Art Education

[James N. Stewart]

I am posting this to this group on the off chance that there is someone
interested in the subject. It that ain't you just lable me a nit wit and
put me to one side.

In consideration of an ongoing discussion on a mailing list (which I will
not bore you with) I am interested to find out if anyone has any information
or interestin the politics of art educators, particularly in the fifties.
That was a time when the a number of artist who had been associated with the
left (apparently mostly the Trotskyite left) such as Jackson Pollock, were
taken into the arms of the corporate establshment. It was a period marked
by virulent anti-communism and an attack upon prgressive education that
would make most current arguments over education seem timid. In the midst
of this art education was held up as proof of the superiority of American
education as opposed to the Russians, who didn't care about creativity. In
the midst of that Lowenfeld wrote a pamphlet for NAEA (if I recall
correctly) in which he praised the art of Russian children.

Now, if I were looking for radicals in the fifties I would have started
among the bohemian artist types of the period. So what's the deal? There
seems to have been very little red baiting of art educators, although I have
been told in confidence of at least one case (i.e. I understood the
conversation to be off the record which was dealing with a Penn State
Seminar).