"Through art," believes rangy athletic Bartlett Hayes, Jr., 62, "the student learns to adapt and meet the unexpected. The quarterback learns this on the football field; the student can learn it in the gallery." As an art teacher at Phillips Academy, Andover, since 1933, and head of the prep school's Addison Gallery of American Art since 1940, Bart Hayes has taught two generations of Andover boys how to adapt, and in the process set nationwide precedents in art instruction and appreciation. Says Metropolitan Museum Director Thomas P. F. Hoving, who attended Andover's archrival Exeter: "Bart Hayes is the best secondary school art teacher in the U.S."
Hayes assigns Andover's eleventh-graders stints in photography, painting and construction, uses the gallery's collection—rich in Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Ryder and Bellows—for instruction, and turns the students loose in Andover's four-year-old Arts and Communications Center. He spices his classroom endeavors with as many as 30 shows a year, most of them "teaching exhibits," ranging from didactic displays on industrial design to such far-out spectaculars as last spring's "Feelies Show." In the latter, students were first plunged into a coal-black room, forced to grope their way along a handrail that turned from wood to fur to aluminum to sandpaper, while the floor underfoot changed from hardwood to rubbery sponge, in order, as Hayes puts it, to make them "aware" that they are "all nerves."
From Pots to Pop. Andover boys seem to love Bart Hayes's unorthodox approach. One hundred and fifty a year sign up for the course, and 20% of the seniors major in art. Several have made it a lifetime calling, either as museum directors, artists (Painters Cleve Gray and George Tooker), or designers (Expo 67's U.S. Pavilion Display Designer Ivan Chermayeff). But Hayes, the perpetual inquirer, still finds himself wondering about the average boy, "how much has rubbed off on him permanently, how has he reacted over the years."
To get at an answer, Andover is staging an extra-special teaching exhibit, consisting of 395 items from 174 donors. The show is a glorious potpourri ranging from ancient Iranian pots to pop art, and includes a sample of artists from Zurbarán and Veronese to Picasso and Pollock. What the items have in common is their owners: they are all Andover graduates. Last week the collectors collected themselves together at Andover to congratulate Hayes.
Marbles & Stuffed Terrapin. "What this exhibit shows," explains Hayes, "is that there are many tastes, none any better or worse than the other. This is the difference between science and art. Old science is no longer useful, but art of one age is just as good as that of another." In arranging the show, he tried "to pounce on any contrasts or similarities." Baroque Italian cupids by Guido Reni hang beside Isamu Noguchi's stainless-steel Man in Space. A gemlike 15th century English marble Pietà contributed by Seward Eric (P.A. '10), is set off by a terra-cotta Nigerian 20th century oba's (a ruler's) head, contributed by Whitney P. Foster (P.A. '60).