“If you want to talk about my beginnings it would have to be in 1952 when I went to Penn State” -Warren Rohrer, 1989
Warren Rohrer’s experience at Penn State was key to his becoming an artist. Working as a high school teacher, he initially enrolled in Penn State’s summer school in 1952 to pursue a master’s degree in education. Rohrer was drawn to the art education program by its founding director, Viktor Lowenfeld, whose landmark book, Creative and Mental Growth, cast children’s primal activity of scribbling as, in Rohrer’s words, “a kinetic . . . attempt to get involved in the social sense of this person getting involved with the world. So that was interesting to me.”
Rohrer’s interest in how mark making involves children in the world around them presaged his own entrance into a new world of art. He recalled his first summer at Penn State as “really when I first had access of the idea of thinking like, and being, a painter,” crediting his teacher Hobson Pittman: “he would constantly be making references to artists that he saw in the student’s work and say, ‘Go look at this person. Notice how your work is like this in this respect.’” At the end of Rohrer’s second summer of study at Penn State in 1953, Pittman invited the Director of the Department of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh to review the students’ work. Washburn encouraged Rohrer to think of himself in the legacy of the nineteenth-century British Romanticist Samuel Palmer, whose mystical landscapes were, in the 1950s, being rediscovered as a forerunner of Surrealism. In 1955 Washburn invited Rohrer to exhibit one of his landscapes from the summers in State College at that year’s “Carnegie International,” a longstanding and prestigious exhibition of contemporary art. Rohrer said of Penn State, “that’s where I started becoming more and more familiar with artists of the present and also the past…. there was always this encouragement to find to what degree you connected to the larger world of art.”
The “world of art” expanded Rohrer’s vision both aesthetically and culturally. By the 1950s, Pittman had for twenty years been running a summer art program on the Penn State campus that, Rohrer recalled, “had developed somewhat like the Woodstock [New York] art colony. A lot of people came back year after year to paint.” This summer art community included many unmarried eccentrics, both women and men, including Pittman himself, his deputy Dean Stambaugh, and the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, artist Josephine Paul, whose paintings of dresses and quilts impressed Rohrer. The memoirs of Abbott Gleason, who spent three years in this summer program while a college student at Harvard, describe it as “my first experience of gay culture,” explaining: “Public discussions of gay sex were natural, not rare. I learned what camp humor was, something that scarcely existed in the straight fifties world that I usually inhabited.” Gleason recalled that he “developed some skill at fending off advances without feeling excruciatingly embarrassed for myself or for someone else. Some of my homophobia dissipated.”
Rohrer studied in State College for four summers, 1952 to 1955, sometimes bringing his family, sometimes renting rooms with Stambaugh and others. His own memories of the social life in this summer colony were that at night students and teachers would gather around a campfire:
they would tell these unbelievable continuous stories, and there would always be someone who would direct the stories toward Mae West and whatever the diamond was in her navel. This was Hobson Pittman’s favorite. Everyone knew that he had to have someone get to this point.
Rohrer’s anecdote describes a party game, popular in queer circles since performer Mae West’s 1927 obscenity trial, at which a testifying policeman, challenged to swear he had actually seen her navel, answered, “No, but I saw something in her middle that moved from east to west.” Rohrer concluded his recollection of this episode, “This kind of craziness and fantasy was so outside my experience up to this time.”
Rohrer returned to the summer school in State College in 1959, replacing Stambaugh as Pittman’s deputy, responsible for much of the teaching. By this time, Rohrer was experimenting with small abstractions rendered with thick dabs of paint applied with a palette knife. Again Pittman expanded Rohrer’s horizons by linking this technique to the recent abstract paintings of the French modernist Nicolas de Staël. But by this time, Rohrer wanted to go “back to the brush” and more recognizable landscape images. “I went looking for the landscape that I…was familiar with, and that was the landscape of fields and trees,” Rohrer later recalled. “What the summer at Penn State, at State College, was about was rediscovering the farm landscape.” He recalled, “I’d get up before sunrise to get the sun coming up across the wheat fields. So I had paintings like Suns of Buffalo Run, and there would be a couple suns in the sky which would be located two different places in the same painting.”
Rohrer did not complete the master’s degree in art education that he initially came to Penn State to pursue. His proposal to write his thesis as an autobiographical inquiry into “what it meant to be a painter and to what degree your own roots and background may have bearing on what this dilemma is” was turned down. But this was the question that animated his identity as an artist, and it was that identity he discovered at Penn State and explored in the fields around State College.
Text written by Christopher Reed.
All quotations of Warren Rohrer on this page are from an oral history interview with Warren Rohrer conducted by Marina Pacini, March 9, 1989 – June 1, 1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Other quotations are from Abbott Gleason’s memoir A Liberal Education (Tidepool Press, 2010), 127-28. The anecdote concerning Mae West is recounted in her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (Prentice Hall, 1959), 98.