Preparatory class for the plastic arts: a model class

In Fontenay-sous-Bois, the specialized plastic arts class of the Lycée Pablo-Picasso each year gives 24 young baccalaureate holders the opportunity to sit the competitive examination for the big art schools.

Vanessa Paradis attended the school – but that’s not the only thing the Lycée Pablo-Picasso is proud of. Apart from being curious to attend the alma mater of the famous songster, you can also go there to perfect your aptitudes in drawing, painting and the plastic arts, for this is one of the original features characterizing the establishment, one of two high schools in Fontenay-sous-Bois (Créteil school district). A kind of flagship located some 100 meters from the RER Val-de-Fontenay regional train station (line A), the school, which caters for 1,200 pupils, 16 years ago set up a post-baccalaureate class specializing in the plastic arts, which remains a model of its type. An initiative that dovetails perfectly with the vision of a public establishment keen to raise awareness of art in general through a wide variety of activities including poetry, slam and theater.

Directed by the plastic arts teacher Charles Gallissot, the plastics arts specialization class (CAAP) each year welcomes 24 recent baccalaureate students keen to pursue artistic studies. They do a “foundation” year, a bridge between high school and higher education, a crucial time when young people are trying to define their future vocation. So, alongside 19 hours a week of general knowledge classes (philosophy, literature, history, languages, science, infographics, photography and music), they also follow 14 hours of artistic practice and culture a week. The CAAP therefore offers a global training program based on interdisciplinarity, with the aim of giving students the tools and fundamental references to prepare them successfully for the entrance examinations to prestigious art schools but also for their professional and adult lives. What are the priorities of this multidisciplinary training. On what is the interdisciplinary approach based? “The general education given in philosophy, literature, modern languages, history, sciences, artistic culture, music and dance raises questions and works on the issue of modernity and its breaks with the past. At the same time, the students develop their artistic skills in plastic arts, photography, infographics, cinema and video workshops, together with a writing workshop. This interdisciplinarity is shaped through the articulation of two approaches: the questions raised in the workshops as the students develop their own artistic skills then serve as a base for the general theoretical courses,” says Charles Gallissot. “There is no fundamental division between the practice of the plastic arts and the theoretical classes, no fundamental division between the student’s creative impulse and inculcating knowledge and scholarship,” he continues, quoting Sylviane Bernard-Gresh (in Learning and living art … Chronicle of a preparatory class, SCÉRÉN-CRDP-Créteil school district). He adds: “Students gradually understand that to construct a genuine plastic reflection and the critical attitude that goes with it, they need to develop their curiosity and their knowledge in a wide variety of fields and appropriate this knowledge for themselves. The analytical and methodological tools offered to them fertilize each other and, thanks to the difference in approaches, allow them to increase their capacity to come to grips with what they are doing, make progress in a disciplined way and establish a long-lasting basis for their development.”

Exhibitions at the high school and the Saint-Denis museum – in collaboration with the Université Paris VIII— and participation in the Jardins de Beaune competition –in collaboration with the Montreuil Horticultural School— are the highlights of this preparatory year, privileged moments for examining practices and their meaning. At the end of the year, the students are ready to sit the competitive examinations to schools of their choice: Fine Arts or Decorative Arts schools, Applied Arts or Architecture schools, in France or elsewhere. And it appears that the failure rate of this program is almost zero: on completion of the preparatory year, between 95% and 100% of the students are accepted in a major art school, a result that makes you wonder why the model has not been replicated more often: to date, Gagny is the only other town that has copied it. For, as Charles Gallissot points out: “The  CAAP aims to be a center of excellence, but with the ambition of offering this excellence to those students who, outside the National Education system, would not have the means to undertake art studies.”