{"id":26424,"date":"2014-09-09T01:18:06","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T07:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=26424"},"modified":"2025-11-09T21:53:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T04:53:48","slug":"blisses-and-black-mountain-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/blisses-and-black-mountain-college\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blisses and Black Mountain College"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A group of faculty members dismissed from Florida\u2019s Rollins College in the 1930s dreamed of a school where, in addition to excellent programs in history, literature and mathematics, students could take classes in dance from the likes of Merce Cunningham, music from John Cage, get lectures in engineering \u00a0from Buckminster Fuller, architecture from Walter Gropius, learn about pottery from the great ceramist Peter Voulkos, study art with Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Josef Albers and weaving and design with Albers\u2019 wife, Anni. They wanted guest lecturers like Albert Einstein and the poet William Carlos Williams.<\/p>\n

Students would each have their own studio, community work to do and woods to stroll in.<\/p>\n

They made their dream a reality in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg would one day enroll.\u00a0Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft + Design<\/em>\u00a0is a comprehensive and comprehensible traveling exhibition about the revolutionary experimental\u00a0 liberal arts college (1933-57) that continues to be influential in education and the visual, performing and literary arts even though it closed 57 years ago.<\/p>\n

This absorbing show includes ceramics, textiles, furniture, sculpture, paintings, printed material and ephemera as well as video clips. It is now at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University through February and has been adapted by curator Katie Lee Koven, director of the Harrison, to include artwork from the NEHMA collection by students and faculty from Black Mountain College. She was assisted in the selection process by museum interns Adriane Dalton and Nick Danielson.
\nKoven\u2019s connection with Black Mountain started when she was in graduate school in London. Her thesis focused on using Bernard Leach, the British potter, \u201cas a vehicle to explore things marginalized in 20th-century Modernism. And I came across Black Mountain College \u2014 while I\u2019m in London. And I\u2019m from South Carolina, so to find out about Black Mountain College [where Leach had taught an important seminar in 1952] when it was just a few hours away was really kind of like, wow this is pretty cool and obviously not well understood or well represented in 20th-century American Modernism history because I didn\u2019t know about it and a lot of people don\u2019t know about it,\u201d she says with a smile.<\/p>\n

Before moving to Utah, Koven had lived in Asheville, N.C., and served on the board for the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center. \u00a0So this exhibit, in its original form, was \u201cto not only bring attention to the influence of Black Mountain College but also the influence it had on the craft and design movement in the United States.\u201d But when she started at the Harrison in January, and learned of the number of artists in the museum collection who were faculty or students at Black Mountain College, Koven says, she began to look at connections: \u00a0\u201cA good very direct example of that is John Neely who is the ceramics professor here at Utah State University. One of his teachers when he was at Alfred University was Robert Turner and Robert Turner built the pot shop at Black Mountain College. And the other connection, of course, is Robert Bliss, having been the [first] Dean of Architecture at the University of Utah and studied at Black Mountain College and helped build the Studies Building there and started learning architecture from Lawrence Kocher while he was at Black Mountain College. Those are just two examples but there are more examples of that national influence and the regional connections that Black Mountain College has to Utah.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bliss was just 17 or 18 when he arrived from his native Seattle to study at the college, at that time located in a large wooden building surrounded by small cabins owned by the YWCA, which took possession back in the summertime. Faculty lived in the cabins and male and female students occupied different floors of the large structure, he recalls.<\/p>\n

There were two courses you had to take at Black Mountain College, Koven says. \u00a0One was a course in the classics, and one was an arts course, a foundation course, with Josef Albers. The latter was Bliss\u2019s first class at the school. \u201cAlbers\u2019 favorite expression was \u2018open eyes\u2019 \u2013 look, look,\u201d he remembers. \u00a0\u201cAnd we would go to junkyards or into the woods and it combined all Albers\u2019 ideas about color so there was a heavy amount of that and he was also teaching drawing and painting.\u201d There are examples of works of fallen leaves from visits to the woods in this exhibit.<\/p>\n

In 1940, the YWCA wanted their buildings back year-round and the school found 600 acres across the valley that included an old summer camp which could be adapted for use by the college. \u201cWalter Gropius and Marcel Breuer designed a facility for the new land and the estimates came in much too high and the community couldn\u2019t afford to do it,\u201c Bliss says. Those plans are on exhibit.\u00a0 Another architect volunteered his design work on some structures that could be done economically and a work-study program was initiated of classes in the morning and building work in the afternoon. \u201cAnd when we moved over to Lake Eden, that\u2019s what I did,\u201d Bliss recalls, pointing to a photograph. \u201cThis is the building I nailed a hundred thousand nails into. It was the only building they were able to get finished before so many of us, me included, left for the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bliss remembers monthly community meetings, where students and faculty discussed finances, the direction the college was going and how to attract more students, because prior to the arrival of Albers, whose presence was good for enrollment, there were not more than 25 or 30 taking courses. Still, in 1949, after he had been at the college for 14 years and was away on a fund-raising trip, the community voted Albers out. It limped along for another seven years or so and folded. Albers became head of the art department at Yale.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a very, very stimulating, energetic education,\u201d Bliss says. \u201cAfter the war I finished up at MIT. It was like going into a factory. And that\u2019s where I met Anna Campbell Bliss.\u201d\u00a0 She had earned a bachelor\u2019s degree from Wellesley College and was working on a master\u2019s in architecture from Harvard University\u2019s Graduate School of Design.\u00a0 She would later study color theory and design with Gyorgy Kepes at MIT and with Josef Albers.
\n\u201cHis roommate was in my class at Harvard,\u201d says Anna. \u201cAnd he invited me for dinner one night. So that\u2019s when I met Bob \u2014 and we went home together.\u201d NOT, says Bob. \u201cWe went back to the drafting room so you could put me to work,\u201d he insists. \u201cAnd I was hooked.\u201d That was 64 years ago.<\/p>\n

The Blisses, who moved to Utah in 1963, have their own exhibit \u2013 just the second time their work ever has been shown together \u2013 in the lobby of the Harrison.\u00a0Relational Forms: Robert Bliss & Anna Campbell Bliss<\/em>\u00a0highlights several furniture pieces designed by Robert Bliss with a number of paintings and prints by his wife. Other work by Robert Bliss is included in the show in the main gallery: one vital piece being \u201cLady Murasaki\u2019s Fan,\u201d (1993) an elegant chair (30 x 37 x 24 inches) replete with black suede cushions. It has 32 teak legs and only one bolt holding it together.
\nHis arresting modern designs are intentionally practical as well as beautiful. A set of three aluminum cube tables (11 x 11 x 11 inches) in the lobby begs to be used as well as looked at. One longs to stretch out on his Deep Cradle Rocker (1991) (1\/4\u201d aluminum & French Bridle Leather 12 x 26 x 84 inches) on a granite base, even though this one resides in the Smithsonian.<\/p>\n

Robert says he is delighted that \u201cAnna enhanced my furniture show with her art.\u201d In fact, it is remarkable how well their pieces work together. Her work makes connections between mathematics, computer science and art \u2014 and is ultimately about color. His is all metal, wood and leather.\u00a0 Yet there is a \u201cmarriage,\u201d if you will, perhaps of minds, a connection that is tangible as you walk through this exhibition.<\/p>\n

The show is hung well, with Bliss\u2019s large and captivating 2010 Element Series (screenprints on handpainted oil on canvas) \u201cWaterwall,\u201d \u201cFirewall,\u201d and \u201cWindwall\u201d high on the staircase and smaller pieces in the lobby itself. Her important 1973 \u201cTriangular Articulation, Series II\u201d Variations A B & C is tucked away into crevices, however, and easy to miss \u2013 look for these. It\u2019s a series that will give you an immediate appreciation of color theory.
\nBliss said she was a \u201clittle bit sick\u201d that she hasn\u2019t been able to get new work done. \u201cBut I put pieces in the show that are of the era of the Bauhaus, things that related.\u201d \u00a0And they do, nicely.<\/p>\n

A newer work, but with the flavor she mentions, is 2002\u2019s superb \u201cTopkapi Palace Study\u201d \u2013 four screenprints on anodized aluminum with \u201ca slightly Oriental feeling, an Islamic feeling,\u201d the artist says.<\/p>\n

Robert Bliss maintains that the only connection Anna Bliss has with Black Mountain College \u201cis through marriage.\u201d But Koven says his wife was included \u201cbecause we have a couple of pieces of Anna\u2019s in our collection and she has taken classes from Josef Albers. \u201c She points out that there are many connections to be made here: \u201cThe Blisses were quite close friends with Josef and Anni Albers and they were also friends with [sculptor] Ruth Asawa whose work is in the same space as their works are being shown. \u00a0But there are a lot of connections that one can make between Anna\u2019s work from a standpoint of her formalistic approach to design, her interdisciplinary interests between computer science, math and art as you find in a lot of works that you see in the Black Mountain College exhibit. . . . And then to see her work juxtaposed beside her husband\u2019s work and his ability to explore material in a very sort of formalist beautiful kind of way with the form following function in a lot of ways but making aesthetic choices like the kind of leather being a saddle leather from France that was specially ordered so that he could get a solid piece of leather for that lounge.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I\u2019m hoping that people make connections between the Blisses\u2019 works and how they have been together for many years \u2014 being now in their early 90s \u2014 and also their relationships to various faculty and students who were at Black Mountain College that they knew throughout their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n