Modern Renaissance: The Fourteenth Street School and Classical Life Drawing

Kenneth Hayes Miller, Women in the Store, 1937, oil on canvas, 19 x 24 inches

Opening Reception: October 18, 5:30–7:30 pm

In the decades between the World Wars, an influential group of painters who lived near Union Square and were teachers or students at the Art Students League began to redefine realist painting. Their work combined an interest in modern urban subjects, observed on the streets near their studios, with a knowledge of Renaissance art and an attention to the body informed by their experience of drawing from the nude.

Led by League instructor Kenneth Hayes Miller and his students Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Arnold Blanch, the group, which later became known as the Fourteenth Street School, also included social realist painters Raphael Soyer and Moses Soyer. Miller had studied life drawing at the League with French-trained painters Kenyon Cox and Frank Vincent Dumond and continued to emphasize this practice in his own teachings. This exhibition pairs works by Fourteenth Street School artists with selections from the League’s collection of classical life drawings, highlighting the impact of the academic tradition on the development of twentieth-century realism.

Stay connected