The history of art appreciation education has received increased attention since a 1985 Getty Center for Education in the Arts' report entitled, Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. The Getty report challenges teachers to reform art education, to shift from viewing art as a tool for self expression to art as a body of knowledge based on the four disciplines of art history, art criticism, aesthetics, and art production. One hundred years ago, classroom teachers promoted the study of reproductions of art in a movement called picture study. This dissertation compares the picture study movement, and its remnants extant in the progressive era, to the discipline-based art education movement of today.
Period textbooks from three sources provide the primary data about early art appreciation education. First, a discrete picture study pedagogy is established through an analysis of three textbooks devoted solely to picture study. Second, an analysis of ten general art education textbooks from the progressive era shows that art appreciation remained an integral part of an overcrowded art curriculum. Lowenfeld's seminal Creative and Mental Growth shows a shift in attitude toward art appreciation in a text that has been regarded as having only negative bearing on the art appreciation movement. Finally, the contemporary discipline-based art education movement is chronicled and cross-compared to its forebears.
The cross comparison is based on the following: philosophical foundations, approaches to curriculum, teacher audience and media, and format options. The researcher argues that the picture study movement of one hundred years ago and the discipline-based art education movement of today share an essentialist philosophy and imply a shared pedagogy, thereby establishing an important historical and conceptual niche for a heretofore neglected movement in art education history.
