Birth of the Cool by Lewis MacAdams

Author:Lewis MacAdams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Josef and Anni Albers arriving in New York from Nazi Germany on their way to Black Mountain College, 1933,

In the late 1930s, as Albers’s English improved, he began making a concerted effort to attract young, practicing American artists and innovative thinkers to Black Mountain, organizing a series of summer institutes that combined work camp with an informal academic program aimed at breaking down the barriers between artists and students. By the late 1940s, the summer programs were attracting so many New Yorkers that painter Franz Kline called Black Mountain “Downtown Manhattan.”

The summer institute of 1948 looms large in Black Mountain lore as the season that saw a generation of American artists come into their own. Merce Cunningham taught technique of dance and produced an evening of new pieces. Willem de Kooning designed the sets for Erik Satie’s lyric comedy The Ruse of Medusa, which starred Buckminster Fuller. That summer’s student body included future California arts educator Ruth Asawa, future fluxus artist Ray Johnson, future painter Kenneth Noland, future director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) and Robert Rauschenberg, who’d enrolled because he felt he needed discipline and he’d read that Josef Albers “was the greatest disciplinarian in the United States.” The main project for the summer was the attempted erection of Buckminster Fuller’s first geodesic dome using venetian blinds, which collapsed, leaving Fuller to shrug cheerfully that the freedom to experiment was what college was for.

Cage enthralled the community with a series of after-dinner concerts, playing the then almost completely unknown piano music of Erik Satie through a window for an audience reclining on the lawn in the long summer twilight. In a lecture before the first recital, however, Cage scandalized his mostly Eurocentric listeners by stating “immediately and unequivocally that Beethoven was in error” in defining harmony as the basic structural element of composition; Beethoven’s influence was “deadening to the art of music.” Cage played his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano while Cunningham danced. The students and faculty were so delighted with the performance that they loaded Cage and Cunningham’s car with gifts of art and food when the pair departed.

When Cage and Cunningham returned to Black Mountain College during the summer of 1952, much had changed. The buildings were falling apart, the grounds were overgrown and cluttered with trash. The teachers weren’t much older than the students, and everybody was living on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Though Cage’s benefactor, Paul Williams, was doing what he could to help out financially, Black Mountain was so strapped that it had to sell off pieces of the property to pay taxes before finally shutting its doors permanently in 1956.

In photographs taken during the 1930s and ’40s, Black Mountain students look like kibbutzniks, busting sod behind a horse-drawn plow, or earnestly pounding nails. Black Mountain students of that era were marked by their sense of optimism, their belief in their ability to bring about social change, and their faith in the goodness of the earth and its bounty. By the early 1950s, however, students

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