A Progressive Vision of Democratizing Art: Dewey’s and Barnes’s Experiments in Art Education in the 1920s

Abstract

Abstract This paper uses archival research to investigate the educational philosophy and methods developed at the Barnes Foundation as well as changes made in the field of art education. The Foundation was, during its period of inception, part of the Progressive Education movement of the 1920s. First, Dewey’s vision of art education for a democratic society, which guided the foundation’s educational experiment, is examined. Second, Dewey’s and Barnes’s mutual influence is analyzed with an emphasis on how Dewey’s vision is woven into the fabric of Barnes’s method of art study used in the foundation’s art-education program. Third, the paper explores the actual process of the educational experiment conducted by the foundation. It focuses on the aesthetics courses established by the foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, at Columbia University, and at the Barnes Foundation itself, and taught by Thomas Munro and Laurence Buermeyer. Finally, the results and significance of the experiment are discussed in relation to the historical context of art education in the early twentieth century. Albert C. Barnes acknowledged Dewey’s contributions, on the occasion of Dewey’s eightieth birthday: “Our institution, the Barnes Foundation, owes its origin to the ideas which Dewey has contributed to human thought, and its program has been benefited on occasions, in ways too numerous to mention, by suggestions and advice from him. The years of educational practice have made the value of Dewey’s conceptions and practices ever more apparent.”