Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

Return to - Notes for a Perspective on Art Education

Perspective - The 1880's - 1900-1920, "Composition" - 1900-1920, 'School Arts' - 1900-1920, Art Education Associations - 1900-1920, Art Education in the Museum of Art - 1900-1920, The Modernists - 1914-1920, War and Post War - 1920's, Progressive Education - 1920's-1930's, Professional Stabilization - 1930's, Museum Education during the Depression - 1930's, National Government in Art - 1940's, A Psychology and Philosophy for Art Education

Notes from: Logan, Frederick M . Growth of Art in American Schools, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955.

Growth of Art
in American Schools

The Years 1914-1920, War & Postwar

The war years 1914 to 1918 slowly whittled away much of the energy and zest that would otherwise have brought a consolidation of many valuable elements in art education Of course, any number of hasty and ambitious projects were outlined, some started, and a few completed to prove that art in the school had some talents which could aid the nation to wage war. Fundamentally, though , the arts are constructive, and war in its most favorable light can only claim to be defensive of human values, not creative. The arts, possibly more than any other part of human life, lose energies and intelligent direction during and just after war years. [p. 148]

By 1920, many once-valued intellectual and aesthetic movements seemed to have been forgotten . . . . what child study revealed of the processes and products of child art was by no means lost, but it faced the necessity of new evaluation in the light of Freud, of the behaviorists, and of Gestalt psychology. [p. 1 48]

The modernism of Stieglitz and his painters, of Davies as the godfather of the Armory Show, of the architects Wright and Sullivan --these men and movements were temporarily in eclipse in 1920, submerged as far as the sophisticated younger art generations were concerned by new European art movements: purism and dadaism and the internationalists in architecture. [p. 148]

Art teaching in the elementary and secondary schools, while it continue to be impressed by the formulas of men like Bailey, did, after the First World War, begin to synthesize, as best its young teachers could, the mass of ideas bequeathed to it by the psychologists and artists, photographers, teachers, architects, and museum directors. [p. 149]

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[Notes from: Logan, Frederick M . Growth of Art in American Schools, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955.]




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