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of American art already glows with the splendid promise of the day. One of our art critics has said,

When the vast mind of America, expressed already in invention, speaks through art, will not the whole world join in its applause? And may not the magnificent lead which America has taken in mechanics be regarded as a prophecy of the time to come in art? To be sure Paris is considered the best place to study art now, but is was to Munich that our older men went, and before that time Rome was art's fountain head. In the ceaseless shifting may not some American city become the next art center? Not that it will come by chance; it must be the result of growth; and art education in our schools can do much to promote the growth which is to mean greater culture for our land. Even some foreigners look to America as the future art center. Edmon Aman-Jean, the French artist, says:

My conviction is that like Venice the United States will have one day, the most magnificent school of painting in the world. The Old World is effete; the United States a splendid spectacle of activity. Venice also began by industry and commerce, had sailors before painters, and was obliged to acquire opulence and dominion before she could cry a school of art.

The natural resources of our country have been marvelously developed in the interests of industry and commerce, but the growth of art is yet in its incipiency. We have as yet no national art in America, but that we shall have, I doubt not. Public opinion must first be changed, however, as must the attitude of our government. Let us hope that the children who are having the culture side trained by art education will grow up into a constituency which will demand legislators who have ceased to look upon art as a luxury but rather as a necessity to the righteous growth of our nation; legislators who recognize and demonstrate the patriotism of art as well as of courage; legislators who perceive that a nation's ideals find permanent abode in her arts; legislators who will foster the arts even as they are fostered, nourished, and safeguarded in France and Germany, in Spain and Russia. Art education so relates itself to everyday life that the youth of our land when grown to man's estate can and will think of something besides trade and traffic, will have some perception of the "strange, sweet beauty which came down to Raphael and the holy Angelica," and having that perception they will so work that one day we shall have our own Raphaels and Bellinis, our own Angelos and Tintorettos. Let us rejoice that we are facing the sunrise and not the sunset of our culture!

THE RELATION OF ART EDUCATION TO EVERYDAY LIFEFROM THE UTILITARIAN SIDE

ARTHUR HENRY CHAMBERLAIN, THROOP POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, PASADENA, CAL.

One is reminded at the outset of the definition of culture as given by Bosenquet. He says:

Culture is the habit of mind instinct with purpose, conscious of the continuity and connection of human events, able and industrious, capable of discerning the great from the trivial.

Applying this definition of culture to the subject of art education, I find it difficult indeed to dissociate in thought the utilitarian view from the culture standpoint. "Culture," in the language of Bosenquet, "is the habit of mind instinct with purpose," and purpose points to utility; it is "able and industrious," and this again implies utility, or use; it is "capable of discerning the great from the trivial," a consummation of the most truly utilitarian value. In a word, the relation that art education bears to everyday life from the culture side, that it bears also from the utilitarian side..

But what do we mean by the utilitarian in art? When we endeavor to analyze our conception of the term utility we have a task far from simple. We are prone to consider in an out-of-hand manner that the utilities are those things, objects, or attributes that can be put to immediate material use. Anything that may be used to our own, or to the advantage of others, anything that contributes to our physical needs would at once be classed as a utility. The utilitarian view is, to the common mind, opposed to the educational or the aesthetic side; it is the bread-and-butter conception. Utilitarianism in the popular sense refers to trade; it bespeaks the commercial spirit; it has to do with coal and iron, shovel and pick, cotton and coffee, steam and electricity.

If this view was, in any narrow sense, the true one, such a discussion as this now before us were impossible. If culture and ability were two distinctly different phases of our problem, art would have no relation to either. All legitimate education is both cultural and utilitarian in character, for what is truly the latter must, perforce, be the former, and the everyday life of the individual is influenced more than he can say by true art, whenever and however it may appear. We mean by art education the appreciation and development of the art spirit in the schools and out of them.

How great an effect art education has upon the utilitarian side perhaps cannot be told. As a tool we think of language as the all-important element in the progress of the race. President Butler says in his introduction to Chubbs's The Teaching of English:

From one point of view the significance of the development of modern education can best be estimated by the progress of the mother-tongue toward the central place in formal instruction. When the study of the mother-tongue and its literature is made the core of the curriculum, education is something quite different from that training in which a foreign, perhaps an ancient, tongue holds the chief place. No people is intellectually independent until it has a language and literature all its own, worthy to be an educational instrument and an educational end.

Just as the language of a people, both spoken and written, furnishes the key to its future development, and, as President Butler says, should hold the central place in formal instruction, so in a lesser degree and perhaps in a more fundamental sense, art performs the same function. It cannot be denied that a people is intellectually independent only when it has an art, that is, an appreciation of art, an appreciation so keen that the moral, intellectual, and commercial life is advantaged thereby.

Art that is capable of making its appeal through utility will be appreciated;

whenever it is accepted as having value from the utilitarian side, it will make its appeal to culture. True appreciation is not simply a matter of development, of evolution, of education, altho the more complete the knowledge the more perfect the ideal. The real in art may be appreciated at once. This may perhaps be stating in another way, that only the real is art; hence true art can always be appreciated.

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine

That lights the path one little step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Teach then the inward light of faith to shine,
Whereby alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Permit me therefore to take the ground that true art cannot exist aside and apart from the useful. This implies that all useful things are beautiful altho there are degrees both of utility and of beauty. But of two things, otherwise equally good, the one most beautiful will serve its purpose best. The crude clay water jug of the primitive savage, fashioned around a basket of woven rushes, was indeed an article of use, and not without artistic merit. The delicately fashioned vase of the Greek, designed for exactly the same purpose and with a capacity equal to that of the clay jug, but combining symmetry and perfect lines, was by far the best piece of work from a utilitarian point of view. The water jug is forgotten by all save the archaeologist, but the vase form is used today as it has been used through all the centuries past. Because it pleases the eye, its market value is greater than that of the other, it will be used as a model while the other will not; it will have an effect upon the life of the individual that the other cannot have-an effect beneficial from both mental and material standpoints.

There is one glory of the sun, and a glory of the moon, and another of the stars; there is likewise an art of strength, an art of simplicity, an art of line, form, and color, and all combine in use, which is the art itself.

Beauty in form, in color, in musical note, reached a high standard of perfection in the life of the old Greek and Egyptian; in fact, with all of the boasted superiority of our present-day civilization we have never excelled the Greek in his power to depict line and form or the Egyptian in his ability to produce abstract color. Music, painting, and sculpture, have, however, until a recent day, been conceded to comprehend the fine arts. When architecture became an art, then, in a measure, was the utilitarian view considered. It remained for the applied arts, or the so-called industrial arts, to clearly point the way of the relation of art to utility.

We have had pictured to us the master Angelo as he toiled day after day and month by month until the Sistine Chapel was complete, a marvel to all the world and a monument to the creative powers of the man; we have stood ⚫ silent before the incomparable Madonna of Raphael, being drawn again and again to view, with reverence and wonder, this picture; the chisel of Phidias

has left its impress upon the lives of a multitude; the majestic lines of Schiller and Goethe, of Emerson and Shakspere, the music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the sentences of Chatham and Webster, are as fresh and inspiring today as they were in the time of our fathers. And in the effects upon our lives of this contact and this experience, the least is by no means utilitarian in char

acter.

Since, however, art has begun to assume a broader aspect than that symbolized by the brush and chisel only, art education in the schools has developed and widened. William Morris says,

Men fight to lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out to be not what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

From the time of William Morris and John Ruskin, the beauty of utility has been more and more emphasized, and today the term art may be applied to work in silver or gold, iron or copper, to wood, glass, leather, or paper. A book or mantelpiece, a city street or a shop window may as clearly embody the art spirit as a painting or a statue. Looked at from this view-point it is easy to see how art education may be a part of school life and how it may have a distinctly utilitarian trend.

Art may be appreciated from the negative as well as from the positive side. What has not been attempted frequently counts far more than what has been done. I mean that much so-called art is overdone and its everyday effect is lost. Here again an analogy exists between language and art. Just as in the former we may find our expression heavy or extravagant and our sentences carrying us beyond the point at which we should give pause, so in art we are aware of this tendency toward the extreme.

An illustration is in point: In many of the schools of Germany where articles of furniture or articles in wood are made, it is the custom to overlay a given piece of construction with elaborate chip carving. This destroys the character of the wood, the effect of the grain, covers from sight any imperfections in workmanship, and consumes much valuable time. This same method is seen to exist in certain types of German commercial life, where the chairs, table tops, trays, picture frames, newell posts are all carved. Some of these articles are less useful after being decorated than they would otherwise be. The moral effect upon the individual is bad, and utility is disregarded. In art, simplicity goes hand in hand with utility.

It may safely be said, therefore, that use is a determining factor in art, and that construction and decoration are the two fundamentals.

I have spoken of the moral effect as being different and apart from the utilitarian. But this is impossible. Let me illustrate. I once taught a group of boys in Henry Street. Those of you who live in New York City and have undertaken to learn at first hand how the other half live, need not be told the location of Henry Street. The filth and poverty and disappointment of the East Side, are resident in this locality; the pathetic and downcast mingle

here with the gay and the boisterous; confidence and suspicion watch from opposite street corners. But with scant means, meager homes, and an unhappy environment there is a growing appreciation of the beautiful and an increased understanding of how to construct useful and beautiful things. I learned one of the silent causes of this appreciation when, on climbing to the attic of a Henry Street building, I entered a small room occupied by two of the young men who were working with the boys of the district. On the walls were prints of the masters, simply framed; book shelves cheaply and serviceably made, and some home-bound magazines and books; pieces of furniture made by the young men, and, scattered here and there, small articles of use, so simply and honestly constructed as to be within the ability and reach of all. This delightful place the boys used to visit and from it radiated such an atmosphere of real art, that they carried with them a feeling for the useful and beautiful and the moral as well.

A decidedly wrong impression is prevalent with many educated and wellinformed people-an impression that a knowledge of art, unless one is to become an artist, possesses a sentimental value only. To most people art education implies lessons in drawing, perspective, light and shade, life, cast, and perhaps a touch of water color and a bit of clay. Indeed, most of our school people take this view and what is still more to be deplored, the major portion of the art teachers themselves, teachers of drawing, so called, subscribe to this doctrine. In point of fact only a small portion of the legitimate art education of the schools should be classed as drawing or graphic expression. Applied art, constructive design in any material, metal craft, jewelry, enameling, pottery, book binding, leather, textiles, may properly be classed as art education, and the student who has a real understanding and appreciation of perspective, pure and applied design, and the principles of construction will find he can use this knowledge. to advantage in a thousand ways.

There is scarcely a profession, trade, or occupation in life where the value of the rapid sketch is not daily seen; the binding of pamphlets, magazines, and books proves a great convenience to many; a knowledge of weaving and textile work, if learned in their elements, will be of great value in later life; decorated and tooled leather may be put to a variety of uses. In wood, many articles of furniture can be made, and there is practically no limit to the extent that metal-work may be carried-lampstands and shades, screens, bowls, vases, buckles, pins, and the like, while wood and metal or wood and leather, in combinations, are adapted to many useful ends. And what is even more significant is the development which is the outgrowth of this experiencea development finding expression in the everyday life of the individual.

It will be understood that in speaking in this connection of the applied or industrial arts and of the crafts, the writer has not in mind the flimsy, piecedtogether work of the popular handicraft club or the society organization, but rather the substantial serious undertakings, considered from the standpoint of good design and true construction. Broadly speaking, that which appeals to

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