Intramuralia: Korzenik Collection of Art Education Materials

Abstract

n July of 1997, some sixty boxes arrived at the Huntington Library, containing a collection of materials relating to art education in America. I had cquired this collection over a thirty-year period. I decided to donate it to the Huntington because I knew that the curators in both the library and the museum were engaged with the issues that had led me to form the collection: the ways in which visual ideas are passed through generations, and the meanings embedded in the evolution of those ideas. The 450 books and 1,ooo artifacts in the collection-which range in date from the late eighteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth-demonstrate the ways in which art-making has been valued by Americans, and also serve as an archive of the specific graphic techniques employed in the education of children and emerging artists of all ages. All of the books in the collection address the issues of why and how to make art. Authors argued for particular artistic, political, and pedagogical creeds. They offered detailed procedures for studio setup and instruction in a variety of institutional settings-art schools, settlement houses, public schools, and kindergartens. In addition to offering a history of thinking about art and art education, these books also suggest the historical connection between techniques for viewing pictures and art making. For example, students using the earliest volumes in this collection learned to make pictures largely from black-and-white prints. By 1900, technological changes-such as the development of wood engravers' color prints, color lithography, and hand-tinted black-and-white images-had generated a universe of color pictures. To satisfy the growing appetite for color, manufacturers developed new educational materials for children, such as paint sets, wax crayons, and coloring books with bright color-lithographed covers. A goldembossed cloth volume from Devoe art supplies, issued in the 188os, shows easels, palettes, paint boxes, animated figures, and even an animated horse, and many forms of color to use working with these. Media in the collection are of two types, prints that were exemplars for students, and the art media that the students actually manipulated. The collection includes items as diverse as wooden and metallic paint boxes, tracing slates, stencil kits, geometric wooden blocks, chromolithographed scenes for copying,