It was time to acknowledge the biggest gap in our New School story today - Parsons School of Design, and the man it was posthumously named after. Frank Alvah Parsons (1866-1930) took over the New York School of Art (originally named after its founder William Merritt Chase), renaming it New York School of Fine and Applied Art as he added path-breaking departments in interior design, costume and advertising. By the 1920s the school was informally known as the Parsons school - a fact acknowledged in catalogs starting in 1928. A dozen years after Parsons passed away, the school was renamed in his honor by his successor (and, it seems, partner) William Odom. What do we know about this man,
endowed by nature with a buoyant disposition and an engaging personality, as an
obituarist wrote, and so
singularly fitted to preach the gospel of beauty to a people hitherto indifferent to the arts?
Our reading was an address Parsons delivered in 1911 at the Annual Convention of the American Federation of the Arts, entitled "
Art in Advertising." It's a more interesting, and stranger, argument than you might expect. Advertising, too, can be art - we must stop supposing art is only pictorial, only pictures, only decorative - and it is art when it achieves both
fitness and
beauty. So far so good. But advertising that is good art is also good advertising, helping accomplish the aims of every advertisement: seizing and holding a viewer's attention, convincing them of the product's merit and inducing in them a desire to acquire it. Fair enough. But how does it do that, and is it really more likely to do that when it is also art? Here the argument gets a little gauzy. Art moves us because the harmonious consistency of an object resonates with an inner harmonious consistency in the viewer, defining a sort of virtuous circle of aesthetic appreciation and consumption. Ideally, aesthetically sensitive citizens would be moved (only) by artistically meritorious advertisements (only) for products themselves aesthetically fine, the acquisition of which would in turn reinforce the citizens' characters and those of all exposed to their tasteful possessions.
for the finest art known to men is the art of right living. To live right one must think right. Let us begin, then, to think in terms of fitness and beauty from the foundation up, then will these qualities appear in our work and the public will grow with us.
How much the civic part is just what you'd say at a national convention I need to find out, and whether the concerns about harmony and fitness are reactionary or potentially progressive. Parsons gave a lot of talks and published a lot of books, as well as running what became a very successful school or art and design. Lots to read!
(Top image, c. 1925, from
New School Archives; this credo is from the start of Parsons'
Principles of Advertising Arrangement, 1912)
It was time to acknowledge the biggest gap in our New School story today - Parsons School of Design, and the man it was posthumously named after. Frank Alvah Parsons (1866-1930) took over the New York School of Art (originally named after its founder William Merritt Chase), renaming it New York School of Fine and Applied Art as he added path-breaking departments in interior design, costume and advertising. By the 1920s the school was informally known as the Parsons school - a fact acknowledged in catalogs starting in 1928. A dozen years after Parsons passed away, the school was renamed in his honor by his successor (and, it seems, partner) William Odom. What do we know about this man, endowed by nature with a buoyant disposition and an engaging personality, as an obituarist wrote, and so singularly fitted to preach the gospel of beauty to a people hitherto indifferent to the arts?
