When the NEF set up shop in South Africa in the winter of 1934, it brought a wealth of knowledge about new pedagogical movements, psychological innovation, and ethnography’s confidence about the way societies functioned. As we have seen, it also brought speakers who bemoaned the passage of the world’s once-varied visual cultures in the face of industrial manufacture. Grossert echoed these concerns, writing that however accomplished it might be, local artistic production could not compete with “the mass produced utensils and furniture from modern European controlled factories.”9 Factories made useful goods but not art. As Walter Benjamin famously argued, mechanical reproduction threatened fundamentally to alter the production and experience of art. Benjamin was particularly concerned about photography’s capacity to displace painting; if anything, the threat that manufacturing posed to African craft–cum-art was even more profound.10 The year 1934 stood on the precipice of a global crisis in the arts, a Dutch educationist, J. J. Van Der Leeuw, had told the delegates gathered in Cape Town. Machines were displacing traditional human activities, and it fell to the pedagogues to figure out how best to preserve that innate creative spark—what he called “spontaneous self-activity”—that made humans unique.11
Given the prevailing undercurrent of concern, it was perhaps not surprising that the best-attended talks of the two-month NEF conference were given by Arthur Lismer, a Canadian art education expert who was working as the education director of the Toronto Art Gallery. In Toronto, Lismer’s primary job was to use the Gallery to motivate the masses of Torontonians to create. “Art has been placed in a water-tight compartment, separate and sacred to the initiated few,” he claimed. Art did not necessarily rot within museums, but neither did it live. As he wrote elsewhere, “dead and stately halls hung with . . . priceless masterpieces of other days feel the need of something more than sightseers and occasional visitors.” Sequestered and set apart from everyday life, art lacked oxygen. The problem was not with the objects, Lismer explained, but with people’s failure to appreciate the vital role that objects played. “The Art Gallery is more . . . than sticks, metal girders and concrete,” he asserted, “it is a living manifestation of the expression that life is not all depression and material possessions, that there are still things in life that we need to see more and more, still new experiences in adventuring into new lands and into the heart of people everyone, through an understanding of their arts.” Art was under threat, but Lismer insisted it remained “the most universal voice to-day,” something in which all communities needed to share.12
Figure 3.3 Children’s Art Centre Class at the Art Gallery of Toronto, July 1937, unknown photographer, with the permission of the Art Gallery of Ontario
Lismer was especially keen that children be exposed to art and encouraged to produce it. He brought an exhibition of children’s art to South Africa. “We are slowly emerging into a wider consciousness of the true function of Art,” he counseled his audience. “We are beginning to claim the privileges and opportunities that the participation in the experience of Art offers to all.” Art was not a matter of specialized training or wealth or privilege. Rather, art was about the “growth and sustenance of people”—adults and children alike—“in daily life.”13 The social work of art worked best when begun early. Thus, Lismer insisted, the role of art and art education in industrial society ought to be a matter of widespread concern.
The American educationist and philosopher John Dewey was in the audience in Johannesburg in 1934. Dewey had recently begun to write on these very same issues, reflecting on his time as education director at suburban Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. Like Lismer, Dewey’s patron, Albert Barnes, was well known for critiquing staid, tired galleries for treating works of art like religious icons. Barnes insisted that art’s value was its insight into the human condition, which meant that works of art needed to be shared, considered, and experienced, not cut off from view. What was needed was “necessary insight,” to understand the work of art, as he put it, and it was that insight that the foundation sought to generate.14
As Barnes’s educational director, John Dewey had begun to reflect on and develop this “necessary insight” about art and society. His studies brought art, insight, and society together. Art, he explained, reflected human insight and initiative, and it produced human insight and initiative, without which the progress of human societies was impossible. The problem, Dewey wrote in Art as Experience (1934), was not that mechanization undermined the unique value of the work of art but that it made artificial the natural relationship between human minds and the objects of their imagination. “Objects that were in the past valued and significant because of their place in the life of the community now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin,” Dewey explained. Museums exacerbated this by telling tales of individual genius and extolling the mystic values of fine art, with the result that works of art were too frequently “set apart from common experience [to] serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture,” not as sources of insight, available and inspirational to all.15
Dewey’s analysis suggested that concepts such as “art for art’s sake” obscured the fact that all aesthetic objects were historical practices, hardwired into the functioning of the human organism within its environment. Art was how people worked within and through their physical world, and works of art revealed and reflected humans’ understanding of their context. To be educated in art was thus to learn how better to be within both nature and society.16 Here in particular, the American’s ideas dovetailed neatly with the gathering South African consensus that crafts ought to be treated as valued and valuable works of art. Like Jack Grossert, Dewey critiqued the art industry for failing to recognize how, in the artisanal past, “domestic utensils, furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars, pots, bows, spears, were wrought with such delighted care.” The work of art was everywhere where people made things and lived among them, and “such things were enhancements of the processes of everyday life.”17
What made objects aesthetic was not their inherent beauty or technical accomplishment but the ways in which their creators had lived in and through them.18 Life, Dewey explained, is ongoing, flowing like a river toward death, but that is not how we experience it; rather, we narrate our lives, carve discernable experiences out of the medium of experience, and tell stories “so rounded out that [their] close is a consummation and not a cessation,” even as our bodies continue downstream.19 To create an object is to narrate time: creation has a beginning and an end; it is a discrete and therefore knowable, discernable experience. This matters, Dewey argued in the early 1930s, because without such experiences, people cannot come to grasp their selves amid the onrushing of time. Art objects are concrete manifestations of the human reflection on (and therefore knowledge of) experience; objects are consciousness, embodied. The work of art is thus work of the self.
But why did this embodied, objective humanity matter in Dewey’s own context? To what would such selves amount? Dewey’s ideas about art and education were not uncontested. Indeed, in his writing he invoked other theorists, among them Franz Cižek, an Austrian educationist who was well known for proposing that schools ought to cultivate their pupils’ “free expression.” Cižek saw art differently than did Dewey. As the Austrian understood it, art was a means by which individuals developed their own selves, period. To interfere in students’ expression was to risk damaging their psyches and their best selves. According to Cižek, individual attainment and expression were the sine qua non of art education. Dewey disagreed, suggesting instead that art education served society’s ultimate purpose: integration of the individual within his or her environment, as a better functioning member of the community.20 In the context of the Great Depression in particular, partisans of the Deweyesque perspective felt that, as the education historian Arthur Efland put it, “[though] the psychological adjustment of the child was . . . important, the survival of society itself was also a priority.”21 Art education did not need to stop with expressive selves; it needed to go further to promote an expressive society. To borrow from Grossert and Junod, art education was about the harmony in social relations