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Emphasizing Beauty as Well as Duty
Folds was raised in Pennsylvania and Illinois. He first became passionate about art during a trip to Europe while he was a student at Yale. "I became infatuated with Van Eyck and Vermeer," says Folds, "but my real hero was Piero della Francesca. I was knocked out by his murals." He began sketching seriously and enrolled in an art history survey, but he had no formal training in art until his senior year.
Folds majored in English, and as a freshman he was already writing features for the Yale Daily News. When an editor discovered Tom drawing on the wall of the News office, he invited him to contribute illustrations as well. By the end of the year, Folds was supplying drawings and cartoons not only to the News but to Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post and Life. He finally took a painting class during his senior year, and the following fall he entered the Yale Art School. He studied traditional academic styles and media, but to the chagrin of some of his teachers, he split his affections between the "primitives" and the "moderns," between Piero and Cézanne. He had become an artist.
Folds' role as an art teacher at Exeter began surreptitiously. When he arrived in 1934, he was required to teach a full load of English courses, but he met a group of students every Thursday afternoon for an hour's discussion "on the lives and works of great masters." By spring, he was offering daily lessons in drawing in a new studio in the Academy Building; directing students in the design of sets for the Dramatic Association; lecturing on art to classes of English, classics and history; and leading field trips on Wednesdays and Saturdays for students to draw from nature.
The positive response among students, faculty and administrators to his informal instruction enabled Folds to offer a course in the "History and Appreciation of the Fine Arts" in the fall of 1935. Fine Arts 1 was a "preliminary survey of the forms and principles underlying the arts of all civilizations, with emphasis on the main movements, the masters and the works of each period." It was supplemented in 1936 by Fine Arts 2, offering "training in drawing, painting or modeling to all boys, regardless of their previous experience." Thirty-six students signed up for the new class, and Folds moved out of the English department to teach art full time. Fine Arts 3, added in 1937, offered "advanced instruction to the more talented students who have completed a year of Fine Arts 2." The new arts curriculum was complete, and the classes were so popular that he had to turn students away.
Folds was fond of making students compare works of wildly different styles: cave paintings and German Expressionists, for example, or Cézanne and Poussin. He recalls, "I wanted students to see that the paintings are different looking, but are essentially the same thing. Each reflects the life of its time and the way the artist sees things at that time. All I can get students to do is try to see all these connections."
True to the principles of the new Harkness curriculum, Folds left the direction of study to the individual student. He believed in establishing a firm foundation in the principles of good design and then letting his students explore different media and directions that they found interesting.
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ART AT THE ACADEMY TODAY STEVE LEWIS:
Lewis was about his students' age when he picked up his first camera. Growing up in eastern Oregon, he was, he recalls, always a visually oriented kid, influenced equally by the state's high desert landscapes and by the flashy images on the family television. Photography was a natural extension of that interest, and once a friend taught him how to use the darkroom, Lewis jumped in with both feet. "Whenever I wanted to learn something," he says with a laugh, "I would just do it a hundred times until I figured it out." He went on to earn his BFA from Oregon State (1978) and his MFA from RISD (1982). A member of the PEA faculty since 1983 and a past (1990-96) and present chair of the art department, Lewis describes his pupils as "a superb group to work with. They're creative, and they're disciplined-I never have to get after anyone to do the work." Lewis finds his students' commitment doubly impressive given the prevailing impression, right or wrong, that college admissions officers take an "A" in physics a lot more seriously than an "A" in photography. "Our students don't take art because it's easy," Lewis says with some passion. "They take it because they want the opportunity to create something. I'm sure of that." Besides, if you're looking for easy, you've come to the wrong place. "We expect students to put a high quality of energy into their assignments," says Lewis, and to push beyond the superficial. In a typical assignment, students return again and again to the same subject matter. Instead of just "grabbing" a single, lucky shot, students have the opportunity to "revisit and revise their work, and to learn what they can do to make it unique." Lewis takes the same approach to his own work: After pursuing a successful (but less-than-satisfying) second career as a commercial photographer for publications like Fortune, Entertainment Weekly and Boston Magazine, Lewis now devotes himself to an ongoing series entitled Desert Road Trip, an exploration of the desert landscapes and the manmade, neon-lit intrusions of the American West that so captivated him as a boy. - by Beth Brosnan
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Instructor Sam Heath studies a front-page illustration that Folds drew for the Yale Daily News as an undergraduate; Folds also sold his cartoons to such publications as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. 