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The Autobiographical Lectures of Some Prominent Art Educators
Edited by Ralph Raunft
National Art Education Association, Reston, VA, U.S.A., 2001.
370 pp., paper
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart , IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
During the past quarter century, an interesting series of books was produced, titled The History of Psychology in Autobiography, in which prominent psychologists were invited to provide accounts of their own training and influences, to describe how they came to achieve what they did. This book contains similar statements about the lives and motivations of 27 leading art educators, among them such familiar names as Victor Lowenfeld, Rudolf Arnheim and Edmund Burke Feldman. With the exception of essays on Arnheim and Henry Schaefer-Simmern, all the selections are autobiographical and came from a series of lectures, called "Autobiographical Lectures of Outstanding Art Educators," that began in 1972 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. As with most anthologies, the chief virtue of this one is the rich variety of its entries, combined with the feeling of presence that comes from hearing a first-hand account of the past. Arnheim, for example, recalls a stray bullet (which he still has on his writing desk) that crashed through the window of his parents' home in Berlin in 1918. Eugene Grisby, Jr., remembers dancing the jitterbug at the Savoy Club (where he also sketched the dancers) to the music of Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. Lowenfeld was a musical prodigy, and a student of Oskar Kokoschka. June King McFee was influenced by Alexander Archipenko and the New Bauhaus. Nearly all the authors have vivid memories of specific moments in childhood when adults encouraged (or discouraged) their artistic appetites. When Feldman's mother, for example, took him with his drawings to a local artist and asked for advice, the artist replied, "Mrs. Feldman, your boy wants to be an artist. He doesn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman." And he then did his best to persuade her "that being an artist was not the worst thing in the world."
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)
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