Art Schools in Trouble: Pennsylvania Academy Cuts Degree Programs

This past weekend I was in Philadelphia to see the very good Mary Cassatt exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ll write about it in a week or so. The zenith of my visit, though, was Lynnewood Hall, the Gilded Age manse — no, best to call it a palace — where the Widener family lived. At 120,000 square feet, this hunk of rough diamond owned, as of last year, by a not-for-profit, is to be restored as a house museum fit to be called America’s Versailles. I’ll write about it in a few weeks once I parse the many undiscovered stories Lynnewood’s walls present, some epic, some esoteric.

Enough teasing. Today I’ll write about art schools, a topic I haven’t tackled over the years. Very sad indeed is the news that the art school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia announced that it’s shuttering its degree programs next year. The University of the Arts, also in Philadelphia, announced the same week that it was closing, and closing the next day! Its president has already slipped the surly bonds of Earth and flown by night. I don’t know much about the University of the Arts except that Camille Paglia, always worth reading, taught there. I’d love to have been one of her students for a semester or two.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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This past weekend I was in Philadelphia to see the very good Mary Cassatt exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ll write about it in a week or so. The zenith of my visit, though, was Lynnewood Hall, the Gilded Age manse — no, best to call it a palace — where the Widener family lived. At 120,000 square feet, this hunk of rough diamond owned, as of last year, by a not-for-profit, is to be restored as a house museum fit to be called America’s Versailles. I’ll write about it in a few weeks once I parse the many undiscovered stories Lynnewood’s walls present, some epic, some esoteric.

Enough teasing. Today I’ll write about art schools, a topic I haven’t tackled over the years. Very sad indeed is the news that the art school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia announced that it’s shuttering its degree programs next year. The University of the Arts, also in Philadelphia, announced the same week that it was closing, and closing the next day! Its president has already slipped the surly bonds of Earth and flown by night. I don’t know much about the University of the Arts except that Camille Paglia, always worth reading, taught there. I’d love to have been one of her students for a semester or two.