Publication: A Princeton Companion
Creative Arts Program, The, precursor of three later programs in Creative Writing, Theatre and Dance, and Visual Arts, was first organized in 1939 by a faculty committee under the leadership of Dean Christian Gauss.
The original program was supported by a five-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation that made possible the enrichment of opportunities for undergraduates with particular aptitude and interest in music, painting, sculpture, and writing. For student composers of music, regular courses in harmony and composition were supplemented by weekly meetings with Professor Roger Sessions. Students interested in drawing and painting worked with James E. Davis '23 and Alden Wicks '37. Classes in sculpture were conducted by Joseph Brown, the boxing coach, in the cellar of Dean Gauss's residence, the Joseph Henry House. Students with talent in writing worked with Allen Tate, poet and critic, who came to Princeton as first resident Fellow in Creative Writing.
Under Dean Gauss's watchful eye, the program survived the Second World War in modified form and began to blossom again soon afterward. Other committee chairmen who guided the development of the program during the next two decades were English Professors Donald A. Stauffer, Carlos Baker, R. P. Blackmur, and Edmund Keeley; Architecture Professor Francis A. Comstock; Music Professor Edward T. Cone; French Professor E.B.O. Borgerhoff; and Philosophy Professor Arthur Szathmary.
Allen Tate's successors as Visiting Lecturers in Creative Writing have been well-known poets, critics, and novelists, among them R. P. Blackmur, John Berryman, Joseph N. Frank, Delmore Schwartz, Richard Eberhart, Leslie A. Fiedler, Sean O'Faolin, Philip Roth, Elizabeth Bowen, and Theodore R. Weiss. A number of Visiting Lecturers became permanent members of the faculty. Tate's immediate successor, Richard P. Blackmur, stayed on as professor of English. Joseph N. Frank, who served in the fifties, later returned as Professor of Comparative Literature, and in the sixties Theodore R. Weiss was given continuing appointment as Professor of English and Creative Arts. Several Visiting Lecturers were alumni of the program: William M. Meredith '40, Louis O. Coxe '40, Bink Noll '47, George P. Garrett '52, Jos� Donoso '51, and Galway Kinnell '48. Another Princeton graduate who taught creative writing in later years was John McPhee '53, who led a workshop in the literature of fact.
Successors to James E. Davis and Alden M. Wicks as Resident Critic in Painting included Hereward L. Cooke, Jr., William C. Seitz, Stephen Greene, Hyde Solomon, Joseph J. Stefanelli, Esteban Vicente, George Ortman, and Thomas B. Cornell.
In 1966 the program was given a home in the Nassau Street School, now called 185 Nassau, which had just been acquired by the University. Joseph Brown fell heir to the school's old gymnasium for his sculpture classes, and there was space enough for additional sculpture studios and five painting studios. In its new home the program grew rapidly. Enrollment in courses in creative writing, musical composition, and painting doubled. A playwriting workshop, conducted by William McCleery, playwright and editor of the quarterly University, was added to the offerings in creative writing, and extracurricular woodcarving under Economics Professor William Baumol supplemented the regular courses in sculpture.
In the early seventies, the rapid growth of student interest in the creative arts led to further expansion of the original program, and by 1975 there were three separate programs -- Creative Writing, Theatre and Dance, and Visual Arts.
CREATIVE WRITING
Throughout this period of change, the mainstays in Creative Writing have been Edmund Keeley '48, who became director of this program in 1971 after guiding the original Creative Arts Program through its previous five years, and Theodore Weiss, who had been associated with the original program since 1967. Keeley, a novelist and translator, has received the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been nominated for the National Book Award in translation. Weiss, a poet and critic, received the Brandeis Award in Poetry and is editor, with his wife, of the Quarterly Review of Literature.
THEATRE AND DANCE
A number of the workshops in acting, directing, and playwriting are taught by members of the professional repertory company of McCarter Theatre, while courses in modern dance have the benefit of the experience and skill of a professional dancer and choreographer, Ze'eva Cohen. The director of the program since it assumed separate status in 1975 has been Daniel Seltzer '54, who came to Princeton in 1970 from his position as director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center. An example of the program's balance of the academic with the professional was provided by the director himself in 1976 when he received a Theatre World award and a Tony nomination for his performance in a Broadway play -- an accomplishment he managed while on leave from his regular duties as a professor in the Department of English.
VISUAL ARTS
The Visual Arts Program has developed a broad range of offerings in many fields -- drawing, painting, sculpture, film history and criticism, photography, printmaking, typography, graphic design, and ceramics. One of the program's best known Visiting Lecturers was film director Marcel Ophuls, whose widely acclaimed documentary The Memory of Justice was made, in part, during his stay at the University. Sculpture was still the province of Joe Brown (until his retirement in 1977) along with James Seawright, a maker of modern kinetic sculptures and director of the program since 1975. Previous directors were architect Michael Graves, 1971-1973, and art historian Rosalind Krauss, 1974-1975.
The primary aims of the three programs have remained essentially the same as those stated by the faculty committee for the original Creative Arts Program -- ``to allow the talented undergraduate to work in the creative arts under professional supervision while pursuing a regular liberal arts course of study, as well as to offer all interested undergraduates an opportunity to develop their creative faculties in connection with the general program of humanistic education.''
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).