The expressions "artistic education" or "artistic training" here signify all the processes involved in the education and training of artists. Historically, they refer to the European models of art and fine arts schools, artist workshops, and the mentor/student or master/disciple relationship. Today they are more aligned with higher education, either in a university setting or otherwise. They are distinct from "art teaching" or "art education", which designate the practice of teaching art (in the primary and secondary schools within education systems)—with a strong emphasis on drawing—for exposure and general education rather than professional practice. The concept of "art" obviously includes various disciplines. Music, architecture, theater, and decorative arts, however, involve pedagogical processes, learning establishments and aesthetic issues quite different from those of the fine arts/visual arts. Consequently, only fine arts/visual arts will be considered here.

Schematically, the transatlantic traffic of artistic education traces a rather standard and unsurprising map. Europe is a model that spreads out, both in the colonial and independence eras, towards the Americas and Africa, though with varied time frames. Africa was not integrated into the transatlantic currents of artistic education until the interwar period. Various agents—missionaries, institutional directors, artists—came from the Old Continent and developed detailed systems of artistic education that replaced traditional and less institutionalized forms. In return, over this whole period, large waves of students went to the European centers of artistic education such as Rome, Paris, London and Vienna. With the 19th century came similar though smaller movements of art students and teachers between Africa and the Americas, gradually increasing over time.

The Spread of European Models

The first wave of exchange in artistic education moved from Europe toward the American colonies, and took place within the larger framework of transference of aesthetic sensibility from European power centers toward the territories they dominated. Missionaries, who needed artists to decorate religious buildings overseas, sent for artists from Europe, but also developed artistic education systems on site. These systems were imported from the large European cities, and either overlaid or completely replaced traditional ways of transmitting artistic knowledge and techniques. The workshop model was especially widespread, and consisted of an artist-owner and apprentices, sometimes with an actual corporate structure that included contractual relationships. While indigenous people were sometimes excluded from these guilds, this wasn't always the case: it was in a guild, in Bolivia, that the indigenous sculptor Francisco Tito Yupanqui (1550-1616) was educated. This is also the case in Paraguay, where indigenous apprentices continued to follow the teaching of the Jesuit master artists even after the Jesuits were expelled from the country in 1767. Sometimes, as in Mexico, indigenous former apprentices subsequently opened their own workshops and took on apprentices, following the same European model. In Venezuela, young Creoles and Afro-Americans benefitted from this workshop system, which was also found in Cuba, Guatemala, Ecuador, Nicaragua...

This workshop model, however, quickly met competition from another European system: teaching featuring a master/student rather than an employer/apprentice relationship, either as part of a general educational program, or within specific art schools. The first courses of this type appeared in the 16th century—for example at the Colegio San Juan in Quito—but it is in the 18th and beginning of the 19th century that this model was developed. In this period, regional art schools proliferated in Peru, two monastic schools were founded in Ecuador, and Antonio Landaeta founded one in Venezuela at the end of the 18th century.

The art school model quickly leads to another key element of the European system of art education: the academy. In this matter, the geography of exchanges is determined by how this system was established in Europe. While Italy was the first to found academies, the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in 1648 in Paris, and renamed Académie des Beaux-Arts after the Revolution, was the point of reference on the other side of the Atlantic, much more so than the Royal Academy of Arts created belatedly in London in 1768, and itself inspired by the continental models. In most of the Latin American states an Escuela (nacional) de Bellas Artes was created on the model of the École (nationale) des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and French artists were brought in to create or direct these establishments using the classical French academy pedagogical methods. The most well-known case of this was the "French Mission," which arrived in Rio de Janeiro in March, 1816. This group of French artists exiled to Brazil was put into the service of the king. One of them, Jean-Baptiste Debret, became the director of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, founded in 1826. He was succeeded in that position by another Frenchman, Félix-Émile Taunay. In southern Haiti, the country's President Alexandre Pétion, in power from 1807 to 1818, sent to Bordeaux for the painter Gilbert Barincou, who established a school in Port-au-Prince. In Cuba, it was Jean-Baptiste Vermay, a student of David, who was the first director of the first school of Fine Arts in Havana, created in 1818. In Ecuador, the French painter Ernest Charton was the director and only professor at the Liceo de Pintura Miguel de Santiago, created in 1849. In Chile, from 1859 to 1871, the sculptor Auguste François directed the sculpture department (created in 1854) of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. When it wasn't French artists, it was artists educated in Paris that were given these positions. Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre was trained in Europe by French masters before directing the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes of Rio de Janeiro starting in 1854. This is also true of Alberto Urdaneta, (one of the fathers of Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de Bogotà founded in 1866), Pelegrin Clavé (director of the San Carlos Academy in Mexico), and Arturo López Rodezno (first director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes of Honduras in Tegucigalpa in 1940). Besides the men involved, the classic French academy principles were also dominant in a number of these institutions, like in the Bolivian Academy in San Pedro de Moxos, created in 1790, where the teaching of drawing is based on the principles of Charles Lebrun and his Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions. Another academic French art text was also widely distributed in America: Histoire d'un dessinateur. Comment on apprend à dessiner, by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

The principles taught—the dominant principles of French academism in the 18th and 19th centuries—are relatively simple. The basis of instruction was the mastery of drawing technique for all students, regardless of their future specialty—be it painting, sculpture or architecture. Each day students were trained in reproducing historical masterpieces or drawing live models. In learning drawing, mastery of shape is essential, with contour drawing, anatomy, and perspective to follow. Because it expresses passion, color is rejected in drawing, which is a product of reason. Otherwise, learning to paint or sculpt is not a goal of the lessons—practice is done outside the school or academy, in personal artist workshops (there is no workshops in the Paris École des Beaux-Arts until 1863). In addition to technical training, young artists received a more theoretical education, aimed at giving them a general knowledge of history and art history. This historicist approach correlates with ideas of reproduction and imitation: a good artist is inspired by masterpieces from the past. Museums were developed to furnish models: collections of paintings and statues, or, in the absence of originals, reproductions in the form of engravings (for paintings) and galleries of plaster castings (for sculptures). Some museums are created in connection with an academy, to give support for student apprenticeships. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts opened a school and museum at the same time. In Ottawa, the Royal Academy of Arts and the National Gallery of Canada are founded at the same time, in 1880. These museums immediately become full-fledged places of art instruction within the academic system, on the same level as schools.

While these founding principles of the French model were widespread across the Atlantic by the end of the 18th century, the impact of the English academic system in America was weakened by its relatively late arrival. The Thirteen Colonies declared their independence in 1776, less than ten years after the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts (1768). Moreover, the liberalism which permeated North American societies prevented the founding of a Louis XIV-style centralized model of artistic education—the same liberal ideal having contributed to delaying the creation in England of a system equivalent to that of France. Similarly hindered was the transfer of the specificities of the English school of painting, more oriented towards landscape and portraiture than towards the historical and mythological scenes dominating Parisian academicism. Artistic education was mostly achieved via self-teaching, individual lessons with masters, or travel to Europe. Some academies were created, through individual efforts, but it is not until the last decades of the 19th century that a true system of higher education in art is established.

Benjamin West is the incarnation of the atypical nature of the structure of the North American system. He was educated as a painter under John Valentine Haidt, a Moravian preacher, before leaving to study in Italy and make a career in London. The first American painter to gain international renown, he was one of the leaders in the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts, which he directed from 1792 to 1802. He also played a role in the founding of the British Academy, later to become the National Gallery. In London, he taught North American artists who, on returning to the United States, went on to found or direct establishments inspired by the London academy: Charles Willson Peale created the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1805) in Philadelphia; from 1817 to 1835 John Trumbull directed the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York (created in 1802); and also in New York, in 1825, Samuel Morse was one of the founders of the National Academy of Design, which he directed until 1845. The issue of English influence has fostered some debate. The Columbanium Academy, founded in 1794, disappeared after just a few months, because of a conflict among its founders; some wished to reproduce the Royal Academy, carrying national status and overseen by the president of the United States, whereas others refused to acquiesce to a reasoning that they viewed as un-republican and un-liberal. In Haiti, the manager Henri Christophe didn't bother with these kinds of questions: he was one of the rare directors to call on an English artist, in this case Richard Evans, to create a painting and drawing academy, which he housed in his Sans Souci palace. The Royal Academy of Canada in Ottawa was founded on the same London-style model in 1880. But this London model was not exclusive in North America; the first university art school, the Yale School of Fine Arts, was founded in 1864 on the model of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Its first director, the painter John Ferguson Weir, took over in 1869, having just completed a one-year tour of Europe that brought him all the way to Paris where his half-brother was studying at the time.

Along with the French and French-trained artists living in Latin America, and the North American artists educated in England, painters and sculptors from other European countries brought their know-how across the Atlantic during the entire 19th century, and beyond. José del Pozo came from Spain to create the Escuela de Dibujo in Peru in 1891. The Spanish painter Tomás Povedano was the first director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in San Jose, Costa Rica (1897), and his fellow Spaniard, sculptor Manolo Pascual, was the first director of the institution of the same name in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (1942). Swiss painter Joseph Guth, established in Argentina, directed a drawing school in Buenos Aires in 1818. Chile took a more eclectic approach—its painting academy, founded in 1849 on the Parisian model (which can be found even in the architecture of the building that houses it), is successively directed by an Italian, Alessandro Cicarelli; a German, Ernst Kirchbach; and then another Italian, Giovanni Mochi, while the sculpture department was directed by the Frenchman Auguste François.

This circulation of the European academic model throughout the 19th century barely reaches the shores of the African continent, where the perceived need to develop artistic education, and thus the European influence over that education, arrive much later—well after the end of the dominance of artistic academism on the Old Continent. In Dakar in 1956 and Abidjan in 1962, the Écoles (nationales supérieures) des Beaux-Arts were created based on the French model. As pointed out by Pierre Gaudibert, almost all the artistic education establishments created in Africa imitated parallel European institutions. The education itself was also essentially based on Western art techniques. The teaching and reference models gave little space to African arts, whereas the pillars of academic pedagogy were repeated with an initial insistence on a rigorous and demanding mastery of the techniques of perspective and figure drawing acquired through imitative practice. As in America during the two preceding centuries, the organization of these establishments was due in part to local artists educated in Europe. The pioneer Aina Onabolu, one of the first African artists to have been educated in Europe (in this case in London and Paris), became, on his return to Nigeria in 1923, teacher of Visual Arts in the schools of Lagos. The Ivorian sculptor Christian Lattier studied and worked in France before teaching at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan, which was founded by, among others, Iba Ndiaye, himself educated in Paris. After interning in the tapestry factory in Aubusson, Papa Ibra Tall came back to Senegal in 1950 to take over directing the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, and then the tapestry factory, with its school, in Thiès. Since these Europe-Africa circulations do not take place before the 20th century, they are associated less with the spread of the fine-arts-academy model, and more with European avant-garde movements of aesthetic and pedagogical reform.

Aesthetic Renewal and Pedagogical Revision

European artistic movements breaking away from academism not only proposed new ways of conceiving and producing art, but they also called into question a foundational aspect of the relationship between artists and their practice: artistic education. Alongside the spread of principles promoted by the avant-gardes, therefore, was the dissemination of new pedagogical models, particularly in the period between the two world wars. This led to the creation of new kinds of establishments, again quite often run or influenced by artists coming from Europe. Already before the First World War, the first winds of opposition to academic teaching were felt, becoming more important during the 1920s and 30s on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to some exemplary artists, teachers, and establishments.

One of the first forms of opposition to the European academic model was in the national shift by American schools starting in the middle of the 19th century. The desire to dig into local artistic traditions led to a new way of teaching young artists, no longer called upon only to reproduce master works from the Old Continent, but also to find inspiration in landscapes, monuments and works in the countryside around them. This tendency was especially present in Brazil, where the director of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, promoted a more national art in the 1850s. In Canada, William Brymner, who became president of the Art Association of Montreal in 1886, made a concerted effort to get Canadian painters included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts. In the same vein, and in the same country and year, the Manuel de la nouvelle méthode nationale de dessin by Edmond-Maire Templé, professor at the Académie Catholique and the École Normale Jacques Cartier, encouraged up-and-coming artists to be inspired by Canadian, rather than European landscapes for their compositions.

In 1875, art students in New York created the Art Students League, designed to compete with the teaching of the National Academy of Design by recruiting teachers just arriving back from Europe, where they had learned the European avant-garde principles. The League's first president, the painter Lemuel Wilmarth, had himself studied in the academies of Munich and Paris. Robert Henri resorted to a more radical undermining; though trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts beginning in 1886, and an eminent member of the academic institutions of the American Northeast (he was professor at the New York School of Art from 1900 to 1908 and a member of the National Academy of Design starting in 1906), he promoted freedom for artists, especially in the school he founded in 1908, after having discovered the European avant-gardes during his time at the Académie Julian in Paris. The Spaniard Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, who took over direction of the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago de Chili in 1911, promulgated the impressionist aesthetic and started the formation of a group of young secessionist artists, "la Generación del Trece," that had its first exhibition in 1913. The opposition was amplified in the 1920s and brought about the closing of the Escuela de Bellas Artes that resulted from the controversies that erupted during the Salón Oficial of 1928.

The pedagogical dominance of academism also came to an end in Mexico in the 1920s, when a student strike at the Escuela Nacional led to the resignation of its director. Competing institutions were created—the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre and the Escuela de Talla directa y Escultura—both careful to break away from European influence and promote more local and popular art forms. In 1930 in Brazil, the architect Lúcio Costa, who had been trained in Newcastle and Montreux, took over as director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes where he also introduces the ideas of the European avant-gardes. The opposition arrived in Cuba as well, thanks especially to Eduardo Abela, trained in Spain and Paris in the 1920s, and one of the founders of the Estudio Libre de Pintura y Escultura, created to promote a national art and reject European influences. In the United States, an important role was played by the German painter Hans Hofmann. After fifteen years of training and working in Paris, and then fifteen years at the head of his Schule für Moderne Kunst in Munich, he was in Berkley in 1930 and 1931 before moving to New York, where he taught at the Art Students League (1932-33). He next created his own art school, the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, which played a major role in spreading modern aesthetic theories in the 1930s and 40s. Active for 25 years, his school trained 4,000 students, some of whom became art professors themselves.

The 1930s also witnessed the spread of the principles and practitioners of the Bauhaus movement, after the Nazis closed the Berlin school in 1933. In that year, Josef Albers joined the brand-new Black Mountain College, which under his influence strongly emphasized the graphic arts. He stayed there until 1949 before joining the faculty at Yale from 1950 to 1960. There, he developed a new kind of teaching, far from the still-dominant principles of European academism. His influence is clear; his key work Interaction of Color (1963), is translated into eight languages and considered one of the main artistic teaching textbooks of its generation. Black Mountain College, furthermore, trained no fewer than 1,200 students during its twenty-four years of existence, following pedagogical principles also inspired by John Dewey.

Starting in the 1940s, these movements of opposition and pedagogical modernization also reached Africa in a wider context of intensifying nationalist and independence movements, which together call into question all forms of European dominance. African artists are partly responsible for this tendency. The Ghanaian artist Oku Ampofo is a typical example; it is paradoxically in European museums that he discovered African art, and once returned to Ghana in 1940, he tended toward African traditions and away from European influence. Often, however, these breakaway movements are transported to Africa by European "inspired godfathers" (Jean-Loup Amselle). Two very successful experiments were carried out in the Belgian Congo in the 1940s. In 1943, the Belgian missionary Marc Wallenda founded the École Saint-Luc in Gombe-Matadi, to train sculptors. Three years later in 1946, the French ex-sailor Pierre Romain-Desfossés opened the Académie d'art populaire indigène, soon nicknamed "The Hangar", for painting. Breaking from the practice of imitating masterpieces, the two men privileged spontaneity of expression, and developed a particular pedagogy that aimed to give students as few boundaries as possible, to allow them to express their talent, and especially their African sensitivities, which should not be adulterated by European elements. While breaking with the European academic tradition, these two establishments soon ironically became the two great academies of Zaïre: the first became the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1957 and, after the death of its founder in 1954, the second was integrated into the Académie des Beaux-Arts et métiers d'art founded in Lubumbashi in 1951 by another Belgian, the painter Laurent Moonens. Also in 1951, another Belgian, Pierre Lods, founded the École de Poto-Poto, a painting studio in Brazzaville, in the neighboring French Congo, based on the same pedagogical principles. Similar undertakings involved the Belgian Brother Marc-Stanislas (Victor Arnold Wallenda) in Leopoldville, and the Austrian Ulli Beier in Oshogbo, Nigeria. Experiments of this kind were widespread in Africa in the middle of the century: private institutions breaking from the European academic tradition that was perpetrated by public schools more steeped in the colonial heritage. These more traditional academies could also be, however, the setting for opposition movements. The École des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan was distinguished in this way in the 1970s by the Vohou-Vohou movement, inspired especially by painter-teachers from other Atlantic coasts, such as the Martinican Serge Hélénon, trained at the École des Arts appliqués in Fort-de-France and the École d'Arts décoratifs in Nice, and founder of the Caribbean Negro School of painters.

Student Movements toward Europe—and back

For three centuries, the Atlantic space was thus crisscrossed with artists leaving to direct artistic training institutions or to teach at them; they were vectors of aesthetic and pedagogical transference in the various regions of this space. The exchanges in this area were not limited to these actors, though. It is important to highlight the longstanding flow of students and artists-in-training. In the European colonies of America, the absence or rarity of teaching institutions, combined with the emergence of local elites, pushed many young people to begin or complete their artistic training in the large European cities. They were often encouraged to do so by their families, the authorities (who sometimes created scholarships), and by artists and educational institutions, when these were present. Similar forms of encouragement existed in Europe, especially starting in the 19th century; the idea was to go beyond the construct of the vagabond Bohemian artist and the pastoral avant-gardes in the decades from 1830 to 1870, and to promote the opening up of artists to other cultural worlds, other aesthetic universes and other sources of inspiration. Examples of these artists who left to be trained abroad are legion—some have already been mentioned above—and these travels are almost impossible to quantify. Some characteristics do, however, emerge.

The duration varies, but because of the cost of travel and the length of education, it was rarely less than several years. Among the North American painters of the 19th century, Robert Henri stayed three years in Europe, Thomas Eakins four (1866-1870), William Merritt Chase six (1872-1878). John Trumbull stayed nine years (1780-1789) and then returned to Europe from 1794 to 1801, and again from 1808 to 1816. Among South African painters from the 20th century who studied in London, Nerine Desmond stayed only one year at the Central School of Art (1938); Christo Coetzee took three years of coursework at the Slade School of Art (1951-1953); Gregoire Boonzaier attended the Heatherly School of Fine Art and the Central School of Art and Design for three years (1934-1937). The European stay often goes beyond the years of education. Some artists came back to their countries very late, like the painter Daniel Hernández, who left his native Peru in 1875 and only went back definitively in 1917 to become director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima. This is also true of Diego Rivera, who arrived in Madrid in 1907, moved to Paris in 1909 to pursue his apprenticeship, and only came back to Mexico definitively in 1921. Some students never came back to the country of their birth. This was the case—a rare case in the 18th century—of Benjamin West, who made his career in London. One century later, James Whistler split his career between London and Paris; at the end of the 20th century, the South African Ansel Krut, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1986, made his entire career in England. It is true that this phenomenon is much more common in Africa during the second half of the 20th century, where artists do not easily find the facilities (available and affordable material, dynamic art market) that Europe offers them.

Destinations also vary. During the entire period, Europe is the main center of attraction, and, within Europe, the artistic capitals are dominant: Rome, Paris, London, Vienna, Madrid... Young artists, however, do not always confine themselves to one country, one city, or one institution. Manuel Dias de Oliveira, one of the rare Brazilian artists from the colonial period to journey to Europe, studied in Lisbon, but also in the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Eakins studied in the workshop of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, but also spent six months in Spain studying Velázquez at the Prado. Merritt attended the Königliche Akademie in Munich, but also went to Venice for nine months in 1877. Long stays in Europe allowed students to trace the traditional paths of artistic training and to reproduce the well-established image of the itinerant artist. While remaining the principal destination, the Old Continent was not the only one; increasingly, travels were to neighboring rather than to distant countries. The Honduran painter Francisco Pinto Rodezno was trained during the interwar period in Paris, but also in Havana. The African states, in the second half of the 20th century, tended to encourage intra-African circulation rather than travels to Europe and North America. Western European models also began to find competition from the United States, of course, but also from Socialist countries that began to create their own exchange networks for art students. Cuba became a privileged destination for (especially African) socialist states around the Atlantic, which favored training in fellow Communist-bloc states.

Progressively, the colonial heritage faded away, though it had never systematically determined the geography of these movements. Many Latin American artists preferred Rome and Paris to Madrid or Lisbon. The Mexican painters Julio Ruelas and Germán Gedovius travelled, for their part, to Germany. Nor did African artists from the 20th century systematically choose their (former) colonizing state in which to train. The Zairean sculptor Limbe M'Puanga Liyolo (born in 1943) chose to be trained in Austria (Graz and Vienna) over Belgium, whereas the Nigerian Ego Uche Okeke (1933) was trained in West Germany and the Malian Bouba Keita in Italy. While Europe remains the preferred destination, its exclusivity is decreasing, especially in the context of decolonization. A good example can be seen in the students from Trinidad and Tobago after the independence; while many chose England or continental Europe, there was an increase in movement toward Canada, the United States and Africa. In the 1990s, the Edna Madney School of Fine Art in Jamaica and the École Régionale des Arts Plastiques in Martinique also became sought-after destinations for Trinidadian students. Liberia—one of the rare Atlantic states not to have a colonial past—sent eighteen art students overseas in 1971, and fifteen in 1972. Though there is no detailed account of their destinations, we know that of the 343 students that went overseas in 1972, 69% chose North America, 25% Europe and 5% another African state.

Authorities sometimes subsidized and encouraged these student travels. The brother presidents Carlos Antonio and Francisco Solano López (who ruled Paraguay in succession from 1844 to 1870), and Venezuelan president Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1870-1877) created scholarships to facilitate trips to Europe for artists-in-training. It was such a scholarship that allowed the Peruvian painter Daniel Hernández to leave for Rome and Paris in 1875. France instituted the Prix du Salon in 1874 (which gave preference to Rome as destination), followed by travel scholarships in 1881. In the same spirit, scholarships for travel to French West Africa were created in 1911 and extended to French East Africa in 1924, in order to allow young French artists to become familiar with African art, and to spread the principles of European artistic education to Africa. Some scholarship recipients would later become art professors in the colonies. The painter Laurent Moonens, professor of drawing at Molenbeek, received an analogous scholarship financed by the Belgian Colonial Ministry. The British Council, created in 1934, granted scholarships to art students in the Commonwealth wishing to study in the United Kingdom. Nigeria launched an "urgent program for teacher training" in 1968 and created study scholarships of which 10% were reserved for cultural and creative activities. More than one hundred students took advantage of the scholarship in two years. In Togo in the mid-1970s, a similar system granted scholarships to the three or four best students in art. Apart from scholarships, other mechanisms help facilitate art student travel abroad. The Department of International Cooperation of the Argentine Ministry of Culture and Education administers residences in Spain (Nuestra Señora de Luján) and in Paris (la Fondation de l'Argentine) which offer two hundred placements.

These circulations created a tradition of welcoming all foreign students into European organizations and turning very few away. Parisian establishments were among the most sought-after. The École nationale des Arts décoratifs welcomed up to thirty foreign students per year before World War I, and another twenty during the 1920s. The economic crisis of the 1930s caused a re-examination of these students, and it was considered unfair that they were not obliged to take an entrance exam; because of this, their tuition was doubled in 1939. The tradition of hosting these students persisted, however, and 15-20% of the École's students were foreign in the 1980s, with two-fifths coming from African countries. The École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA) has the same tradition; 17% of new enrollments in 1889 are not French and the Fernand Cormon workshop hosted between 20 and 25% foreign students in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the 1980s, the proportion is the same: 12% come from the Americas and a little less than 10% from Africa (half are European). The development of contractual exchange programs at the end of the 20th century, such as the Erasmus program, gave a new framework to transatlantic exchange in artistic education. During the 1994-1995 academic year, eighty-seven students from ENSBA were able to study abroad—thirty-one in North America, three in Africa and none in Latin America. ENSBA also hosted sixty-four students from foreign schools, with one fourth coming from the United States and Canada, and four from Africa.

The role of journals

Journals play an uneven role in the diffusion of information on art teaching. In France, periodicals, guides to their respective fields like the Revue internationale de l'enseignement (RIE) and the Gazette des beaux-arts (GBA), show almost no interest. The tables of contents for the former for the period 1878 to 1920 and the latter for the period 1859-1959 show an absence of articles specifically dedicated to these subjects. RIE is interested in Atlantic regions only for the general study of their educational systems or the organization of colonial instruction. GBA only turns toward the Americas to analyze some works in their collections, and Africa is conspicuously absent. By contrast, perhaps due to greater and more recent importance placed on art education, North American journals pay attention to these subjects. Thanks to the index established by Mary Morris Schmidt of forty-three journals from 1844-1907, we can count 338 articles devoted to "Art Education", of which seventy-five devoted to foreign artistic education systems (essentially European).

While the articles are sparse in the 1850s and 1860s, they increase during the 1870s and are most concentrated in the last two decades of the century. Just two journals, The Art Journal (American edition of an English periodical) and The Art Amateur, contain forty-four articles. The journals are interested only in Europe, and, in Europe, it is especially the United Kingdom that is studied; the other Atlantic regions are entirely ignored. The omission of Africa might be explained by the fact that it did not yet have an institutionalized system of art education, but it is more surprising for Latin America, which was becoming an increasingly important focus of U.S. policy in the 19th century, and was also a region where art training was the subject of a large number of debates and projects during this period. It is noteworthy as well that this subject does not interest the journals that are directly concerned: The Art Student, a journal published by the students of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1882 to 1884 contains no articles about foreign systems, and it is the same in the Quartier Latin, published in Paris from 1896 to 1899 by the American Art Students Association. In contrast, more general periodicals do take an interest in these subjects. The North American Review published an article in 1892 entitled "Art Students in Italy", offering advice to young Americans planning to go to Italy and be trained in the country of Michelangelo...