Is this the end of conceptual art?

Great painters learnt their trade by copying famous art works - until it fell out of fashion. Now, drawing is back. Lucy Hodges reports

Great painters, from Turner to Picasso, were taught to draw. They learnt their craft, in part, by copying other artists. They sat for hours, poring over the works of the Old Masters they admired, trying to get inside their heads and figure out how they achieved what they did. In the first half of the 20th century, drawing was taught by putting students in front of bowls of fruit and nude models. As late as the 1960s it was de rigueur for art college students to take a life class - reproducing the human form as faithfully as they could on paper.

But by the early 1970s, figurative art began to be seen as passé and sterile - and there was something in the criticism. Many art colleges dropped it in favour of an emphasis on originality, abstraction and letting students express themselves. For the same reasons, the colleges abandoned their links to museums.

Art colleges used to be embedded in museums, according to Stephen Farthing, Rootstein Hopkins Professor of Drawing at the University of the Arts London. The Royal College of Art was part of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Oxford's Ruskin School (which Farthing used to run) was in the Ashmolean Museum.

"The break with the museums came about because the curriculum didn't require students to have proximity to historical models," says Farthing. "They were focusing much more on contemporary developments than they were on history as a way of underpinning learning. So, the Ruskin left the Ashmolean and went to a building on the High Street, and the Royal College of Art built a big new building by the Albert Hall and only the painting school was left at the V&A."

That break with the museums - and with copying as a way of learning to draw - is about to end. The traditional is about to become trendy again. Farthing is based at Chelsea College of Art, which has just moved to a magnificent new site next to the Tate Britain. He is hoping to bring about a renaissance in the teaching of drawing in art schools, and plans to use the Tate in that mission. His first project, called "Drawing from Turner", involves asking established artists and other big names to spend time in the Tate's Prints and Drawings Rooms copying Turner's drawings.

The founder of The Big Issue, John Bird, who had an art education, is copying "The Lake of Brienz" onto corrugated cardboard, and the artist, Jake Tilson, is copying "The Ruins of the Pantheon in Oxford Street".

Farthing himself has probably undertaken the toughest assignment of all, which is to copy Turner's drawing of the interior of the octagon at Ely Cathedral. It is an elaborate drawing of the intricate Gothic stonework of a medieval cathedral and it is massive. "I think it will take eight hours to complete," says Farthing ruefully.

When the copies are finished, they will be hung next to the Turner originals at an exhibition at the Tate in 2006. Farthing hopes that the project will prove that there is a point to an art school having a strong relationship with a museum because it will show what can be learnt from copying. He hopes that this will relaunch the teaching of drawing in the UK.

In fact, his aim is to write a curriculum for teaching people to draw and to test it out. But first of all, he is writing a book called The Landscape of Drawing, which will be a survey of drawing across the disciplines, to be published at the end of the year.

The Farthing curriculum will not be particularly prescriptive but it will elaborate the professor's views about the links between drawing and writing. "In order to make sense of drawing you have got to see it in relation to writing," he says. "In a way, they are part of the same language that has had this kind of artificial divorce. If you look at the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, he has as many words as images on the page - sometimes more words than images. What is interesting is how the pen and the pencil are so good at both writing and drawing."

So the Farthing curriculum would not exclude writing. He compares the way that a life class teacher and an English teacher would talk. "In the life classes of the 1960s, the teacher would ask students to 'draw a nude model'. But the English lit teacher would not say, 'I want you to write this model' because that would not make sense," he says. "The English teacher would say, 'I want you to write about this model.'"

The word "about" is very important, according to Farthing. When people start to just draw rather than draw "about", they stop thinking about how what they are doing fits into the world. It's not an intellectual inquiry. They shut down their imagination and simply wonder whether they are skilful enough to reproduce what's in front of them.

So, as part of teaching people to draw, Farthing thinks it would be interesting to have life writing classes instead of life drawing classes. You would go into the room and write about the model. The Farthing curriculum would look at how people use notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci -style. Instead of asking students to undertake big formal works, drawing would be a means of inquiry and invention. "The more that words and images fit together, the more inventive people can be because they have a more robust language to work with," he says.

Drawing underpins everything that we do visually, according to Farthing. Over the last 30 years it has had a rough ride in the curriculum. "It certainly was not at the top of people's list of subjects that needed to be taught," he says. "Now there is renewed interest and a lot of people are wondering the same things as I am: how important is it and can it be revived?"

When he was running the Ruskin School at Oxford in the 1990s, Farthing was involved in a big research project into the curriculum and was startled to find how much photography there was and how little drawing.

"It was kind of shocking in a way to find that so few people were teaching drawing," he says. "People don't go to art schools with the same drawing skills as English lit students go to study English with writing skills."

Farthing is the first professor of drawing at the University of the Arts London, having come from New York where he was executive director of the New York Academy of Art. He learnt all about a deeply conventional kind of art education in America and does not want to reproduce that in London. It is fair enough, he says, to teach people to draw in an academic style and retread the path of a 19th-century academy, but it has to be put in today's context.

"I want to take hold of what is the best of that and use it in a much more thoughtful way."

Any drawing course developed by Farthing would be open-ended and inventive, he emphasises. You need to produce intelligent, inquisitive people and give them tools to work with. "It's a wonderful time to be a professor of drawing because there are very few preconceptions. There's nothing to break down.

"It's not a question of rebuilding but of working through the ashes to find out what's there and to reconstruct that into what's useful for today."

l.hodges@independent.co.uk