History with Attitude: A Subjective Tour of Studies in American Graphic Design Education
Ellen Mazur Thomson
In his Theatres of Memory, the Oxford historian Raphael Samuel reaffirmed the power of the present in directing our understanding of the past: “History is an argument about the past, as well as the record of it, and its terms are forever changing, sometimes under the influence of developments in adjacent fields of thought, sometimes . . . as a result of politics. . . .” History, he argued, must continually be revised, “stamped with the ruling passions of its time,” yet to be convincing it must create “a consecutive narrative out of fragments, imposing order on chaos, and producing images far clearer than any reality could be.” Historical studies that engage and excite us use the past to inform our present preoccupations and interests. Unlike critical appreciations of designers and objects (works of connoisseurship) or chronicles of styles and schools, recent studies in graphic design education have posed questions and constructed versions of the past that lend depth and complexity to contemporary issues.
These studies have re-created histories of graphic design education that confront issues of interest to contemporary practitioners: the status of graphic designers in American society; the benefits of establishing a core curriculum to define the professional; what is, or should be, the relationship between classroom instruction and the needs of design firms or advertising agencies. These issues are rooted in the history of the profession. They pose significant questions about the relationship between graphic design and the larger society. In addition, and not, I would argue, incidentally, these studies are based on a wide variety of primary documentation, published and unpublished, that falls outside the scope of what is currently considered design history. This essay touches briefly on some of the studies that ask interesting questions about these materials.
One of the most engaging of these recent works was based on children’s drawings, student artwork, magazines, ledgers, and instruction books the author found in the collection of the Cross family. In Drawn to Art: A Nineteenth-Century American Dream (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), Diana Korzenik followed the members of a New England family as they moved from rural New Hampshire to careers in Boston’s printing establishment and art schools. She was able to show that the Crosses, like many others between 1850 and 1900, saw art education as preparation for work in a new economic system. Drawing was “an avenue by which industrialization could be integrated into culture.”
Design School Studies
The value of design to society has been a perennial topic in design education. Educators and design professionals alike have written about the graphic arts’ contribution to the economic well-being of the nation—or, conversely, the degree to which the arts are corrupted by commercialism and democratization. In the nineteenth century, this was a central issue for those in the industrial drawing movement, a movement of importance to graphic design history because it shaped the training of illustrators, engravers, type designers, and printers. In William Minifie’s Popular Lectures on Drawing and Design (Baltimore: School of Design of the Maryland Institute, 1854), he contended that the study of drawing and design is “not as a mere accessory that may be dispensed with at pleasure, but one of the fundamental branches of education.” Minifie maintained that design education would directly increase opportunities in manufacturing and cure unemployment. Similarly, Walter Smith, an Englishman trained in the Arts and Crafts system, was hired by the state of Massachusetts to administer its 1870 law that required instruction in industrial or mechanical drawing for all students in the public school system. Smith’s Art Education: Scholastic and Industrial (Boston: Osgood, 1873) is a fulsome justification of this provision. A decade later, the federal government sponsored Isaac Edward Clarke’s six-volume Art and Industry (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Education, 1885–98). Perhaps the first great work on art education for industry, it was appropriately monumental. Clarke passionately believed in the importance of instruction in the applied arts and gathered vast amounts of data and documents that he reproduced with detailed curricula of individual design schools, many of which began during this period.
Twenty years later, Charles R. Richards’s Art in Industry (New York: Macmillan, 1922) combined in one volume information on design education, based on a survey of close to six hundred instructional programs throughout the United States and Europe. He described trade schools, schools connected with colleges and museums, and art schools that gave instruction in graphic design.
Modern studies of design schools go beyond institutional histories to explore the impetus for their creation and the context in which they operated. Nancy Austin in “Educating American Designers for Industry, 1853–1903” (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 105, 1 [1995]: 211–30) uses the early history of the Rhode Island School of Design as a model to examine the beginnings of design schools in the United States—as institutions created during the industrial revolution to transform the training of artists to meet the needs of machine manufacturing. Austin’s thesis—based in part on this material—is that the origins of consumer culture and the commercialization of art lie in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and occurred as part of the industrial revolution.
Not surprisingly, feminism has also contributed to the focus of contemporary art-education history. Using admissions records, published catalogs, census data, and personal interviews, Nina de Angeli Walls analyzed changes (over nearly a century) of the class and geographic origins, ethnicity, age, and aspirations of the women who attended the Philadelphia School of Design. “Educating Women for Art and Commerce: The Philadelphia School of Design, 1848–1932,” (History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 3 [Fall 1994]: 329–55), unlike so much design history, combines statistical data with other materials, enabling the author to describe both quantitatively and qualitatively the women who attended professional design schools and the reasons they did so. Walls demonstrates that despite the change in student population, women used vocational training in the applied arts to gain entry into the middle class or maintain their status within it.
The Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (1953–68) is the subject of an unusual study that uses documents of the period and comments on them by presenting—on the bottom half of the same page—contemporary interviews and essays by former teachers and students. Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, edited by Herbert Lindinger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), not only describes the school’s curriculum, but the theory behind it and how the experience, in both personal and political dimensions, was perceived by participants then and thirty years later.
The Importance of Theory
Education theories are ultimately based in the philosophies of knowledge— explanations of visual perception, how we see, and how we understand and use what we see. Successive theories are based on new understandings of the way humans learn. The education philosophies of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Arthur Wesley Dow, John Dewey, and, in the mid-twentieth century, Victor Lowenthal set the terms of the American art curriculum. Yet, design historians have, for the most part, ignored them. Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) is the exception. Dow’s emphasis on formal elements and his direct influence on advertising photography give his theoretical writing contemporary interest. In his hugely popular Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1899), Dow emphasized the application of abstract visual principles rather than technique. Two of Dow’s pupils, the photographer Clarence White and painter Max Weber, incorporated Dow’s theory into the curriculum of the Clarence H. White’s School of Photography, where pioneers in advertising photography, including Anton Bruehl, Paul Outerbridge Jr., and Margaret Watkins, studied.
Most recently, Dow, White, and the school have been the subject of several studies written by historians of photography interested in White because he represents an alternative to the aesthetic tradition of Alfred Stieglitz and the photo-secessionists. Bonnie Yochelson’s “Clarence H. White Reconsidered: An Alternative to the Modernist Aesthetic of Straight Photography” (Studies of Visual Communication 9, 4 [Fall 1983]: 23–44), Susan Doniger’s essay, “The Clarence H. White School of Photography” in Collective Vision (Athens: Ohio University Art Gallery, 1986) and Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography, edited by Marianne Fulton (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), trace the application of Dow’s philosophy.
Instructional Texts
Perhaps nothing goes out of style more quickly, or is more revealing of its period, than the instructional text. For historians, they are invaluable to understanding how design was taught, what topics were included, what skills were considered important, and what styles were favored. Yet, most of these texts have not been subjected to scholarly analysis.
The exception is a fascinating study based on nineteenth-century instructional texts that focused on the early proponents of the industrial drawing movement. Peter Marzio examined the dilemma faced by late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art educators who wanted to find a role for the visual arts in a young democracy. His The Art Crusade: An Analysis of American Drawing Manuals (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976) describes the controversy over drawing instruction in the public schools.
As part of this movement, Louis Prang, the great chromolithographer and publisher, worked with the Massachusetts Commissioner of Art Education, Walter Smith, in developing a series of teachers’ manuals. Prang expanded his operation to publish a large number of graduated lesson plans for both elementary and high school classes. Michael Clapper’s “Art, Industry, and Education in Prang’s Chromolithograph Factory” (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 105, 1 [1995]: 145–62) analyzes Prang’s publishing company as it influenced ideas about the use of art in industry and as a business enterprise.
Unlike Prang’s publications, which were written for public school teachers and students, the United Typothetae of America sponsored a series of texts for use in trade schools. Originally entitled “Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices” and later the “U.T.A. Library,” these publications provided technical information on machinery and materials, presswork, binding, printing history, accounting practices, and English grammar. They also addressed topics in design as in Laurence B. Siegfried’s Typographic Design in Advertising (Washington, D.C.: Committee on Education, United Typothetae of America, 1930). The influence of these texts has yet to be explored.
If many of the studies cited seem to use design textbooks to illuminate cultural and social history, Edward R. Tufte’s Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1997) may be said to reverse the process and focus on the graphic strategies of nondesign texts. Tufte shows, among much else, how illustrations in textbooks on magic, dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, could add the element of time or multiple points of view, could “make verbs visible.” Using books that were written to induct the would-be conjuror into the routines and skills of the magician, Tufte demonstrates how their graphics went beyond mere description to show both the trick as seen by the audience and the sequence of operations the magician used to achieve his illusions.
Autobiography and Biography
Autobiographies almost always include accounts of the writer’s education. Subjective by their very nature, they cannot be taken as a general picture, but they often give insights into the learning process that more objective studies miss. Unlike most histories, they trace the change from apprenticeship to school instruction.
Some of the earliest books describe apprenticeships rather than schooling. John Thayer, in Astir: A Publisher’s Life Story (Boston: Small Maynard, 1910), recalls his training as an apprentice in a Boston print-shop composing room and how he expanded his skills by moving to Chicago to work and train in larger printing establishments. Will Bradley, in Will Bradley: His Chapbook (New York: Typophiles, 1955), recounts how, starting as a twelve year old in a small Michigan printing plant, he rose from printer’s devil to master printer to self-taught designer, poring over magazine illustrations and exchanging ideas with friends. A rarely cited Goudy biography, Bernard Lewis’s Behind the Type: The Life Story of Frederic W. Goudy (Pittsburgh: Department of Printing, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1941), was written in cooperation with the subject and shows that Goudy learned many type production and printing skills by working with craftsmen in a variety of trades.
This transition from apprenticeship to school is explored by several authors in “The Cultivation of Artists in Nineteenth-Century America,” a special issue of the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (105, 1 [1995]). Donald C. O’Brien’s “Training in the Workshop of Abner Reed” (pp. 45–69) uses three generations of family records, including unpublished diaries, letters, trade cards, and copperplate engravings, to reconstruct “the sequence and nature of the work of apprentices” in an engraving shop. David Tatham examines “The Lithographic Workshop, 1825–50” (pp. 71–78) to show that master craftsmen were forced to assume a teaching role because of the tremendous need for skilled draftsmen. Ann Prentice Wagner’s “The Graver, the Brush, and the Ruling Machine: The Training of Late-Nineteenth-Century Wood Engravers” (pp. 167–92) describes the gender differences in training engravers as well as the consequences of introducing photo-graphic methods of reproduction.
Conclusion
Taken together, these studies create a very different sense of American graphic design from that presented in standard works on the subject. The impact of Ruskin and Morris in the nineteenth century or European modernism in this century are not ignored, but they are shown to be only part of a complex evolution. This evolution is complex because no single narrative thread ties graphic design history from its past to the present. It is complex also in that the influences operating at any particular time on education and on design came from a wide variety of forces both within and outside the profession.