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From 5 to 4 plus 2

An art school education in the Netherlands used to take five years. In 1986, a law was adopted that limited the study to four years. The art schools protested. They absolutely believed that more time was needed to train artists. A Dutch compromise brought a solution: an initial study of four years with an additional, two-year ‘second phase’ for the best students. In 1991, the now lamented five-year programme was discontinued. The second phase or graduate programmes would begin in 1995.

Sandberg

At the time, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy was under considerable pressure from the Ministry of Education. Since the mid-1980s, art schools had been compelled to merge into larger higher educational institutions. The Rietveld refused; they wanted to remain autonomous. The Minister threatened that if they did not merge, they would not be approved for a second phase programme. So what happened? In 1993, two years before the second phase programmes were to go into effect, the Rietveld independently began a second phase programme: the Sandberg Instituut. The first director was Jos Houweling; among the first students he selected were Job Koelewijn and Mark de Cloe. The idea was courageous and clever: by being the first to begin such a programme, the Rietveld would be the only school able to prove they had hands-on experience with the new second phase. The idea was that funding and official status would automatically follow.

Advanced Study Programmes

The Ministry set up a procedure whereby the art schools had to submit ‘proposals’ in order to be selected for the second phase programmes. These proposals would be evaluated by the Arts Council [in Dutch: Raad voor Cultuur – eds.]. The Council’s response was that second phase programmes for the fine arts already existed in the form of the so-called werkplaatsen (workplaces): the Rijksakademie, De Ateliers and the Jan van Eyck Academy. But the Ministry, which had promised the art schools funding for the extra two-year programmes, decided otherwise. Ultimately, they approved four schools to set up the new graduate level programmes: the academies in Enschede, Arnhem, Rotterdam, and … the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. The academies in Groningen and Breda launched campaigns on their own behalf and convinced the Lower Chamber of Parliament to give them another chance to prove themselves. Their programmes were officially accepted a year later. After the merger of the academies in Arnhem and Enschede in 2002, the Netherlands officially had five programmes for second phase education in fine arts.

Bologna

In 1998, Ministers of Education from the major European countries decided to harmonize advanced education. A year later, 29 countries met in Bologna to hammer out the details of the agreement. In terms of education, Europe would become a single region. In virtually all European countries, the Anglo-Saxon model of the Bachelor and Master’s degrees in art was adopted, with study credits holding equal value everywhere. The two phases of the Dutch art education system proved to be an ideal stepping stone towards the new Bachelor and Master level structure. It could simply be carried over as it stood. In 2002, all the initial four-year programmes in the Netherlands became BA or BFA programmes. For the graduate programmes, the Ministry required assessments of the respective programmes before approving them. The first to receive this new status was the Sandberg Instituut, in 2006. The HKU School of the Arts in Utrecht had already begun a one-year Master’s programme in 2004, in association with the British Open University. This was outside the Dutch system, which meant that its students could not claim financial support. Two years previously, the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague had begun its ArtScience Master’s programme, focussing on the development of interdisciplinary art forms that reflect recent developments in science and technology. In 2009, the Royal Academy also established its Master in Artistic Research, which brought the total number of master’s programmes in the Netherlands to eight.

Doctorate

In May of 2000, a headline in the de Volkskrant newspaper announced, ‘Students can obtain a PhD at the Rietveld’. Two years before the arrival of the BA-MA structure, the school had already foreseen the consequences: artists with an MA or MFA would have the right to go on to a doctorate. A year later, together with the University of Leiden, the Royal Academy founded the Academy of the Arts, which has for some years now been offering a PhDArts programme for visual artists. In its own MaHKU graduate school, the HKU established a number of trajectories for postgraduate studies with several different universities. The first artists from The Hague and Utrecht have now received their PhDs, with the first Utrecht PhD being awarded by the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Today, a range of artists in the Netherlands are working on dissertations that reflect on the creative process in today’s new tradition of artistic research.

Postgraduate Institutions

The MA programmes and the werkplaatsen with their studio programmes for artists always seemed to be getting in each other’s way. Their budgets were widely divergent, and they sometimes did the same things or sought the same students. Financially, since the budget cuts, there are now only slight discrepancies between them, but what about their working methods? In 2010, the Arts Council launched a thorough investigation into these issues. The study concluded that the intent of the master’s programmes is for graduates with a BA or BFA to be able to continue to work in an educational environment. The educational objective of the programme is to deepen their understanding and specialization, with an increasing emphasis on research. The werkplaatsen, which are now known as postgraduate institutions, with their studio programmes, in contrast, are there for those who already have a recognized artistic practice and who want to further develop that practice in a freer context. Following this logic, postgraduate institutions offer a step beyond the MA programmes. It is, as it were, a practical third phase that exists in parallel to the theoretical trajectory of the PhD, within the educational field. The story is undoubtedly to be continued…

Beyond the Netherlands

The BA and MA structure was intended to harmonize art education. Students would benefit: they would more easily be able to move from country to country and their degrees would have the same value wherever they went. Looking around us, however, we see pronounced disparities. In Belgium, the BA programme is three years, the MA only one year. So, a BA and MA in Belgium takes the same length of time as a BA in the Netherlands. In Germany, most regions have not even adopted the new system. Undergraduate study is still either four or five years. BA graduates sometimes apply to a renowned five-year school, such as the Städelschule in Frankfurt, to complete the last two years of their programme. The art academy in Hamburg does offer both BA and MA degrees, of four and two years, respectively. In England, where the BA-MA structure comes from, almost everything seems possible: a BA or BFA study of three, or in exceptional cases four years, and an MA or MFA in either one or two years. The time spent studying can be anywhere from four to six years.

The Future

The Master of Arts programmes are certainly the thing of the future in the Netherlands. They are becoming the flagships of the art schools. Now that the institutions for higher professional education in the arts are working towards establishing distinctive reputations, the flexible graduate programmes, with their potential for specialization, are ideal study programmes to give these institutions a recognizable image. There will be more available places for students in the existing graduate programmes. There will also be new graduate programmes being offered, with more specific possibilities and curricula. Research is becoming a core activity. The programmes will continue to be subjected to quality assessments that will encompass ever new elements. International comparisons will assume greater weight.

In the meantime, it seems equally important to take a thorough look at the future of the Master of Arts landscape. Do we have the programmes that we need? Are the respective profiles sufficiently diverse and distinctive from each other? Do they offer the qualities that make them truly meaningful for the discipline? Are their programmes sufficiently visible? In order to promote that visibility, more money needs to be made available. The chance of that happening is very slim, so the graduate programmes are therefore also becoming experiments in how something great can be achieved with so little. There is no doubt that here too, like everywhere else in the arts, fundraising will be making its entrance.

Tip: www.artandeducation.net is a convenient site for those searching for graduate schools in art in and outside the Netherlands. Also, get on a train or an airplane and go visit the schools.