Art School / Art World Confidential

THE TEACHINGS OF HANS HOFFMAN
According to the book 9th Street Women, Hans Hoffman's summer art school in Provincetown was a "harem" and Hoffman a “bull elephant,” who "patted his female students on the derrière" and "fucked everything that moved.”

SEDUCTION 101
Lucian Freud slept with student after student at the Slade School of Art, and many of his young conquests had to co-exist in the same class.

SEX WITH STUDENTS
Thomas Roma taught at lots of art schools and was rumored to pressure his students for sex. He claimed it was always consensual but eventually he had to “retire.” A student film shows Roma drinking and interrogating a student about her sex life as she gets more and more drunk, embarrassed and upset. Finally, she runs behind a hedge. Oblivious faculty members actually wanted to show the film at a reception for prospective students and parents until a female professor clued them in.

HE’S HIRED. SHE’S FIRED
A female art professor on a faculty selection committee at a major East Coast art school expressed concern about a candidate who had been known to sexually harass female students at previous jobs. The candidate, Professor X, was hired anyway and the department chair told him all about her remarks. Eventually students again accused X of sexual harassment. The university did nothing. When the same female faculty member, the only full-time woman, came up for review, X was chosen to be on her all-male review committee. Surprise! She didn’t pass the review and had to find another job. X continued to exact sex from his students for almost 20 years until in 2018 The New York Times ran an article about him and he was forced to “resign.”

FACULTY BROS
After the admissions committee at a major US art school finished its selection of incoming grad students, the committee members retired to a local bar and discussed the “fuckability” of the students they had just admitted.

HOW CHUCK CLOSE TREATS MODELS
Chuck Close invited female Yale students to sit for portraits. When they arrived he told them it was an “audition,” then asked them to undress. Those who refused were given money and abruptly told to leave. Those who stayed endured prying questions about their sex lives while naked. He placed his head inches away from one model’s vagina and said “looks delicious.” When asked about a similar incident, Close said while he did not remember, it sounded possible.
Four More Women Allege Sexual Misconduct by Chuck Close, Hyperallergic

HOW ART SCHOOL MODELS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TREATED
1.  Inform models in advance that they would be expected to undress
2.  Make sure the subject is comfortable posing unclothed
3.  Refrain from commenting on a model’s body
4.  Keep the atmosphere professional, avoid personal questions

THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN

Convicted pedophile Epstein gave $30k to a NY Academy of Art and got to freely wander around student workspaces. Higher ups encouraged students to discount their work for him and to travel to his notorious remote retreats. Epstein promised a studio, professional help and sales to one student but ended up assaulting her and her 15-year-old sister. The school admitted no guilt or responsibility but, after a year of victim blaming and Epstein’s death, Trustees resigned and The New York Academy of Art apologized and gave $30K to victims of sexual assault.

ART ED OR SEX ED?
In 2018, Nicholas Nixon, Professor of Art at Mass College of Art chose to “retire” rather than face charges of creating a hostile environment in his photo classes where he suggested that students take pictures of people they wished to sleep with and even photograph genitalia – including each other’s. He also allegedly asked a class to analyze pictures of his own penis.

VAGINA ENVY
In 2017, Walter Gaudnek, Professor at the University of Central Florida, critiqued a female students’ work saying “You should just paint a vagina on it, it would be much better.” She filed a complaint. He continued teaching until age 90.

QUID PROF QUO
Roy Frumkes, a Professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, told a new student about a former student he took to his apartment for sex. He also told her that if she wanted a recommendation from him she should go there, too. He got fired in 2018 but students had complained about him for 20 years!

SHE WAS 18
On her first day at the Slade School she showed her drawings to Professor Lucien Freud, age 55. He touched her back, invited her for tea, then took her to his studio, caressed her hair and tried to kiss her. She was afraid and skipped his next class. He called her, they met and he kissed her waist in a public park. Next time they met, he pulled her to the ground. She felt hemmed in and wanted to get out. They were interrupted and she broke free. He called her again, took her to his studio and expressed irritation at her “prevarication.” They became lovers.

TEACHERS WHO PET
When she first met her husband, they went out for dinner with his college mentor, someone very important to him. They were walking home and she felt a hand on her ass and thought, oh isn’t that nice, her new boyfriend was grabbing her ass. Then she realized it was his mentor!

HOW SEXUAL HARASSMENT AT YALE CHANGED THE HISTORY OF PHOTO REALISM
In the early 50s young art student Audrey Flack, then a devotee of AbEx, was recruited by legendary Josef Albers to shake up the stodgy figurative art department at Yale. In a meeting with Albers he inched his hand up her leg all the way to her crotch. She jerked away and was knocked over her chair. She never took his famed color class, vowed to have nothing to do with him, continued her Yale studies and went on to become one of the most celebrated photorealist painters.

LEGER: ALL WASHED UP
French painter Fernand Léger taught in many art schools in his lifetime, including Mils College, Yale, the Sorbonne and his own Academie Fernand Léger. He was a visiting artist at the Black Mountain College during WW2 while living in the US. In his sixties at the time, Léger thought it was OK and “sexy" to sketch the young female students while they showered then pinch their behinds as they exited. The women thought he was disgusting. One day they trained the shower nozzles in his direction, soaking him and ruining all his sketches.

GOLDSMITH COLLEGE OF ART TIMELINE OF ABUSE, HARASSMENT AND COVERUP
2015 Female faculty member organizes event about sexual harassment
2016 She resigns to protest college’s refusal to confront harassment of students calling it "a normalized and generalized part of academic culture" The charges: faculty made sexual comments in class, groped students and forced them to have sex
2017 Following an investigation, it’s discovered that over just six years Goldsmith’s College paid more than £200,00 to students impregnated by faculty – and required those students to sign nondisclosure agreements
2018 Goldsmith issues policy about sexual harassment
2021 Is it working? LET US KNOW!

MoMA, GLENN DUBIN AND JEFFREY EPSTEIN
MoMA named a gallery for board member and donor Glenn Dubin. He and his wife hung out with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. One of Epstein’s victims even claimed she was pimped out to Dubin. Dubin denied it, then resigned from his hedge fund. MoMA still kept his name on the gallery.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ABUSE?
Another pal of Jeffrey Epstein's also had a MoMA gallery named for him. Board President Leon Black paid Epstein $200 million for “advice” years after Epstein’s conviction for sex trafficking. Black resigned as head of his hedge fund and also as MoMA Prez but remains a plain old board member – and remains mum on his Epstein connections. A young Russian single mother says Black trapped her for years in an abusive sexual relationship through manipulation, threats, and coercion. Black claims it was consensual and the money he “lent” her was to buy her silence. She says otherwise and recently sued him for defamation.

TATE AND D’OFFAY
Art dealer, collector and donor Anthony d’Offay gave a lot of artwork to Tate, curated a project room there for years, and even had his name inscribed on the building. When a number of women came forward to accuse him of unwanted advances and threats, the museum distanced itself, then quietly reconnected with D’Offay after police reports were inconclusive. In 2020 the museum permanently cut ties with him after he took a selfie with a racist doll and sent it to a Black artist he had abused.

ARTFORHIM
An Artforum magazine employee accused its longtime publisher Knight Landesman of continually harassing her, even after she left her job. The magazine promised to protect her from his behavior but proceeded to trash her in the press. Twenty other women came forward with stories of Landesman harassing them, too. The courts let him off the hook but went after Artforum for retaliating against her.

“In regards to Knight Landesman, it’s not about sex, it’s about power. He feels he has the license to put his hands wherever he chooses. In 2010 I was sitting next to him at a dinner event and he was placing his hand on my thigh, near my crotch, saying how he felt so comfortable with me because of my sexual subject matter” – Judith Bernstein.

REPORT FROM THE FRONT…DESK
Collectors, curators, artists, I could go down the list. They come in the gallery, look around and say “I’m really interested in buying this. Let’s go next door for a drink and talk about art.” They’d use my interest in art to get me in a situation where I understood that they have money and power and I’m just a receptionist and I need the job, making minimum wage, barely.

HERSTORY
Hundreds of women in the US and UK signed a letter in 2017 stating they had been groped, undermined, harassed, infantilized, scorned, threatened and intimidated by people in “positions of power in the art world who control access to resources and opportunities.” They promised to be silent no more.