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Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Here is another memory from Randy Enos‘ tenure at the Famous Artists School.

The Famous Artists Schools had five correspondence art courses, cartooning, illustrating, painting, writing and photography; they always wanted to do sculpture too but couldn’t figure out how to deal with the student submissions of assignment work.

Each course was laid out the same way. The school had 12 famous practitioners in each field as their “Guiding Faculty” who were the ones that created the texts and assignments that I and the other “instructors” would criticize by means of written, drawn or painted corrections and advice on the lessons.

The Guiding Faculty, of course, didn’t work in our Westport, Connecticut office buildings but they did visit from time to time and give us lectures on their own work and look at some of our student critiques. Some of them who happened to live locally came over to the school frequently like Robert Fawcett (who got friendly with me and would give me tips on my own work). Harold von Schmidt also came to visit quite often to see his friend Al Dorne our fearless leader and principal founder of the schools. A few of our cartoon course Guiding Faculty like Whitney Darrow lived in Westport.

The cartoonist Virgil Partch (VIP) would come from California to visit and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon) and others would come, and when they did, Dorne would take our small group of cartoon instructors and the visitor out to lunch at a very high class restaurant in Westport. I remember going out once with Rube Goldberg and after we had our lunch we all sat there and smoked great long cigars.

One notable visit was from the legendary sports cartoonist Willard Mullin, who decided that he’d like to try a critique of one of the students’ works before we went out to lunch. He sat down at my drawing board and a lucky student got an original Mullin drawing of a baseball pitcher. I watched in awe as the master started with the pitcher’s throwing hand extended forward in the throw and drew a sweeping arm line down to the pitcher leaning into the thrust.

Young Randy Enos (left) watches legendary sports cartoonist Willard Mullin draw.

When the painting course’s Ben Shahn would visit, I would show his slides of paintings to invited guests from the Westport Womens Club. I was chosen to do that because I was the only one in the building who knew Shahn’s work so well that I could navigate, looking at and putting each individual slide into our antique slide projector one at a time (it only held two slides). I did the same thing for the famous Chinese watercolorist Dong Kingman who used to make believe he couldn’t speak English well enough to answer the dumb questions from the audience (more about Dong in another story).

I think the funniest visit was from our superstar Guiding Faculty member … the one and only Norman Rockwell. He visited about once a year but the visit I remember best was when my friend and car-pool buddy, Zoltan raised his hand to praise Mr. Rockwell’s work. Zoltan was the schools’ staff photographer. He shot stuff for the text books mainly; it was pretty pedestrian stuff. Zoltan was a nice, simple soul, not very well versed in the art that surrounded him at the school.

Zoltan stood up and said that his favorite work of Rockwell’s was his annual Santa Claus in the Coke ads. Rockwell answered that he didn’t do the Coke ads. Zoltan’s reply was, “Yes you do … you know those great Santa Clauses… I love them!” Rockwell reiterated that he was not the illustrator that did the Coke Santa Clauses. To which, Zoltan replied, “Yes you do… the Coke ads!” Now, Zoltan was arguing with Rockwell. Finally after a few more back and forths, Zoltan quietly sat down.

I know that Zoltan was never convinced, like so many other Americans, that Rockwell didn’t do Haddon Sundblom’s Santa Clauses.

–Randy Enos

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Famous Artists Schools

The Pushpin Debacle at the Famous Artists Schools

The great self-taught illustrator of the 30’s and 40’s, Albert Dorne, was nationally known and making $100,000 a year at the age of 20. He was a great favorite of mine. In 1947, he went on to create The Famous Artists Schools, the most famous correspondence art school in the world. He enlisted 12 of his friends like Norman Rockwell, Al Parker, Ben Stahl, etc. to become partners in the venture and to write the textbooks and assignments which would be critiqued by instructors like little me. When I went there at the ripe old age of 20, I told Al of my love for his work and the huge file I had on him. This endeared him to me and he was always very fatherly towards me. After I had been there for 8 years, he urged me to go forth and become a free-lance illustrator.“You didn’t grow up to be an instructor at The Famous Artists Schools” he said, “Get your ass in New York and get working!” I was already working a little for Playboy, Harper’s and others but it was just the push I needed to go full time at it.

When I first started at the school in 1956, Al lived and worked in New York. Eventually he came to Westport where the school was located. We got half the mail that came into Westport in those days and had a big mail truck of our own.

He bought a lovely house there and the instructors were sometimes invited over. He had a big Ad Reinhardt painting over his bed. You could eat off the floor of his garage. Like my father, Al had grown up a poor boy and became very fastidious, well groomed and excruciatingly neat and clean when he became rich. He dressed impeccably and was always shaved and perfumed as he strode the halls of his empire. He smoked great long expensive cigars but had a pipe rack on his desk which featured a pipe for each day of the week. I never saw him smoke one of them.

One fatal day he summoned the entire staff of the building to his small office to view a purchase he had made. We crowded in there as best we could with many left to gawk through the door from the outside.

He explained to us that he felt bad about not having a drawing board in his office. He said it probably reflected badly on him when visiting students (we had many from all of the country… and world) would be ushered in to meet him. He also pointed out that he did do a drawing at least once a year for the school magazine… SO… he gestured toward his acquisition which was a beautiful mahogany single post drawing board off to the side of his desk. He beamed with pride as we all gasped in envy. He explained that no one was to touch this glowing jewel of a drawing board. He didn’t want anything put on it, taped to it or stuck into it.

Then… he left for lunch with his secretary Pauline Engler (who, by the way, found out, when she applied for a passport that her actual real name, on her birth certificate, was recorded by her parents as “Baby girl Engler “).

There were plenty of jokers in our midst, mainly in the painting department for some reason. One (or two) of them decided to have a little fun with the boss. They took a push pin and cut the point off of it and then dabbed a dollop of rubber cement on the head and gently placed it smack dab in the middle of the mahogany masterpiece.

Dorne returns from lunch and suddenly a huge bellow is heard through the halls of the building rattling the Robert Fawcett’s almost off the walls. Once again, we are all summoned to his office where we find an enraged, red faced Dorne, his plentiful eyebrows furrowed ferociously.

“WHO DID THIS?” he screamed. With mouths gaped open, we were frozen in silence. “Who did this?” No one said a word. Then, Dorne went to his desk drawers, rummaged around and came up with
a push pin. He said, “If it has one hole in it, it might as well BE FULL OF HOLES!” And with that, he proceeded to stab madly at the beautiful mahogany board to everyone’s horror. The stabbing, of course, jabbed the original pin loose and it fell to the floor. He looked at it in disbelief shouting, “I’ll find out who did this and they’ll pay!”

We left in silence like a funeral procession. No one ever fessed up. The staff was terrified. Dorne never found the culprit. To this day, no one knows who did it.

But … I’ll tell you this … It was either Chip Chadborne or Mike Mitchell … or both. That’s for sure.

–Randy Enos

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