Between 1949 and 1951, Rauschenberg attended classes at the Art Students League. Founded in 1875, the League grounded its teaching in drawing from the model, a method that was very different from the material-based studies Rauschenberg had learned at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. At the League, he studied easel painting under Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, often with little encouragement. Rauschenberg recalled his time at the League: "I just stood in the back of the room and did my own things…. I didn’t have the intellect even to decide what form my nonconformity would take."