HISTORICALLY artists have always worked quite successfully in garrets and brothels. Somehow these places seem to enhance the creative experience. Yet there has always been some doubt as to whether an artist could survive in a university, especially a liberal arts university.

Approximately 20 years ago Harvard faced this dilemma. Previously the University had paid scant attention to the creative arts. Harvard's first art history course was given by Charles Eliot Norton in 1874. A few sporadic courses in painting and sculpture had been offered in the Fine Arts department. But it was not until 1954 that the University felt it was important enough to appoint a committee to study the practice of the arts at Harvard.

Its mandate was "that a careful study be made to determine the future course of the arts at Harvard." Reinterpreted it meant that the committee should determine how to fit the creative arts into Harvard's highly academic curriculum.

Yet even today, as Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts celebrates its tenth anniversary, the question is being asked again. This time around, however, it seems to be formulated a little differently. Now the question is, how can what have been the arts at Harvard be made more creative?

In 1954, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, President Pusey appointed a five-member committee which included as its Harvard members John N. Brown '22, a former Overseer, Francis Keppel '38, the dean of the Graduate School of Education, and George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology. The recommendations of what came to be known as the Brown Report were three-fold: a new department of design should be created for concentration in the visual arts, its curriculum should emphasize two and three dimensional design, and an arts center should be built. The content of the curriculum was to become the most controversial of all recommendations.

There are numerous ways to teach art. The typical art school approach stresses techniques, such as the use of oil paint, a charcoal crayon or a lithographic press. Alternatives include allowing students to work in teams with a series of visiting artists on specific projects. Or they can be left completely alone with certain equipment to do as they please.

The Brown Report opted for a fourth approach--instruction in design theory. The committee members recommended that Harvard teach those fundamental principles of design which they felt underlay all art.

From the very start the Brown Committee made it clear that it was not in the least bit interested in training professional artists. The new center was not going to be an arts or craft hall for ceramicists and weavers. It was not going to provide the opportunity for students to work at a variety of hobbies. Rather it would serve to make art conform to Harvard's intellectual standards.

The Brown Committee seized upon an appropriate analogy--the role of the scientist in the University. Just as the experimental laboratory work of the scientist had become academically respectable, so artistic experimentation would become respectable. Art would be rid of its "mental inferiority" because it would be made intellectual. Professors would teach students design theory in a series of controlled experiments in the studio.

The Faculty set up a standing committee, chaired by Jose Luis Sert, dean of the School of Architecture, to implement the recommendations of the Brown Report. The Committee on the Practice of the Visual Arts (CPVA) then took charge of building Carpenter Center and further defining its educational philosophy.

TO A CERTAIN extent there existed external pressures to make art academic through a series of high-structured studio exercises. According to Eduard F. Sekler, Hooker Professor of Visual Art and now director of Carpenter Center, opposition to the idea of studio arts at Harvard was prevalent. In testifying before a Faculty committee on the creation of a new department, Sekler recalls being asked "And what is the discipline of your department?" And even though the building had been constructed and in use for five years, it was not until 1968 that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences agreed to grant this new department of design the status of a concentration.

However, the CPVA itself was very much opposed to the idea of the Harvard student as a bohemian artist creating freely in the studio. They felt something had to be taught. And they agreed with the Brown report that it should teach design principles.

There was the feeling that Carpenter Center's role was to educate all Harvard students on visual matters. Underlying it was the belief that "visual illiteracy" accounted for much of the visual squalor present in the American environment, from its cities to its eating utensils. The task of the new design center was to make Harvard students more visually sensitive while they were still undergraduates. Then during their careers in business, industry, and government, when faced with decisions involving visual judment, they would be properly equipped to make them.

The CPVA decided that the new department would be concerned with "visual studies." In a statement to the Faculty Sekler described visual studies as the "manipulation of forms and media in a spirit of purposeful exploration, sometimes to an expressive end, but not necessarily with an aspiration towards the production of works of art--though not excluding that possibility which might come, on rare occasions, as a crowning reward." Clearly, the future government official would not feel out of place in the new department. Art would never be expected of him, merely the acquisition of skills of visual expression.

The inspiration of the new department was in part derived from the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus had as its core certain basic courses in the principles of design that included experiments in texture, color, and form of paper, and precluded the creation of works of art. One of the department's first Faculty members came from Illinois Institute of Technology, a Bauhaus that had been reconstituted in this country in the '40s. In addition, the CPVA was heavily composed of architects and architectural historians who were knowledgeable in the ways of the Bauhaus and undoubtably found them quite applicable to Harvard's program.