Black Mountain College (1933 - 1957) the experimental spirit

Europes’s Finest Minds

Before its closure in 1957, the tiny college, which had fewer than 1,200 students, grew into a combination of a liberal arts school, summer camp, farm school, pioneering village, refugee camp, and religious retreat. It survived with little money and few facilities. Still, its faculty included some of Europe’s finest minds, many of whom had migrated as refugees to America. In this manner, the college was influential in America in reinterpreting and assimilating European modernist thought.

Influences

Josef Albers, who came in 1933, brought Bauhaus ideas with him. Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg, who were both professors, were to be significant influences.

The college was predominantly connected to two communities in the 1960s: the Black Mountain Poets, the John Cage (1912-92) and Merce Cunningham’s (1919-2009) circle of writers, singers, musicians, and performers.

Sources

Falconer, M. (2001). Black Mountain College. In The Oxford Companion to Western Art. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 Jan. 2021

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