The Subject Is Art

Abstract

One can hardly fault the desirability of creative and mental growth. It was Viktor Lowenfeld's great good fortune to link these human processes closely to art education. He did so at a time just after the Second World War most propitious to furthering the Romantic and Progressive notions of natural human growth and amid a rejection of educational formalism. Spurred on by a benign optimism and a vigorously advocated egalitarianism and increasingly abetted by a popular and influential spread of psychological analysis, Lowenfeld's concept of developmental stages in the art of the young became a major element of belief in art education. That stress on developmental maturation found a ready if uncritical acceptance among art educators, and in the wider community of teachers caught up in the momentum of pedagogical change. Lowenfeld's ideas probably did more to establish art education as a necessary, albeit instrumental and therapeutic element in the school curriculum than any single contribution to the field up to midcentury. He certainly was a seminal thinker in this regard and he remains an influential force in art education today. I must confess that after an early conversion in the fifties to the Lowenfeldian approach to the teaching of art I soon became an apostate. Too many of the classroom art practices then current took on amateurish clinical features rather than art studio traits. It appeared to me that the emphasis on process and the rejection of content did not flow logically from an understanding of the nature of art or its aesthetic ordering. Nor did the outright instrumentalist role in which art was cast sit well with my own perceptions of the intrinsic nature and profoundly metaphoric place of art in the scheme of things things of the spirit as well as those of the perceived world. What was lacking for me was art art as the subject of art education. In its place was the boundless province of creativity and the realm of the unleavened self laden with an unspoken anxiety which seemed to devour the very object of regard, as indeed the destructive tendencies of the sixties confirmed. Nor was I comfortable with the doctrinaire conceptual position which separated and isolated children's creative efforts and their art works from the form making actions of adult artists and the larger body of art. A preciousness of perception regarding the art work of youngsters coupled with an analysis of artistic behavior sometimes bordering on sentimentality seemed to place human and particularly early creativity in an unwarranted precarious position. I still believe now, as I did then, that children's need to shape form and expression is basic to their human nature. That urge is not easily repressed, though it does require nurture and instruction much as does the older adult's attempts to make art. I became a recidivist, reverting to a position aligned with the virtues for some the elitist virtues of high art. The viewpoint stressed the guided aesthetic unfolding of artistic