare like merchandise sold by Wanamaker’s, the city’s high-brow department store, and the newspaper rack hawking the last edition of the Philadelphia Bulletin, once the evening paper with the biggest circulation in America.

PAFA isn’t brimming with endowment money, so stumbles and down-sizing affect fundraising. I looked at its acquisitions over the last few years. It’s adding lots of DEI junk that might inspire a moment-of-virtue frisson, but no one’s going to want to look at it when that moment’s come and gone. Now that the art school’s been filed, by and large, under Old Business, the museum will need a makeover. I hope the place aims for seriousness and quality.