Nov 20th Session 6B

Presentation 1: Class, Revolution, and the Origins of American Art Education, Mark Boonshoft

In 1780, Major John André was the second most hated man in the United States.  The only person Americans despised more was Benedict Arnold, the treasonous American general who fed American battle plans to André, a British officer.  The night before he was hanged, André sketched a self portrait.  The next day, as André marched to the gallows, the class tensions were palpable.  American enlisted-men banged their muskets and cheered, but their commanding officers wept.  To the American officer corps, the fledgling elite of the infant republic, André was a model of gentlemanly refinement, sensibility, and grace.  The self-portrait was only the most dramatic and conspicuous example of André’s character, which the officers deeply admired.

The officers’ veneration of an enemy officer obviously presented a number of problems, but they still tried to learn how to be like him.  In the 1780s, “French academies”—which taught French, dancing, fencing, and the visual arts—began opening in major American cities and well-developed hinterland areas.  The schools catered to former Army officers and other presumed leaders of the young nation, and their families.  These so-called “ornamental” accomplishments had no place in a nation guided by civic-republican ideology, which ostensibly celebrated austerity, virtue and equality, and condemned luxury.  Nonetheless, American elites believed the United States could not command diplomatic legitimacy in the eyes of Europe unless its leaders lived up to the cultural standards of their European contemporaries.  Art education, in short, was a lightning rod for debates about class and social order in early America.

This paper is based on an extensive examination of American newspapers from 1740-1800, which are available through Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers database.  The majority of my primary sources are newspaper advertisements for drawing schools and French academies.  These rarely-examined sources allow me to reconstruct the cost, curriculum, and justifications for visual arts education in the period.  Occasionally, newspapers also published essays and satirical commentaries that considered the merits of certain types of education, many of which offer insights into debates about the place of art and other ornamental subjects in early American education.   

The paper provides a new framework for understanding the origins and nature of art education in the early United States.  Previous work has tended to look at the Enlightenment intellectual heritage that shaped American ideas about art and art education.  I explore early art education on the ground and illuminate the political context in which it emerged.  In the process, the paper connects the study of art education to many of the revolutionary era’s most fundamental historical and historiographical problems: the tensions between democracy and aristocracy; the competing impulses of austerity and refinement; and the interconnections between the processes of state-building and the formation of post-colonial national identity.  Many of the issues that art education raised in the early republic, especially class tensions, continue to shape debates about the purpose of teaching art in the present day.

Presentation 2: From the Drawing Classroom to the Séance Room, Justin Clark

One day in the spring of 1852, the Boston Universalist minister and reformer John Murray Spear found his hand compelled by an external spiritual force to create a series of drawings.  His hand began to draw itself, then other parts of his body, and then labeled the anatomy with various spiritual mottos.  Through this drawing, Spear learned, he was being sent on a mission to heal the sick and spread the news about Spiritualism.  Though long acquainted with Boston’s trance-medium community, as well as members of the newer Spiritualist movement, Spear had only begun a few weeks earlier to receive messages from beyond.  But confirmation of his mediumship came from the sixteen subsequent drawings that issued involuntarily from his hand over the next few weeks, “beautiful diagrams of things which he, and no one else on earth, so far as I am aware, ever saw, or heard of, before.”  This paper roots Spear and other spirit-drawing mediums in the “art crusade” that had overtaken Boston in recent decades, in order to argue that drawing education played a critical role in the development of Spiritualism.  

Spear’s productions emerged at time when a growing number of local private academies and common schools had begun to teach drawing, at least on an informal basis.  Even before the passage of the Massachusetts Drawing Act of 1870, these schools furnished talent for the city’s rapidly expanding graphics industry, encouraged the development of new amateur exhibition venues, and helped drive a nation-wide drawing-manual publishing boom that placed over 145,000 drawing manuals into the hands of ordinary Americans between 1820 and 1860.  

In the process, the amateur study of drawing promised middle-class Bostonians entrée to a sophisticated world of urban connoisseurship, while simultaneously appealing to their opposing desire to remain rooted in the “natural” sensibility of the rural countryside that a substantial portion of that middle class had abandoned only recently. As a consequence, Bostonians began to idealize the untrained eye of the rural amateur, who learned her craft with a minimum of formal instruction, and pursued it strictly out of her pious love of nature, rather than for any economic or social motive.  This amateur ideal served as a crucial model for the largely untrained spirit-drawing mediums who emerged at mid-century.  For their followers, the spirit-drawing mediums’ lack of artistic polish proved that the spirit-world was aiding their more sophisticated productions.  Professionals might fake spirit-drawings; the spirit-drawings of amateurs were harder to dismiss.  By tracing the careers of several amateurs from the classroom to the séance room, this paper demonstrates the overlooked role that antebellum urban art education played in legitimating one of the 19th century’s most important religious movements.

Presentation 3: The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia: The Practice of Classification and Representation of Asian Art, Eunjung Choi

This paper examines the purpose of exhibiting arts from foreign nations and how East Asian art was represented to the American audience at the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia, or in short, the Centennial. It also searches what educational and moral value the Centennial imposed on the viewers, focusing on how these artworks were classified and how this portrayal affected the audience’s perception of cultures of “others.” In addition, the paper explores how the educational aspect of the exhibition, derived from the practice of classification and the idea of progress, prescribed the representation of Asian culture.

The Centennial brought together the vast industrial and artistic achievements from the U.S. and foreign nations and attracted over ten million visitors. With the idea of progress as the main concept of the classification, art was given a separate building for its presentation as it embodied the highest intellectual achievements by men. However, it was mainly the works of Western European countries that were considered to be “art,” and were thus displayed at the art gallery, which was known as the Memorial Hall. The spatial representation of “art” excluded artworks from Asia by displaying them at the Main Building instead, which mostly displayed industrial, craft, agricultural products, and specimens of natural resources. Asian art was seen as more of a “craft” rather than “fine arts,” which the audience understood in the framework of everyday life, and the culture of East Asia was understood as “exotic ways of life.”

The Centennial attempted to implement a scientific system of classification for the exhibition, and the issues of organization, arrangement, and installation methods. By offering this structure as a guideline to interpret the objects on display, the exhibition compelled the audience to accept the idea of “order” as the foundation of social reality. The administrative department’s decision of choosing the objects to be collected and displayed and organizing and arranging these objects constructed the intellectual frameworks in which those objects and the cultures that produced them should be interpreted. And this framework sustained the understanding of Asia through terms such as “primitive,” “exotic,” and “anthropologic,” in relation to the era dominated by industrialism, nationalism, and imperialism. Therefore, the cultural identity and differences of Asia was governed under this structure.

The Centennial functioned as an institution of popular education, and its main educational effects combined the roles of a museum, market, and school. The significance of this paper lies in seeking how the practice of classification was utilized to facilitate the audience’s learning about cultural representation—an issue which could also be discussed in relation to today’s ethnographic or art museum. This historical research paper consults various primary sources about the Centennial such as the official catalog and reports, illustrated surveys, and newspapers and magazine articles composed around the time of the exhibition. It also refers to a number of secondary publications such as books and journals reflecting on the event.