Graham Nickson, 78, Dies; Passionate Steward of the New York Studio School

Graham Nickson, an erudite British-born artist known for boldly figurative paintings rendered in lush, saturated colors — and for his influential stewardship of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, the bastion of fine arts in Greenwich Village — died on Jan. 28 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, Dita Amory, his wife, said.

Mr. Nickson joined the faculty of the New York Studio School as a teacher in 1988 and was named dean in 1989. He retired last year.

The school had been started in a Broadway loft in the early 1960s by the artist Mercedes Matter and a group of disaffected Pratt Institute students in search of an immersive, atelier-like arts education focused on fundamentals like drawing. By the time Mr. Nickson arrived, it occupied an eccentric collection of rowhouses on West Eighth Street that Gertrude Whitney had cobbled together and used as the site of the original Whitney Museum, which she opened in 1930.

That provenance and raffish, bohemian architecture nicely matched the New York Studio School’s anti-corporate ethos: It was an anachronism, and proudly so.

Mr. Nickson joined the ranks of an illustrious group of teachers that had included, over the years, Philip Guston, Louis Finkelstein, Alex Katz and Sidney Geist — and that would later include, as visiting artists, Louise Bourgeois, Christo, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, Fairfield Porter and Elizabeth Murray.

In his first year at the school, he conceived the Drawing Marathon, a two-week boot camp required for full-time students but also open to the public. With Mr. Nickson as its amiable, indefatigable guru, it became a cultlike pilgrimage for many, despite the eight-hour days and the critiques stretching late into the night, which required enormous stamina. (Other faculty members taught — and continue to teach — marathons, but Mr. Nickson was the one applicants clamored for.)