The Ateliers of R. H. Ives Gammell and Richard F. Lack

Tradition and the Training of Painters in the Second Half of the 20th Century

By Stephen Gjertson

“Art students are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. . . . They wish to find some shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means than those which the indispensable rules of art have prescribed. They must therefore be told again and again that labour is the only price of solid fame, and that whatever their force of genius may be, there is no easy method of becoming a good painter.” ~ Sir Joshua Reynolds

“It is austere and profound studies that make great painters and sculptors. One lives all one’s life on this foundation, and if it is lacking, one will only be mediocre.” 
~ Jean-Léon Gérôme

Foundations are important. Everything that is made or thought is only as sound or as valid as its foundation. If a foundation is weak or wrong, whatever is built upon it will ultimately collapse. This is as true of the visual arts as it is of architecture and science. The foundation of the visual artist is their training and, throughout Western history, the foundation of the artist’s training has been the representation of the visible world. In general, an artist is as good or as poor as their training. It is a rare artist who rises above poor training to create work of true distinction.

An Artist’s Education

Apprenticeship

Artists of the past were trained in one of three basic ways. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance a student was apprenticed at a young age (usually about 10 years old) to a recognized master. The rudiments of the craft were learned by working in the bottega, or workshop, under the direct guidance of the master. Since there was little distinction between “artists” and “artisans,” these workshops were often engaged in many different activities of an aesthetic nature, from fashioning jewelry and picture frames to painting frescoes and altar pieces. In time, a gifted apprentice would acquire the knowledge and skill needed to become a journeyman and would assist the master. The ultimate goal was to create work independently. When the work displayed a thorough mastery of the craft according to the standards of the profession, the journeyman was recognized as a master and was qualified to open a studio and accept commissions.

The Academy 

During the 15th Century, in addition to the workshops, another way of training painters began to develop — the Academy. The aim of the first academies was to free artists from the control of powerful trade guilds, to supplement their training with a broader curriculum and to increase their social prestige. By the 16th Century, the conception of an artist began to shift from that of a mere craftsman to that of a learned and profound intellectual, capable of contributing to the thought of the time. In keeping with this conception, the education of an artist was expanded to include intellectual learning as well as the skills of the trade.

The Atelier/Workshop

Fortunately, the workshop — on-the-job-training under a single master — continued concurrently with the academies. These studios (in French, ateliers; in Italian, bottegas) represented a modification of the older apprenticeship system. The master opened his studio to a qualified group of young students who paid a modest fee. The students were taught the elements of the painter’s craft under the guidance of the master. The characteristics of each studio varied according to the judgment of the master, the nature of his work, the desires of his patrons, and the aptitude and ability of individual students. Rubens’ studio was a large, complex workshop where students learned the skills of their profession and assisted him with his vast array of commissions. Rembrandt rented a warehouse where his students could work quietly from a model in small spaces of their own.

In 19th-century Paris, the ateliers of individual artists worked together with the École des Beaux-Arts. In the ateliers, students drew and painted the human figure and studied composition. These exercises were often supplemented by copying or by additional life drawing at other studios. Emphasis was placed on studies that would prepare students to enter the École and compete for the coveted Prix-de-Rome. French students who were awarded this prize traveled to the French Academy in Rome for another four or five years of study. The École taught only figure drawing, from antique casts and live models.

Painting instruction was taught in the individual ateliers. In 1863, the École greatly expanded its curriculum, essentially offering a complete course of higher education in the arts. It contained individual ateliers devoted to drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Courses were offered in anatomy and perspective. Later, lectures in related subjects were added: history, archaeology, aesthetics and art history, general history, ornamental design, decorative art, and literature. During the latter half of the 19th Century, the École des Beaux-Arts was the art academy par excellence. It was the culmination of nearly four centuries of gradually shifting academic art education.

Patronage

During this time, art had been in the service of three interrelated patrons: religion, government, and the wealthy. Artists were employed by these patrons. It was the patrons who, to a great degree, determined the subject matter of an artist’s work. The artists then designed and executed it to the best of their ability according to the established standards of the time and their personal artistic gifts. The iconography of the arts developed in response to the dictates and desires of the patrons within the existing cultural milieu. Thus, the arts portray the teaching and traditions of religion; the allegories, history, exploits, and great personages of government; and the pursuits, passions, pleasures, and portraits of the wealthy. These traditional and universal themes required an heroic depiction of the human form. Learning to represent the human figure was, therefore, the primary goal within the workshops, academies, and ateliers. Depending upon the artist and the age, this representation was done from nature, convention, or a combination of the two.

The Disintegration of the Western Tradition

By the end of the 19th Century, complex philosophic systems emerged that would bring about the demise of these traditions. The philosophic foundation upon which Western civilization had been built was being slowly challenged and undermined, and traditional Western civilization began to disintegrate. Art, the mirror of civilization, began to disintegrate with it. Modern philosophy was essentially anti-Western and anti-traditional. By the end of the 19th Century this ideology had begun to take over the intellectual world. In the visual arts, the inevitable consequence was the rejection of artistic tradition, particularly the traditions embodied by the academies since they represented tradition in an official and codified form. The subject matter supported by the academy, its artists, and its patrons, was rejected. The arduous artistic training and methods that had enabled artists to convincingly portray such subjects was also rejected. The training of an artist, therefore, began to deteriorate. The knowledge and skills that had been necessary to the production of academic works of art were transmitted with decreasing conviction and expertise. This degeneration took place slowly during the early part of this century. It quickly accelerated after Europe was decimated by the First World War. By the end of the Second World War the process had nearly destroyed the efficacy of artistic training. Over five centuries of accumulated studio tradition and practice were almost entirely lost.

What Gammell had observed was the waning of the great academic tradition. The finest of the academic painters had died; only a few lived into the 1920s. Those whom Gammell met had been their pupils. He recalled in his autobiography that, “all these French painters, then in their forties, represented a stage in a world-wide decline in the art of painting, a phase whose counterpart I observed in Boston a decade or two later. The severe training implicit in the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Léon Bonnat, Jean-Paul Laurens, William Bouguereau, and their contemporaries had not been given to their pupils, who were turning out greatly weakened versions of what their seniors had done far better. . . . As teachers they merely dispensed minor corrections to large classes of students who naturally benefited little from that sort of instruction.”

The Influence of French Art in America

Nevertheless, the teaching of the older academic painters, in diluted form, continued to exert an influence in this country through their American pupils, who had been trained in the schools of Paris during the 1880s and 90s. When they returned, many of them began to teach. Unfortunately, most of them failed to view Western art education from a broad historical perspective. They did not recognize the superiority of the atelier/workshop system as a way of teaching painters. Trained in Paris after the reforms of 1863, these painters began teaching in or forming schools that were patterned after their own training at the École des Beaux-Arts or the Académie Julian. Other painters, who had been trained in similar institutions in Munich, returned to do the same thing. Classes were large and students were, for the most part, modestly gifted. Subjects were taught by different instructors whose teaching and methods were often contradictory. Gifted students could not be given the attention they deserved.

The Degeneration of American Art Education

It was to this situation that Gammell returned from France. For a short time he resumed his studies at the Boston Museum School. He relates the frustration he felt, recalling that “the standards established by the great 19th Century painters were still very generally understood and accepted. The impressionist concept of painting, which tended to reduce the art to a matter of rendering bits from nature, predominated but had not, as yet, acquired undisputed sway over the minds of art students. Many of us were eager to learn the principles of mural decoration, hoped to paint large figure compositions and wanted to find how imagined scenes could be convincingly projected to canvas. Our teachers, at any rate the best of them, had studied under excellent painters who had mastered these skills and we heard them refer to the older men with reverence and admiration. They made us understand that a picture would sooner or later be junked unless its execution was of a high order. Yet in their schools and art classes these teachers of ours told us very little about procedures and nothing at all about picture-making. . . . a number of us felt we were not being taught what we wanted to learn. My own dissatisfaction led me to Paxton’s door.”

At that time, Gammell often cast longing glances in the direction of a group of mural painters in New York, who were creating work closer to what he had in mind than what the Boston artists were painting. However, he recognized the limitations imposed on their art by their sometimes grotesque stylizations and realized that they knew less about the total art of painting than the Boston artists Joseph DeCamp or William Paxton. He therefore decided to get “the most thorough training possible along impressionist lines, impressionism being the only type of painting flourishing at the moment, and then, using that as a basis, to construct a system of my own suitable to my particular purpose.” To that end, Gammell rented a studio and began to paint, receiving regular critiques from William Paxton.

Throughout the 1930s, students had accepted as a matter of course the incomplete teaching dispensed in art classes throughout the nation. According to Gammell, “Inadequately trained painters were everywhere imparting their fragmentary knowledge under conditions even more crippling than the ones responsible for the limitations of their own professional equipment. By 1946 the failure of art school instruction to equip competent painters had become apparent to perceptive observers and there was a growing demand for more personally directed teaching. . . . My own isolated attempts to remedy this situation had attracted very few pupils before the war and those few boys, although not devoid of talent, had all been seriously hampered in their development by inauspicious backgrounds. At that time better advantaged youths were inevitably attracted to well publicized art schools featuring reputed names on their rosters. My failure to reach any talented young men in this category was all the more striking in that my venture then had the backing of the outstanding artist which Paxton still was. For Paxton continued to be very active until his sudden death in 1941, and it manifests the artistic climate of the time that only one boy came to him for counsel during the last 14 years of his career.”

Richard F. Lack (1928-2009)

Ives Gammell was eventually able to put his theory of training painters into practice. After the publication of Twilight of Painting, aspiring young artists began to knock on his door. “From these,” he states, “a small nucleus of promising students evolved under my direction.” One of those promising students was Richard Frederick Lack. Lack was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 26, 1928, the only child of a dentist living in South Minneapolis. He had decided to become an artist at an early age. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). Like Gammell, Lack’s heart was set on learning to paint in the tradition of the Old Masters. He soon learned that the instructors in Minneapolis were unable to help him. He read a recently published book called Twilight of Painting. It perfectly explained his situation, but the young man never thought of the author as a potential teacher.

In 1950, Lack quit art school and moved to New York. He began copying paintings every morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He spent afternoons going to galleries and studios in search of a teacher. Lack visited the Art Students League looking for Frank Vincent DuMond, but DuMond was old and had retired from teaching. On every hand his search proved fruitless. Discouraged with the New York art scene, Lack decided to stay and copy at the Metropolitan until the first of the year. He would then return to Minneapolis, give up art, and study chemistry at the University of Minnesota. Fortunately for him and several generations of American painters, the direction of his life was in other hands.

A Propitious Encounter

On one particularly dreary morning, Lack awoke tired and sick. He felt like staying in bed rather than going to work at the museum. He had almost decided to forgo copying that morning when his practical Scandinavian conscience reminded him that hard work and perseverance were, at this point, all that he had going for him. Lack dragged himself out of bed and headed for the Metropolitan Museum. Later, while working, a young man named Robert Cumming, impressed by Lack’s copy, stopped to talk with him. He was in New York for one day to purchase supplies for a mural decoration that he was working on. He lived in Boston and was studying with an artist named R. H. Ives Gammell. Gammell, he said, was running a small studio based on the European atelier system of training painters and was accepting students as apprentices. They went out for dinner and Cumming encouraged Lack to come down and see Gammell. Excited by the prospect of at last finding a teacher, Lack made plans to leave New York for Boston. In a few days he received a package from Cumming. It contained a copy of Twilight of Painting.

Gammell worked in a studio in Boston’s Fenway Studio Building. Robert Cumming, Gammell’s only student at the time, worked in a studio two doors down the hall. On December 31, 1949, Lack arrived in Boston. He met with Ives Gammell the following day. Gammell was very impressed with the drawings of horses that Lack had done at the police stables in New York. After viewing Lack’s work, he took him to the Museum of Fine Arts and asked him questions about certain paintings and artists. He liked to put potential students to the test. The answers he received told him a great deal about the aspiration and perception of the student. When Gammell had ascertained that Lack was perceptive as well as talented and serious, he accepted him into his atelier. Gammell’s atelier was rather loosely structured. Lack spent his mornings doing simple tasks on the cartoons for the mural that Gammell was doing for the Industrial National Bank in Providence. He began to draw casts in the afternoons. After his work on the cartoon was completed, mornings were spent drawing the figure in a large studio situated between that of Gammell and Cumming. Lack was quick to recognize that Gammell was the only living source able to teach him the practical knowledge and skills of picture making that came from the European academic and American impressionist traditions. He was determined to get as much of this information from Gammell as possible.

After studying for several months, Lack returned to Minneapolis with the intention of going back to Boston for a longer period. While home, he was drafted. The Korean War interrupted Lack’s studies for two years, but he kept up a vigorous correspondence with Gammell. In 1953 he returned to Boston. True to his convictions, Gammell kept his atelier small. Cumming was still there when Lack returned, as well as a new student, Robert Hunter, who drew with them. During his third year they were joined by Robert Cormier, who shared a studio with Lack. At any given time, Gammell never had more than three or four students.

In 1964, Gammell built a complex of summer studios in Williamstown. He had his own wing adjacent to three bedrooms and two large studios for the students. Students would spend summers there, working in a routine like that of the former students in Provincetown. They painted head studies in the mornings and landscapes in the afternoon. Gammell usually painted one small, two-hour landscape sketch as a demonstration. The students would then be free to work on their own. It was Gammell’s habit to take a walk in the afternoon, and students who wanted him to look at their landscapes were careful to choose a motif near his usual route.

Unfortunately, Gammell’s effectiveness as a teacher was sometimes hindered by what Lack characterized as “big psychological problems.” Gammell was unable to detach himself from his students and had an unhealthy desire to control and manipulate them. He often sought to make students feel dependent upon him and would sometimes, in front of their fellows, unjustly berate them for mistakes in their work. These unhealthy aberrations were not as manifest during the earlier years of his teaching. When they did surface, Lack learned to disregard the machinations of Gammell’s skewed thinking. However, Gammell had immense knowledge and insight about art, and Lack listened carefully to his mentor when he discussed painters and painting.

Beautiful Mysteries – Three Ways Artists View the World

Gammell opened Lack’s eyes to the practical elements of picture making. Before meeting Gammell, Lack had viewed paintings as “beautiful mysteries.” Gammell provided the key that unlocked the secrets of those mysteries: the knowledge of how paintings were made. The key was not in esoteric rituals designed to unleash the creative power within, but in the practical thinking and procedures that an artist actually uses to make pictures. Gammell separated visual artists into three distinct, but interrelated categories: the impressionist, the decorator, and the imaginative painter. The impressionist, such as Velásquez, is inspired by the look of the visible world and wants to record it on canvas; the decorator, such as Tiepolo, sees spaces and desires to fill them with beautiful patterns; the imaginative painter, such as Raphael, is inspired by literature, history, and poetry, and wishes to create work based on literary or symbolic themes. As individual students began to manifest their particular sensibilities, Gammell steered them in one of these three directions.

Lack Begins to Teach

Shortly after he returned to Minnesota from Boston, Lack began teaching at Art Instruction Schools, a correspondence school that taught art through the mail. At first, he worked there full time, rewriting and illustrating much of their curriculum. As his career developed, he was able to gradually reduce his teaching load to two days a week. Although Lack took his responsibilities at Art Instruction seriously, he knew that teaching art by mail was impossible. Nevertheless, at this time he had no plans to accept students for private study.

In 1967 Lack wrote On the Training of Painters, a brief essay on the teaching of art based on the material developed at greater length by Gammell in Twilight of Painting. His first opportunity to teach more formally and effectively presented itself when a young man whose portrait he had painted approached him for instruction. Thomas Mairs became his first true student. For two years Mairs came to Lack’s studio several times a week. Later, Lack rented a space which was shared by three women’s art groups. There, Mairs drew plaster casts in a corner and Lack came by to look at his work two times a week. Lack began to think about teaching in a more structured and systematic way.

Atelier Lack Inc.

In 1969 several of Lack’s colleagues asked him to teach life drawing. He rented space in a new location and began a weekly evening class. Several young men (including a former pupil of Gammell’s) had approached him for more comprehensive instruction and they, along with Thomas Mairs became Lack’s first full-time students. Basing his teaching methods on principles that he had learned from Gammell, Lack opened Atelier Lack. It was incorporated as a small, non-profit studio-school in 1971. During the first years it was supported by three grants from the Elizabeth T. Greenshields Memorial Foundation of Montreal, Canada. In addition to the full-time program, Atelier Lack offered evening classes in painting and drawing for both professionals and avocationalists, taught at first by Lack and later expanded with classes taught by advanced or former students.

Although Gammell was an exceptionally original and gifted artist, and a conscientious craftsman, his work exhibited few of the painterly qualities that characterize the work of artists who have a real feeling for the expressive qualities of oil paint. Lack, on the other hand, was a consummate painter. His use of paint was luscious and varied. He relished the act of painting — the many ways paint could be applied and manipulated — and he used sumptuous and sophisticated methods. 

Atelier Lack was first located above an adult bookstore on the corner of Nicollet and Lake Street in Minneapolis. It later relocated to a large upper floor studio on Hennepin Avenue. After a fire destroyed that building, Lack rented and renovated a large second floor studio across the street. The school slowly gained a reputation as a small island of traditional art training surrounded by a sea of hostile opinion. Despite opposition, it attracted many students from the United States, Canada, and Europe and eventually became a model for other schools throughout the United States and in Italy.

The Core of the Curriculum – Life Drawing and Painting

Like artistic training of the past, the core of Atelier Lack’s curriculum was the life class. Students drew or painted the figure for one-half of the school day, five days a week, for the duration of their training. They did small figure studies in pencil and larger ones in charcoal. Three or four days was the average time spent on each pencil drawing, and two or three months was the average for charcoal studies. Unlike Gammell’s atelier, there was a generous mix of the two. When Gammell’s students had progressed to painting studies of the figure, they began doing so in full impressionist color. Lack recognized the necessity of a transition between drawing in black and white and painting in color. He introduced students to figure painting through studies in black and white oil. Once this was mastered, they progressed to studies in full color. Painted studies took several months to complete. Advanced students who were interested in imaginative painting were encouraged to extend their stay at the school and paint compositions in the bistre and Venetian methods. In 1988, Lack began teaching a small group of advanced students imaginative painting procedures and methods at Atelier LeSueur, a school in Excelsior, Minnesota that was operated by former student, Annette LeSueur.

The Culmination of the Student Year

At the end of May, Atelier Lack held a yearly student exhibition. This was a festive, well-attended affair that taught the students to prepare for, organize, advertise, design, and hang a successful exhibition. Seeing their year’s work on the wall gave the students an opportunity to gauge and evaluate their progress in relation to one another. Everyone was usually overwhelmed by the copious body of respectable student work. This yearly exhibition has become a continuing tradition in the schools spawned by Atelier Lack.

The Tradition Continues to Grow

In the mid 1980s, one of Lack’s students suggested starting a small periodical written by professional artists to educate and inform the public about traditional realism. Lack had long recognized the need for such a publication. In the spring of 1985, Atelier Lack began publishing the Classical Realism Quarterly. Lack had chosen the term “Classical Realism” for a traveling exhibition in 1982, to differentiate artwork within his tradition from the many kinds of realism in vogue at the time. He contributed numerous essays to the Quarterly including “The Venetian Method” and “The Bistre Method”, both drawn from his studies of these techniques. At the urging of Don Koestner, he began using a landscape palette based on that of the French and American impressionists. After further research and experimentation, he modified this palette and summed up his experience in an article entitled “The Outdoor Palette.” In 1988, Lack was one of the founders of The American Society of Classical Realism, a professional organization devoted to the preservation and promotion of traditional realism. The Classical Realism Quarterly was put under the banner of the ASCR and, through the effort and good will of many individuals, developed into the widely read, semi-annual Classical Realism Journal.

Lack continued to administer and teach at Atelier Lack until health concerns forced him to retire in 1992. At that time, two former students assumed teaching responsibilities. They changed the name of the school to The Atelier but continued its teaching tradition. Other students have opened ateliers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois, New York, and Italy. Ives Gammell died in Boston on March 27, 1981. Several of his former students teach in ateliers on the East Coast.

The Strength of an Artistic Tradition

The strength of an artistic tradition lies in its ability to impart the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary to produce fine work without becoming dogmatic and dictating exactly what that work should be. A vital tradition provides and upholds a healthy standard of artistic and technical excellence while allowing and encouraging individual creativity and experimentation. Good training is impossible to achieve adequately through written instruction. It is a hands-on process, communicated to the pupil by the master through exercise and example. The training of Ives Gammell and Richard Lack did this. Most would agree, however, that Lack was better able to impart this knowledge and skill in a healthy manner. The teaching of Gammell and Lack was an amalgamation of the principles of visual impressionism, as taught by the Boston impressionists, with academic cast and figure drawing and painting, as taught by the French academic painters. Their pupils continue to teach this dual tradition.

The Extent of the Gammell/Lack Influence

During his career, Ives Gammell had approximately 22-25 serious students and many others who stayed for short periods. Most of the serious students have continued to work and pursue careers as professional painters. From the time that Richard Lack incorporated Atelier Lack in 1971 until his retirement in 1992, he had 96 full-time students. Of that number, 70 completed their training. The diversity of styles and methods in the work of artists trained by Gammell and Lack is ample testimony that such training enhances, rather than hinders, artistic creativity. It is too early to assess the lasting importance of Ives Gammell and Richard Lack in the history of American representational art in the second half of the 20th Century. However, many familiar with their lives and work are assured that, as artists and educators, Gammell and Lack will have a significant place in the history of American art. Their writing, influence, and teaching has made them the fathers of the “Atelier Movement” that has grown exponentially during the last several decades.

During the tyrannical reign of Modernism, when undistorted representational fine art was considered anathema, the art and teaching of Ives Gammell and Richard Lack provided a living link to the great traditions of Western art that had almost disappeared. Through them the fundamental principles and skills of the language of representational painting were imparted — a language that has passed from master to pupil since the Renaissance. During a time when beauty and technical skill were considered passé, Gammell and Lack firmly believed that these elements were the foundation upon which all great art is built. Their teaching has enabled many younger artists to paint pictures with a refinement and skill that would have otherwise been impossible.

The legacy of Ives Gammell and Richard Lack will ultimately be seen in their own art, the art of their pupils, and the art of future generations of artists trained in their tradition. The culture of the last half of our century has been greatly enriched by the imagination, beauty, and skill of works created by these artists and their pupils. In this respect, the contribution of Ives Gammell and Richard Lack has already been considerable. In the visual arts, as elsewhere, many thinking people are recognizing the disastrous effects of the nihilism of our age and are searching for more fundamental and sensible sets of standards. Should this continue, I believe that the importance of Ives Gammell and Richard Lack in the history of American art in the last century will become increasingly apparent, and their contribution within the great tradition of representational painting will be greatly appreciated and highly esteemed.

Stephen Gjertson wrote this article in 1998 for the magazine Art Ideas, but it was never published. He later used much of this information in Richard F. Lack: An American Master, which was published in 2001.