4p, one sided pages, 4 horizontal folds, staple in top left corner. Mimeograph on matte off white paper. Walter Gropius gave three talks on architecture on Aug 1, 8, and 10. Introduction on the Institute Faculty from page 1-3. mentions that Japan surrendered last week
COMMUNITY BULLETIN BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
First August bulletin 1945 college year 12
EVENTS:
August 1- Dr. Walter Gropius gave his first informal talk in a series of three on architecture.
Dr. Karl With gave his last lecture on ”The Inherent Abstract”.
August 4- in his only concert of the summer Roland Hayes sang a group of lieder, a group of African-American religious folk songs and arias by Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Monteverdi.
August 5- the first student concert of the summer was performed by Lorna Pearson, Shirley Medcalf, Elaine Schecter and Margaret Purcell.
August 5- the first student concert of the summer was performed by Lorna Pearson, Shirley Medcalf, Elaine Bonaparte, Maria Kant, Anna Schauffler, Sam Schecter and Margaret Purcell.
August 7- The Musical Offering by Johann Sebastian Bach was performed after a brief discussion and introduction of the Musical Offering by Mr Erwin Bodky.
August 8- Dr Walter Gropius gave the second in his series of three informal talks on architecture.
August 10- Dr Walter Gropius gave the last of his informal talks.
August 11- Emanuel Zetlin, violinist; Eva Heinitz, cellist; Erwin Bodky, pianist; Edward Lowinsky, pianist presented works by Beethoven and Dvorak.
August 14- A concert was performed of the works of Pergoleso, Caldara, Pasquini, Handel, Bach and Heinichen.
August 15- The College Community celebrated V-J Day by suspending classes and having a picnic supper with beer in the evening.
ON THE INSTITUTE FACULTY:
The visit of Roland Hayes and his family came to an end last week. Their stay ere had lasted more than two weeks and during that time the Hayes family gained the affection of the whole community. Roland Hayes is a most unusual artist- unusual in his youthful enthusiasm, his combination of kindness and directness, and last but not least in his singing. Here is an artist who sings only what he believes in and who therefore is able to convince his audience.
His only concert, given on August 4th, attracted a record crowd of visitors from the neighborhood of the college. The dining hall had to be used to accommodate our regular community members while the guests filled the hall itself to capacity. Mr Hayes’ accompanist, Reginald Boardman, had come from New Hampshire for two days to accompany the artist for the concert. The unity of feeling and timing between those two artists was perfect, and Mr Hayes’ singing aroused tremendous enthusiasm. He had to give encores after each group of songs. A few days after the concert, faculty, students and Mr Hayes met for a memorable session in the lobby of the North Lodge. Mr Hayes answered questions of students and told of his artistic experiences. It was clear to everyone that the success of Roland Hayes the artist is due to Roland Hayes the person, and his defiance of all obstacles, his high ideals and his unconquerable faith. With his remarkable narrative talent, Roland Hayes kept his audience spellbound. We know that the visit of the Hayes family is the beginning of a long friendship
First August bulletin 1945 page 2
ON THE INSTITUTE FACULTY: (continued)
It is best to let great men speak themselves:
“Although I know my face to be black,” I wrote “I am persuaded that the spirit’s choice of my body to inhabit has some specific purpose....I am not pleased when I am told that my being black does not ‘matter’. It does matter, it very much matters. I am black for some high purpose in the mind of the spirit. I must work that purpose out.”
Last Sunday Frances Snow Drinker left BMC, where she had participated at flutist in the Music Institute. We have heard and admired her in performances of Mozart’s Fugue Quartet, of Bach’s Sonata for Flute solo and flute and harpsichord. But outstanding in our memory is her performance in the Musical Offering by J.S. Bach.
We are fortunate to have Lyonel Feininger with us this summer for eight weeks of discussion and criticism of the work of students in painting.
Lyonel Feininger was born in 1871 in New York. He says of his childhood: “from my earliest moment, I lived in an atmosphere of music. Music has always been the first influence in my life, Bach before all others. Without music, I cannot see myself as a painter. Although I could never attempt to express the one in the other, as many have attempted. Polyphony, paired with delight in mechanical construction, went far to shape my creative bias.”
To American influences and scenes Feininger attributes impressions which were to influence his painting. He said: “the earliest impressions I have of machinery were the trains, locomotives, half-terrifying and wholly fascinating. I used to stand on one of the footbridges over the Fourth Avenue tracks of the New York Central. At the age of five years I drew from memory, dozens of trains..the black locomotives of the New York Central with ‘diamond’ smokestacks, and the locos of the new York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad with elegant straight smokestacks painted, like the driving wheels, a bright vermillion red, and oh, the brass bands about the boiler, and the fancy steam domes of polished brass...”
“In the late ‘70s I saw the Second Avenue ‘L’ built.. When I was between five and seven my parents lived in a house in East 53rd Street very near the river, and I watched the paddle steamboats pass and knew them all by name...And in the ‘80s I remember the Hudson, teaming with vessels, Schechners, sloops, not to speak of the magnificent side-wheelers plying up and down the river.”
Of New England he remembers “the snow, the sleighing, the cold...a favorite stove with Gothic doors showing the flames like a living thing”. Then back in New York, where “I was taken to the Metropolitan Museum, and of all the paintings I saw, the only ones to make a deep impression on me were from a very early period; they represented Gothic architecture with figures, bright and beautiful in color and clearly silhouetted. For many years I carried the recollection of these pictures with me. It seems to me they influenced my development as a painter.”
From “Angel Mo’ and her son Roland Hayes” (p.171) by MacKinley Helm.
First August bulletin 1945 page 3
ON THE INSTITUTE FACULTY: (continued)
Before he left America at the age of 16, Feininger absorbed in New York and New England many of the essential elements of his art—his love of precise centrapuntal construction in music, an understanding of mechanical forms and dynamics whether of locomotives or model yachts; and a love of the sea, of sailing ships, and those more modern craft of the day which used both sail and steam—the ships which sail in his paintings almost to the exclusion of more recent designs. During his long career in Germany, he always thought of himself as American.
As early as 1919, he had been the first painter to join the staff of the Bauhaus, Weimar, Germany, which, under the leadership of Walter Gropius, was to become a world important school of design.
Of his return to this country he said: “Coming back after so many years of absence has been a strange experience. I went away as a musician; I came back a strange experience. I went away as a musician; I came back as a painter. People I had known before were most of them dead. Of the conditions and surroundings I had been familiar with, nothing was left. I had to readjust myself in every respect, and sometimes felt my identity had shriveled with me. But I was met with kindness and good will all around. That helped a great deal, yet it took me some time to put forth new sheets. In Germany I was ‘the American’; her in my active land I was sometimes classified and looked upon as a German painter—some have seen relationship to Chinese art in my work—but what is the artist, if not connected with the universe?”
Alvin Lustig left us some days ago. He conducted an intensive three weeks’ course in Graphic Design dealing with “basic principles of visual presentation as well as with format, typography, printing and engraving processes and their effect on design.” The results of this course were shown in the Faculty Room.
Mr Lustig was visual research director of Look Magazine and is now designing and editing a yearbook “Visual Communication” to appear this coming November. He is a designer of posters, exhibits and furniture for some of this country’s largest manufacturers of airplanes. Mr Lustig is largely self-taught. He has been connected with the National Broadcasting Company and has worked with the War Department, Conde Mast Publications, The Screen Actor’s Guild and others.
COMMUNITY WORK:
The farm has been being improved during the midsummer lull that comes after the crops have been worked for the last time and before the harvest. A tile drain has been laid from the milk house to the curved field and the barn read widened, regraded, ditched and spread with cinders. Shoots have been out from around the stumps in the new pasture and lime spread. The old Hog Fence has been cleared out of the Barn Pasture and weeds cut. With the increased activities of the small pigs the pens have been fortified and separated and now they continue to grow in proper relation to one another.
The College road from the New Bridge to the Farm has been scraped and ditched and all the road surfaces dragged. Ross Penley almost lost the Hough Leader in the headlong dive into the dump, but after uprooting is now consolidated and burned.
First August bulletin 1945 page 4
COMMUNITY WORK: (continued)
The doors and windows on the drama shed are replaced. A box has been built for the storing of lights, and equipment behind the stage curtain in the dining hall. Just who does do the dishes is constantly a wonder. Somehow Howard Rondthaler usually seems to be there.
Last week everyone waited for the final news of the Japanese surrender, and when it came the immediate significance was too tremendous to be grasped. A really wonderful concert Tuesday night, a free day Wednesday and a gay community party Wednesday evening gave us time to be thoughtful and to celebrate too. Somehow now we work harder with renewed direction.
-Molly Gregory
