Art History and Education. - book reviews

STEPHEN ADDISS AND MARY ERICKSON Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 2.56 pp.: 13 b/w ills. $39.95; $15.95 paper

When, in 1955, Erwin Panofsky recounted the development of art history in the United States, he turned to the early numbers of this periodical to illustrate the discipline's difficult birth:

At the beginning, the new discipline had to

fight its way out of an entanglement with

practical art instruction, art appreciation,

and that amorphous monster "general

education. " The early issues of the Art

Bulletin, founded in 1913 and now

recognized as the leading art-historical

periodical of the world, were chiefly devoted

to such topics as "What Instruction in Art

Should the College A.B. Course Offer to the

Future Layman?"; "The Value of Art in a

College Course"; "What People Enjoy in

Pictures"; or "Preparation of the Child for a

College Course in Art." Art history, as we

know it, sneaked in by the back door.(1)

Art history arrived first, and Panofsky adds, "characteristically," through the book reviews.(2) The Art Bulletin, then, is an ironic place for these four volumes to be reviewed: their presence here marks a momentary return of the repressed. Published, as each back cover notes, "with the assistance of the Getty Center for Education in the Arts," the four volumes--Art Education, Art History and Education, Aesthetics and Education, and Art Making and Education--comprise a series entitled "Disciplines in Art Education: Contexts of Understanding." Together, they ask much the same questions that were posed in the titles of the early Art Bulletin essays that Panofsky so easily skewered: what should grade-school and high-school children learn about art, at what age, and to what end? and how should art be taught? The questions do not strike me as unreasonable.

The Illinois series takes its name from Discipline-Based Art Education, a now decade-old movement in art education funded in many of its manifestations by the Getty Center. The prehistory of DBAE lies in the post-Sputnik push to teach the disciplines, to reform school-age science and math through the "participation in curriculum development by university scholars and scientists, men distinguished for their work at the frontiers of their respective disciplines," as Jerome Bruner wrote in 1960.(3) The disciplines were more than the source for Bruner's best minds, they were a remedy for the disconnectedness of classroom knowledge: each discipline has its own organizing principles that serve to structure information and guide inquiry. In 1966, art educator Manuel Barkan argued that while "the disciplines of art are of a different order" than Bruner's sciences, "artistic inquiry is not loose."(4) Following Edmund Feldman and, as Albert William Levi and Ralph A. Smith note in Art Education, recalling Panofsky, Barkan grounded artistic inquiry in the humanities:

The professional scholars of art--the artists,

the critics, the historians--would be models

for inquiry, because the kind of human

meaning questions they ask about art and

life, and the particular ways of conceiving

and acting on these questions are the kinds

of questions and ways of

acting that art instruction would be seeking

to teach students to ask and act upon.(5)

This division of labor among the academic professionals of art, along with the appeal to professional expertise, determines the authorship of the three books that carry the titular supplement and Education. Each is written by a representative of the discipline named in the title together with an art educator. Michael J. Parsons and H. Gene Blocker wrote their chapters together. The teams of Stephen Addiss and Mary Erickson and Maurice Brown and Diana Korzenik have divided their books, professionals in the front, teachers in the back, an arrangement that might be taken as an ideological picture of DBAE.(6)

As a program and a name, Discipline-Based Art Education was coined in 1984 by W. Dwaine Greer, director of the Getty's Institute for Education in the Visual Arts, in an article subtitled "Approaching Art as a Subject of Study."(7) But already in 1966, Arthur Efland writes, "it was Barkan's basic contention that the dominance of studio studies was a problem to be resolved."(8) As Greer's subtitle suggests--and as the title of a Getty Center publication of the same year, Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in American Schools, makes singularly clear--one of the intentions of DBAE was to dislodge art making, particularly that produced in the name of self-expression, from its position as the core of art education. Despite Barkan's inclusion of the artist in his list of professional scholars, the curricular goals of DBAE have implications for the way in which artists are treated throughout the series. Alongside a great deal of love expressed for creativity and for art objects and their significance, there is a mistrust of artists, an exasperation at their willfulness and at their refusal to make community-based objects, or even simply beautiful ones.