John P. Heins

About the Artist

• John P. Heins was born in New York City and received a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia Teachers College in 1919. Upon graduation, Heins was asked by Teachers College chair Arthur Wesley Dow to teach composition, metalwork, and jewelry at the college, a job he held until 1930. In 1920, when the Clarence H. White School of Photography opened uptown, White asked Heins, who had taken his course at Columbia, to teach composition and art appreciation there as well, a position Heins kept until the school closed in 1942.

  Heins was a friend, and probably teacher, of Paul Outerbridge, the pioneer of color photography. Outerbridge, who found great success with his fashion and commercial photography studio, studied at the White School in 1921–22. Heins was at the school for the “second wave” of White students, which included Outerbridge, Margaret Watkins, Wynn Richards, Ralph Steiner, Anton Bruehl, and Margaret Bourke-White. Unlike those artists, who became pioneer magazine photographers, Heins devoted his career to printmaking and teaching.

  In 1923 Heins traveled to Europe, and in 1926 he studied printmaking at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts. In the 1930s he was hired as a printmaker by the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and he partnered with White’s son Lewis to run the Equinox Cooperative Press, in New York. In 1939 he received a master’s degree from Columbia Teachers College, writing his thesis on White as a teacher. In 1943 Heins joined the art faculty of Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he remained until 1964.

  —Bonnie Yochelson

Meeting Points

• Cultural Hubs New York
  
• Schools White School, 1914–42
  

Artist Chronology

Walther Photographs

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  Untitled

Related Essays

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  Yochelson, Bonnie
  The Clarence H. White School of Photography