Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

(Emmanuel Radnitsky 1890-1976) Armed with his exotic new persona, Man Ray broke from the cocoon of his early life. One day at Stieglitz's he heard about an ongoing series of art classes and lectures sponsored by the Ferrer Modern School, which had just moved to a brownstone building at 63 East 107th Street from downtown headquarters, first at St. Mark's Place, then on East Twelfth Street. Thursday and Friday evening art classes ("with living model") were twenty cents per session. And on Wednesday nights, the popular critic John Weichsel spoke on cultural and aesthetic topics. The Ferrer School had been founded by Emma Goldman, in commemoration of Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, the libertarian Spanish educator shot in Barcelona on October 13, 1909. Goldman traveled tirelessly across the country, addressing audiences of anarchists, freethinkers, and progressives in the aftermath of Ferrer's death, raising funds to start an association in his honor and spirit, predicated upon her shared belief that "dogmatism is the worst enemy of education." "What is the Modern School?" asked sculptor and poet Adolf Wolff in the pages of the school's magazine. "It is a sort of alchemist's laboratory where the philosopher's stone of education is be