Painting by numbers

IN "MONA LISA SMILE," Katherine Watson, the free-spirited, protofeminist art history professor played by Julia Roberts, struggles mightily against the conservative attitudes she encounters at Wellesley College. The year is 1953, and the students are coiffed, pearled, and patrician -- exaggeratedly so, according to Wellesley grads of the period who have stepped forward since the movie's release two weeks ago.

Roberts is excoriated in the school paper for trying to persuade her students that they can aspire to a career as well as a husband. She is also branded "subversive" for teaching modern art to her young charges. We're invited to wink knowingly at this veiled reference to McCarthyism, and at the hidebound faculty who express skepticism at Roberts's claim that Picasso will be as important to the 20th century as Michelangelo was to the Renaissance. In a visit to New York to view a Jackson Pollock drip painting in a Greenwich Village loft, she asks her skeptical students merely to "consider" the painting.

The movie's take on the period's taste may be as overstated as its depiction of young women hell-bent on getting their "Mrs." degree. In fact, abstract expressionism, American's homegrown brand of modern art, was widely appreciated in the 1950s, especially in elite circles like these. By 1953 Pollock had had numerous shows throughout the country; in 1951 he was featured in Life Magazine along with photos illustrating his drip-painting process. But in its depiction of Roberts's freewheeling teaching style, the movie accurately reflects an emerging approach to art history teaching that, like the modern art she shows her students, emphasized personal expression -- though perhaps not as much for women as for men.

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At Wellesley, notes `53 art history graduate and painting conservator Susanne Pletman Sack, the teaching of modern art was "quite up-to-date," mainly due to the presence of John McAndrew, who had been an architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art for five years before joining the Wellesley faculty in 1945. Even if it presented itself as rebellious, American abstract expressionism -- along with atonal music, space-age product design, and free jazz -- was not only accepted but "encouraged as a symbol of American freedom," as a 2000-01 exhibition titled "Cold War Modern" at Wellesley's own Davis Museum pointed out.

But Roberts's teaching methods actually were unusual, if not quite revolutionary, for the discipline of art history in the `50s. Frustrated by the traditional survey lecture, she switches to an informal, Socratic discussion style that emphasizes independent thinking -- with no right or wrong answers, only questions. Roberts shows her students Chaim Soutine's "Carcass of Beef" and asks them, "Is it any good?" She then shows them a painting (not telling them it's one she made as a child), informs them that it has been praised (in fact, by her mother), and asks them if that makes it good. She throws out the textbook, declaring that the new subject of the class is "What is art, what makes it good or bad, and who decides?"

This wasn't the way art history was taught at most places in the `50s, including Wellesley. "Art history in the `50s," Sack reports, "was straight lecture in a darkened room, no questions or student participation (except in seminars) and always using slide comparisons."

Art history was not the only discipline that emphasized the lecture, but in the 1950s art was a newly significant part of the general education philosophy, and changes in teaching style, that had emerged at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and elsewhere. At Chicago, the visual arts made up a third of the cornerstone Humanities ("Hum") I course, in which art was taught increasingly in small-group discussions with the aim of developing critical skills and the capacity to make personal judgments.

In 1957 a young art history professor named Joshua Taylor -- who had himself tangled with more traditionalist scholars over their preference for a heavy dose of survey courses -- published "Learning to Look," a book based on Hum I that continues to be one of the most popular texts in introductory courses. The participatory, sometimes confrontational pedagogy of Julia Roberts's character is quite close to the teaching style espoused by Taylor, which involved looking at art outside the classroom as well as within it, and helping students find an individual voice. Unless students learned to consider their own responses, Taylor wrote, history and theory could "effectively smother the all-important spark of vitality that separates the meaningful study of art from a routine academic exercise."

A distinctive aspect of the study of art history at Wellesley in the 1950s was an introduction to techniques and materials. As Sack recalls, "For each art history course there was a required lab and we created small sculptures, architectural elements, [and] paintings in the techniques of the period we were studying."

Curiously, in "Mona Lisa Smile," hands-on work makes an appearance only in the form of paint-by-numbers sets -- the very symbol today of rote uniformity and kitsch. Roberts uses a paint-by-numbers set of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" as an object lesson about the commodification of originality. Van Gogh died in poverty, but now, thanks to American mass-produced consumerism, she declares ironically, "everyone can be Van Gogh."

It was probably not possible to buy a paint-by-numbers set of "Sunflowers" in 1953. But the paint-by-numbers fad was a very real phenomenon in the early `50s, as art historian Karal Ann Marling describes in her book "As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s." Paint-by-numbers sets, initially produced by Picture Craft, started appearing in quantity in 1951. By 1953 they had sold to the tune of $10 million. President Eisenhower, himself an avid Sunday painter, even installed an exhibition of paint-by-numbers works by Nelson Rockefeller, Ethel Merman, J. Edgar Hoover (who contributed a Swiss village scene), and others outside the Cabinet Room.

A 1950s ad reproduced by Marling lists subjects that include "dogs, horses, birds, landscapes and circus scenes" -- not exactly the brilliant, nervous strokes of Van Gogh. But ironically, it may have been the rise of abstract painting that sent the message that everyone could be an artist -- for better or for worse. Abstraction, as it appeared in popular culture, did not require skill, but rather force of personality and individual expression. As the ad puts it, "PICTURE CRAFT's `Mystery' canvas guides your hand like a Master Painter, yet the painting is your own original work -- signed with your name, expressing YOU!" This seems to encapsulate the paradox of America in the 1950s: widespread conformity and mass-produced consumerism, inflected by an emphasis on freedom and individualism.

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In the end, Roberts leaves Wellesley because she cannot conform to the conditions of her new contract, which requires a standard syllabus and pre-approval of all her lesson plans. One changed student reflects on Mona Lisa's smile: "She's smiling . . . but is she happy?" -- a commentary on the duty of the upper-class wife to keep up appearances no matter what.

As a final gift, each student creates her own painting of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers," based on the paint-by-numbers set. Except for one very abstract painting we get only a brief glimpse of, they don't go too far outside the lines. Radical self-expression was mainly the province of men. As Mrs. Dale Carnegie wrote in Better Homes and Gardens in 1955, "Let's face it, girls. That wonderful guy in your house -- and mine -- is building your house, your happiness, and the opportunities that will come to your children . . .. There is simply no room for split-level thinking -- or doing."

Julia Roberts's protofeminist -- or is it paleofeminist? -- character might have imagined something more for women because she came of age during World War II, when there was a sense of ever-increasing opportunities for women. But tellingly, all the heroes of modern art she shows the students are male. After the raised expectations of earlier decades, opportunities for women artists in the `50s were at their 20th-century nadir. The ambivalence of the film's ending, and the ambiguity of Mona Lisa's smile, are appropriate to a period in which, for women, individual choice existed within narrow parameters -- painting by the numbers, but doing it one's own way.

Rebecca Zorach teaches art history at the University of Chicago.