Viktor Lowenfeld Research Articles

Analyzing the Paintings of the Children in Penglipuran Bangli Bali

The purpose of this article is to analyze the works of children's paintings which focus on traditional architectural paintings made of bamboo, especially bamboo roof. In order to understand the level of expression, creativity, and psychologies development of the children. This study used a qualitative and participatory method. The researcher directly observed the process of children’s painting, to explore the psychology, expression, and aesthetics. Viktor Lowenfeld, (1957) professor of art education at the Pennsylvania State University, he wrotes in "Creative and Mental Growth" explained that there are six stages of creative age grouping, but for research in Penglipuran researchers only chose two. The first, ages 7-9, is called the early realism stage. At this stage in artistic development, children begin to become more critical of their work. The second, 10-13 years of age, is called the pseudo-naturalistic stage, the use of values and light is now visible in pictures. Penglipuran children are very proud of the customs, traditions, and culture. This pride raises the intention to develop creativity in the form of painting and craftsmanship, and tourist attractions. The elders keep maintaining to pass the heritages to the next generations. The result of this creativity process is varied, one of them are traditional architecture made of bamboo, the house entrance of Penglipuran residents. Their sensitivity in capturing objects is very creative and expressive, straightforward and free. This children's painting shows the development of expressive and very dynamic use of line, shape, darkness, light, shadow, and color.

Tracing Lines: On the Educational Significance of Drawing

In 1865, the Brussels educational reformer Pierre Temples advocated to take drawing as the cornerstone of education. He criticized that education was modelled on conventions and grammatical rules in order to learn to read and write, this way ignoring the potential of drawing to create new concepts. This paper is also concerned with the significance of drawing in the realm of education. However, not to elaborate on its added value for education, but to discuss the mode of thinking that it seeks to disclose. The paper starts with a re-reading of two stories: Pliny the Elder's image of the origin of drawing and Viktor Lowenfeld’s artistic developmental theory. This brings us to an understanding of the significance of drawing not as a pure sensory experience, nor as a cognitive one, but as a new gesture that marks the visual as visual, to make it an object of thought. Unlike Temples, this contribution is not against grammar, but understands the act of drawing as a form of grammatisation in itself: i.e. a particular response to an event, which simultaneously enables us to visualize what confronts us. Hence, an ability to imagine and create new relationships with the world.

Reality in blind people’s drawings. Research procedures and tools

The study presented in this article looks at how the phenomena of reality are constructed in totally blind people’s drawings. Analysis focuses on drawing skills and their development seen based on drawings made by people who have been blind since birth. Raised-line drawings made on a special drawing film for blind people were analyzed. The analysis covered: 1. Blind people’s cognitive abilities – the way they see phenomena. 2. Abilities and ways of presenting phenomena in drawings. 3. Determining stages in the development of drawing skills in blind children as compared to the development of drawing skills in sighted children. The study was motivated by the desire to answer the following questions: What similarities and differences are there in the process of drawing by people with disabilities and in their drawings? What esthetic features (content, form, uniqueness of presentation, manner of displaying emotions) do blind children’s drawings have? How are the phenomena of reality depicted in blind people’s drawings? What difficulties do blind people encounter in making a drawing on a two-dimensional surface? Does blind children’s artistic development take place in a similar way as sighted children’s artistic development? Are blind children at a similar level of artistic development as their sighted peers? I proposed a model of artistic creation that takes into consideration the content and form of drawings and the artist’s creativity and emotionalism which was used as a tool in the analysis. All aspects of the analysis refer to the stages of drawing development in sighted children proposed by: Stefan Szuman, Viktor Lowenfeld, W. Lambert Brittain, and Georges-Henri Luquet.

Selected Concepts in The Development of Drawing Activity in Children Aged 3 to 12

Abstract More than a hundred years of research on the drawing activity of children and young people shows both a change in the way it is perceived and in its importance for healthy development. Numerous monographs, dissertations, research conducted by psychologists, pedagogues, aestheticians, art historians and visual artists has contributed to the popularity of terms such as “children’s art” or “children’s artistic work”. Children’s and young people’s drawings have not only been acknowledged for their artistic and aesthetic value, but also for their projective and psychometric qualities. Research on children’s drawing shows that the depiction is a result of knowledge and perception, which depends on personality and intelligence, as well as on emotions, persistent views and attitudes. Furthermore, the content, as well as the formal qualities of a drawing are subject to the constant influence of changing aesthetic conventions and cultural processes. This article deals with selected classic concepts of artistic development in children aged 3 to 12 defined by researchers such as Stefan Szuman, Georges Henri Luquet, Viktor Lowenfeld and Lambert Brittain, Rudolf Arnheim, Ernst H. Gombrich and Władysław Strzemiński. The crucial aspect of this disquisition was to emphasize the value of spontaneous children’s drawings and of the role of spontaneous drawing in their appropriate development. It was equally important to highlight the need for the students to do their own creative work with a teacher assisting them only as a guide, a discrete observer and potential advisor. This is why I pondered upon the following key notions in characterizing the drawing activity of children aged 3 to 12: the period of scheme in drawing development (ideoplastic art, S.Szuman), spontaneous drawing and drawing scheme.

Gloucester and the Friendly Sea: An Early 20th-Century Art Educator’s Mural as a Pedagogical Hinge

In this article, I investigate the mural-making experience of Mabel Spofford, an early 20th-century art educator from Massachusetts. Spofford designed and created a mural titled Gloucester and the Friendly Sea while attending a Pennsylvania State University Summer Arts Institute course with Viktor Lowenfeld in 1947. By placing archival documents, such as the written mural plan, in relation to relevant historical, social, and cultural contexts, a story emerges about the personal and social motivations of Spofford as an art educator whose life was inextricably intertwined with place. The story I tell is of a woman who had a deep connection to the local and whose experience in the mural course served as a pivot point (Ellsworth, 2005) in her own becoming—one which brought her lifelong experiences of place into relation, allowing her to see the known anew.

Book Review: “Helen Keller: A Remembrance,”

Helen Keller: A Remembrance, by Berthold Lowenfeld, originally published in the May 1980 issue of the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, Volume 74, Number 5, pp. 169-174. Recommended by Simon Hayhoe I have not had time for real heroes for about 30 years now. However, as my hunger for heroes died out in adulthood, my need for influences from the world I inhabited did not. I think it is fair to say that it is part of our human condition to need guidance from others and to see ourselves in relation to others in our social groups. As humans, we need to create identities from our societies, and how we see our influences is an important element of these identities (Berger & Luckmann, 2016). Beyond acts of worship, the people who influence us become the stimuli of our contemporary thinking. This relationship is perhaps an appeal of being a researcher, writer, or teacher: it is the ideal of being an influence on others and therefore the social world we inhabit. It is also a legacy we leave for future societies. Berthold Lowenfeld and his brother Viktor were two such influencers on my research and teaching on blindness. Viktor Lowenfeld, a trained sculptor, taught art in Vienna's school for the blind in the 1930s, using this experience to write influential works on this topic (Lowenfeld, 1934, 1951). He went on to become one of the most influential mainstream art educators in the United States after leaving Austria for England and the United States during the rise of National Socialism. As a professor of art education, Viktor Lowenfeld continued to draw reference from art by students with visual impairments (that is, blindness or low vision) in his influential book, Creative and Mental Growth (Lowenfeld, 1987). Yet, despite his important work, it was Berthold Lowenfeld that had a greater influence on the education of visually impaired students in the 20th century. Berthold Lowenfeld was a teacher of visually impaired students. Like his brother, he also left Vienna for America during the rise of National Socialism. In Vienna, he trained as a teacher of students with visual impairments under some of the most influential philosophers of his time--something he discusses in the article I chose to highlight in this essay, Helen Keller: A Remembrance, which was originally published in the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness (JVIB) in 1980. From there, his life became dedicated to promoting, developing, and, most of all, understanding the educational potential of all visually impaired children. Unlike Viktor, he did not restrict himself to a single teaching topic or a single discipline of study. In his understanding of blindness, Berthold Lowenfeld always took a holistic approach. He understood that blindness was not just a physical condition, and that visually impaired people are not only influenced by the physical condition of their eyes. Consequently, his writing on blindness covered a spectrum of topics. These topics included the historical understanding of blindness, the social condition of visually impaired people, perceptual psychology, pedagogy, and the arts. He was also perhaps the most important writer to talk about the psychological and educational differences between early and late onset of visual impairment. …

Viktor Lowenfeld: Portrait of a Young Art Teacher in Vienna in the 1930s

Viktor Lowenfeld (1903-1960), one of the most influential art educators of the 20th century and author of Creative and Mental Growth (1947, 1952, 1957), barely talked or wrote about his early teaching experiences at the Chajes Realgymnasium, a secondary school for Jewish youth in Vienna, where he taught art and math for 14 years before fleeing the Nazis in 1938 and eventually emigrating to the United States. Lowenfeld did write extensively about teaching blind and visually impaired students during the same period in Vienna, publishing his findings in The Nature of Creative Activity (1939). This article formulates new information about Lowenfeld’s early teaching years at the Chajes Realgymnasium based on two student art portfolios, personal interviews with three of Lowenfeld’s former students, and additional correspondence with others. Discussion about Lowenfeld’s relative silence about his years at the Chajes Realgymnasium concludes the article.

Historical Contexts and Emerging Practices in Art Education

When I began writing this editorial, i was sitting in the Vancouver International Airport in British Columbia, having just spent 3 days with colleagues from across the US and Canada discussing a range of contemporary concerns related to art education.Topics of conversation included the impact of social contexts on aesthetic experience and artistic practice; the expanding power of fear and the role it plays in the lives of students and teachers; and the emergence of do it yourself or DIY influences on art, and more broadly, on the richness of our material culture. These conversations encouraged me to continue thinking about how art education responds to the social forces within which it constructed and practiced. For me, this means that the history and future development of art education cannot be understood and imagined from the standpoint of an objective set of incontrovertible facts. Instead, we must address the diverse ways in which artists and educators see and engage with the world, as well as the forces that enable or constrain that engagement. Whatever understanding we acquire of the or the new pathways emerging in the present always situated within and influenced by the framework of our prevailing interpretations. When responding to the question, What history?, E. H. Carr (1961) wrote that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his [sic] facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past (p. 35); it a process of interpretation situated in a particular context at a particular time.Forthose persuaded of this contextual perspective, it always useful to study and reflect on the forces that influence our understanding of what art education has been in the or could be in the future. Sometimes untold or lesser-known stories and events can be brought to light in such a way that we change our thinking about art education's and perhaps, re-envision the possibilities for its future.The articles included in this issue of Studies in Art Education address a wide range of topics. However, they all, in different ways, help us to reflect on the social forces that affect what art education has been and what it may become. Two of the articles present research on important moments in the history of art education, while the remaining three set the stage for thinking about how our contemporary stories or narratives will be interpreted and told by art educators in the future. To think about this requires that we consider how current social forces are uncovering and constructing new potentialities and possibilities for the practices of art and art education.In Lowenfeld at Hampton (1939-1946): Empowerment, Resistance, Activism, and Pedagogy, Ann Holt looks at one of art education's most influential figures, Viktor Lowenfeld. Holt interested in an aspect of Lowenfeld's legacy that not usually thematized. Focusing on the years spent at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, Holt positions Lowenfeld's pedagogical engagement as a practice of social justice, grounded in efforts against institutionalized racism.''While doing so, Holt not only focuses on Lowenfeld's work to support his students in the face of well-entrenched racism; she also draws our attention to issues of historiography. Her article challenges us to consider how are created, whose pasts are deemed worth remembering in histories and why, and whose interests are served by leaving out the messiness of political turmoil, cultural conflict, racism, and class discrimination.In a similar vein, Gina Wenger's History Matters: Children's Art Education Inside the Japanese American Internment Camp reflects on the role played by art education during a particular period of political and cultural turmoil. Through archival research and interviews with survivors who were relocated and interned in camps during WWII, Wenger examines the practice of art education within these camps and the role it played in the cultural assimilation of young Japanese Americans. …

Lowenfeld at Hampton (1939-1946): Empowerment, Resistance, Activism, and Pedagogy

Viktor Lowenfeld (1903-1960) has been abundantly documented as having influenced art teaching in the United States. Scarce attention, however, has been given to the significant and remarkable advancements he made to resist structures of institutionalized racism and promote inter-racial cooperation. Lowenfeld was a mentor to several notable African American artists, who participated in his art program at the Hampton Institute, a historically Black college in Virginia (now Hampton University). While recognized in African American art history texts, it has been largely understated in histories of art education even though extant archival materials authenticate this aspect of his career. This article, based on archival research, revises Lowenfeld’s story to include his connection to his African American students whose agency shaped the art world and helped create social change. It also raises questions concerning the collection, documentation, and preservation of the historical record in furthering knowledge about art education that reflects inclusivity, plurality, and social justice perspectives.

Creative Intelligence, Creative Practice: Lowenfeld Redux

Volume 1, No. 2, of Studies in Art Education, appearing in spring 1960, included an article by Viktor Lowenfeld titled “ Creative Intelligence.” Here, he highlighted his belief in the importance of creative intelligence to human functioning, linking it to creative practice as represented most purely in the artworks of children and untutored artists. The present article written with over 60 years of hindsight, offers a gentle critique of Lowenfeld’s theory of creative intelligence as exemplified within his concepts of developmental stages, growth components, and final outcomes. Yet, by paring away some of his outmoded surfaces, there lurks within Lowenfeld’s seminal offering to art education the enduring idea that creative practice offers ways of knowing and world-building that enliven knowledge through acts of personal generativity.

Viktor Lowenfeld as Mentor

Viktor Lowenfeld as Mentor

Viktor Lowenfeld as Mentor

Viktor Lowenfeld as Mentor

Questioning the Role of Art in Education: Paradoxical Views of Preservice Teachers

Many of the preservice elementary teachers with whom I work begin to contemplate questions such as, What is my role in the teaching of art? and What is the role of art in education and society? while enrolled in the elementary art methods course required for teacher certification. As a form of critical inquiry, contemplation of such questions can be an important and integral part of these preservice elementary teachers' professional development. Moreover, recent research has shown that preand inservice teachers and students can use questions or questioning as strategies to develop critical thinking, increase cognitive or metacognitive activities, improve comprehension, focus attention, organize new material, and enhance learning in general.1 In this article, however, the focus is not upon the strategic use of preservice elementary teachers' questions to enhance learning, but rather, on my use of such questions to gain important and evaluative insights into the field of art education. Because preservice elementary teachers consider themselves to be outsiders looking in on the field, they can offer fresh and valuable perspectives to those of us inside it. These perspectives, of course, are shaped by preservice teachers' experiences of the elementary art methods course. Indeed, the particular texts used in the course serve to construct the lenses through which they look at art education and what it means to teach art at the elementary level. During the past several semesters, preservice elementary teachers enrolled in my courses have engaged in a form of critical inquiry as each kept a journal, reflecting on and questioning one of the following texts: Creative and Mental Growth (Viktor Lowenfeld and Lambert Brittain),2 Children and Their Art (Al Hurwitz and Michael Day),3 and Emphasis Art (F. Wachowiak).4 That is, 137 preservice elementary teachers enrolled in six sections of elementary art methods at two different institutions formulated questions

In Search of Lowenfeld's Proof That Coloring Books Are Harmful to Children

This article examines the claim, popularized by Viktor Lowenfeld, that coloring books are detrimental to the creative expression of children. Lowenfeld's basic argument is examined, and questions a...

Art Education Progress: A Field of Dichotomies or a Network of Mutual Support

The challenge to prepare the Studies Lecture for 1990, combined with freedom from daily academic concern, has given me more opportunity to reflect on my perspective on art education. Like all of us living through this extraordinary period in world history, watching intense social, political, and cultural readjustments, while contemplating their implications for this society, has been impelling and stirring. We have been forced to reassess our basic assumptions about the world and our interrelations with it. It requires flexibility with ideas to see these evolving connections in this transitional social arena. Not only the world scene but many aspects of our own society require rethinking. We are finally recognizing that this nation is far more diverse than we have been willing to accept; that minorities as a whole are no longer the minority in many urban areas; that the influx of new cultures is far greater than immigration data document; and that the basic ingredient of our society, the family, is undergoing transitions which ripple affect society as a whole. Being off campus we have missed dialogue about these tumultuous events with colleagues and students. I have missed discussing their impact on art and education, so I particularly welcome this invitation and your reactions. During my years of teaching, thoughtful graduate students often raised the question, "Just what is art education?" Trying to impress them with the importance of their own inquiry, my answer, in content, was "It is what we make it become." Years before, just after finishing my dissertation at Stanford, I went to an NAEA convention in New York City. There I first met Kenneth Beittel, and we shared our excitement with graduate research. He asked to take my dissertation to his great teacher Viktor Lowenfeld to read and then to meet with them the next morning. Lowenfeld's response was much the same that we were in our infancy as a field and that many steps, including mine, were needed to develop it. He was encouraging about the inquiry I was pursuing. This impressed me because, even though his perspectives were quite different than mine, his concepts of the field were more inclusive. It is in this more open context that I will pursue my presentation here.

Art Education Progress: A Field of Dichotomies or a Network of Mutual Support.

The challenge to prepare the Studies Lecture for 1990, combined with freedom from daily academic concern, has given me more opportunity to reflect on my perspective on art education. Like all of us living through this extraordinary period in world history, watching intense social, political, and cultural readjustments, while contemplating their implications for this society, has been impelling and stirring. We have been forced to reassess our basic assumptions about the world and our interrelations with it. requires flexibility with ideas to see these evolving connections in this transitional social arena. Not only the world scene but many aspects of our own society require rethinking. We are finally recognizing that this nation is far more diverse than we have been willing to accept; that minorities as a whole are no longer the minority in many urban areas; that the influx of new cultures is far greater than immigration data document; and that the basic ingredient of our society, the family, is undergoing transitions which ripple affect society as a whole. Being off campus we have missed dialogue about these tumultuous events with colleagues and students. I have missed discussing their impact on art and education, so I particularly welcome this invitation and your reactions. During my years of teaching, thoughtful graduate students often raised the question, Just what is art education? Trying to impress them with the importance of their own inquiry, my answer, in content, was It is what we make it become. Years before, just after finishing my dissertation at Stanford, I went to an NAEA convention in New York City. There I first met Kenneth Beittel, and we shared our excitement with graduate research. He asked to take my dissertation to his great teacher Viktor Lowenfeld to read and then to meet with them the next morning. Lowenfeld's response was much the same that we were in our infancy as a field and that many steps, including mine, were needed to develop it. He was encouraging about the inquiry I was pursuing. This impressed me because, even though his perspectives were quite different than mine, his concepts of the field were more inclusive. is in this more open context that I will pursue my presentation here.

The Subject Is Art

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

The Lowenfeld Lectures: Viktor Lowenfeld on Art Education and Therapy

(1984). The Lowenfeld Lectures: Viktor Lowenfeld on Art Education and Therapy. Art Therapy: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 90-90.

Approaching Artistic Sublimation in Low-Functioning Individuals

The treatment of low-functioning individuals in an adaptive art therapy program was conducted using the “art as therapy” approach. Both the theoretical formulations of Edith Kramer and Viktor Lowenfeld were used to devise practical strategies that addressed the clients intellectual and emotional handicaps. Emphasis upon the pursuit of both aesthetic and therapeutic goals is illustrated in a case treatment study that involved a severely retarded client with Down's syndrome. The author's contention is that in exceptional instances, these clients are capable of approaching artistic sublimation, and deriving the quoted benefits from such a process.

A Sequel: Selected European Influences on the Theory and Philosophy of Viktor Lowenfeld

The body of work that is Viktor Lowenfeld's legacy to contemporary art educators is widely recognized for its significance. What is less recognized is the foundation upon which this work was constructed. While Lowenfeld's theory and philosophy of art education were certainly his own, they were marked by elements of influence which are easily traced to numerous European researchers, teachers, philosophers, and theorists. The objectives of this paper are to direct attention to certain individuals of influence, to briefly survey relevant aspects of their work, and to discuss how these aspects of work influenced the art education theory and philosophy forwarded by Lowenfeld. In pursuing these objectives, this paper is a continuation a sequel of a previous one which recently appeared in Studies (Michael & Morris, 1985). Individuals of influence covered include: John Ruskin, Ebenezer Cooke, Corrado Ricci, Alfred Lichtwark, Oskar Wulff, William Stern, Georg Kerschensteiner, Franz Hartlaub, and Gustaf Britsch. Viewed from the perspective of this paper, Lowenfeld's legacy to contemporary art educators is actually twofold: (a) his work, in and of itself; and (b) his work as an extension of a rich European tradition of thought, research, and practice in art education.