AN ARTIFACT AS HISTORY
"The Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk" can be described as a computer without electricity. This "Desk" was a turn-of-the-century venture in instructional technology and embodies many concepts in embryonic form that now have been developed into complex programs delivered through electronic means. Here are the seeds-if we may speak in metaphors-of what now is sprouting luxuriously, whether like a flower or a weed is for each of us to evaluate. Its archaic simplicity may help us to better understand what now may confuse us in the din of techno-babble.
Diana Korzenik was the first art education historian to pay schol arly attention to the Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk, in "Doing Historical Research" (1985) an article which included photographs of fragments from a Desk that had been found by a student, Ray Lund.1 This information was all we knew about the Desk until Clyde Watson, Professor Emeritus of Arizona State University, gave one of the authors a complete Desk from his personal collection.
When opened, the Desk has a vertically mounted scroll of some 24 "source pictures" that can be rolled into sight, a horizontal chalkboard surface, and spaces for chalk, pencils, pens and so forth in little recesses beneath the scroll. On the back of the vertical panel holding the scroll is a map of the United States with the products of each state listed. This provides us with a clue that the desk was probably manufactured in 1913 (or slightly later), since New Mexico is listed as a state and it entered the Union in 1912. The Desk is made of oak and hinged in a way that makes it collapsible, with the fragile paper scroll and drawing tools safely stored within it. It can be carried about like a laptop computer, although it measures about 18" by 24" and is about 3" deep. It is also constructed so that it can be hung on a wall out of the way. Because the Desk has no legs, it can be placed on a table level surface or on the floor for use by smaller children.
"OUR HISTORY" AND THE DESK'S HISTORY
The Desk was not a self-explanatory teaching machine. At least two booklets, The Home Teacher and Child Life, both dated 1913, were published to guide parents in using the Desk. The manufacturer of the Desk claimed that its direct antecedent was a Chautauqua adult education event, a "chalk talk" given by Frank Beard in 1886 (Anonymous, 1913). Unfortunately in the section of The Home Teacher titled "Our History," that made this claim, no descriptions of Beard's talks were provided. Since a number of the images on the scroll are in white lines on dark background, we would guess that the "chalk talks" were lectures accompanied by rapidly executed simple drawings. The author (or authors) of "Our History" go on to claim:
The scope of the Desk we first presented [1890s?] suggests the amazing fact in the educational history of our country that the value of drawing was then practically unknown and an inclination on the part of the children thus to express the ideas that float before their inward vision was an outcropping of evil tendencies. (Anonymous, 1913, p. 13. Emphasis in original)2
Present-day art educators familiar with the fame of Walter Smith's work with industrial drawing in the 1870s (Smith, 1996) may be puzzled by such an assertion, while amused by the peculiar rhetorical style. Perhaps ignoring the well-publicized school drawing education of Walter Smith and his followers was part of the disconnection Korzenik saw between education in the school and home around 1900, even projecting a feeling of rivalry (Korzenik, 1985). The Foreword to Child Life pictures a society in which the home was fast losing its educational function through industrialization and the resulting separation of work from the sphere of the home. Interestingly, the author of this publication saw the new social conditions as, "Fashioning the new woman-the woman of selfdependence and self-reliance" (Anonymous, 1913, p. 4).
Making a connection between the Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk and the Chautauqua movement may have been legitimate in a limited sense, or it might have been a marketing strategy. Chautauqua, in its original adult education sense in the town of Chautauqua in western New York, or in a broader sense of various itinerant programs (often presented in tents) that were called "Chautauquas," was a great and widespread attempt at democratizing education. Art education or art appreciation was sometimes a part of this democratization and it had some relationship to Picture Study (Smith, 1986). However tenuous the connection between the Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk and Chautauqua as a populist educational movement, there was a widespread sense that self-education or education in the non-school setting was a powerful and practical idea. Even the most advanced learning could be acquired by the masses outside elite institutions.
The name of the Desk (Industrial Art Desk) also indicates that art education and what later became known as industrial arts had not yet split apart. "Art" pictures could be included alongside technical working drawings for machinery. Some of this conglomeration of fields of study, however, did suggest an ambiguity about how the Desk was to function.
Our picture lessons reduce to a form intuitively comprehensible to the child the elements that lie at the basis of almost all the useful and artis tic pursuits of mankind. This variety of ideas is presented in a way to excite the wonder, the interest and the self expression of the normal child through which he is most likely to find his best self. With these claims our work assumes a broader message than ever. It concerns the child as being born into a world totally different and distinct from that of the adult. We believe the problem in education is to furnish this child-world with ideas the growth and direction of which will lead to useful and serviceable careers. (Anonymous, 1913, p. 13. Emphasis in original)
From this it can be seen that a mixture of progressive education rhetoric and old industrial drawing ideas were gathered into an uneasy relationship. In part this was the result of art teachers and teachers of "manual arts" being joined in the same organizations, many of which were being formed at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century.
The membership of practically all the associations included teachers of drawing, of manual arts, and of industrial or mechanical drawing. There was assumed to be a community of interest among the teachers of these areas. In fact, in many school systems, there were supervisors appointed to organize and administer joint programs of drawing and industrial arts. ([ogan, 1955, p.143)
Frederick Logan saw 1917 as the terminating date for this professional association of art and "industrial education," although he felt the Western Arts Association continued to represent art teachers, home economics teachers, and manual arts teachers up to the time he published The Growth of Art in American Schools (Logan, 1955). Because Lewis E. Myers & Company, manufacturer of the Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk, was located in Valparaiso, Indiana, it was well within the territory of the Western Arts Association.
The Desk was intended for two age ranges, "Kindergarten" (apparently meant to include a wider age span than present-day use of the word), and older children up into adolescent years. A manual for the first group, Child Life by "M. Vanderpoel," was published in 1910 and reprinted in 1913 (Korzenik, 1985), as was the booklet to guide in the use of the Desk by older children, The Home Teacher2 .
Korzenik pointed out that some of the rhetoric in Child Life is quite shocking and suggestive of the social strains and fears Americans experienced during the late 1800s:
The next great step of race culture may be in the direction of society determining who and what kind of child may be born, for all the social problems now being studied, whether commercial, educational, political, or religious, our findings carry us back to a solution in the welfare and fitness of the individual child. (Quoted in Korzenik, 1985, p. 127)
It takes little imagination to draw a parallel between the sales literature of the Chautauqua Industrial Arts Desk and the stirring up of social and educational anxieties so rampant in presentday political rhetoric and the simplistic solutions of educational entrepreneur and pressure groups (e.g., software to ease math anxiety, hooking up each classroom to the information super highway, fear of immigrants symbolized by groups demanding English as an official language, privatization of schools, and so on.)
CONTENT OF THE DESK'S SCROLL
The Home Teacher (1913) contains a series of lesson plans to accompany the "source pictures" on the scroll. The first sections of the scroll present schematic drawings to provide the child with formulas for drawing a house, a jack-in-the-box, a pail, and rear views of a pig, a cat, and a rabbit. These, along with stick figures for drawing people, may seem stifling to contemporary art educators, although they do recall some of Gombrich's discussion at the start of Art and Illusion (1960). However, a drawing by Paul Hadley, a 7- year old, reproduced in The Home Teacher suggests that free and expressive drawing was acceptable.
Sewing, paper cutting, weaving, cartoon drawing, lettering, Morse Code, shorthand, ledger work, perspective drawing, electronic wiring, material on railroading, mechanical drawing, architecture, illustration, color theory, flags of the nations, still life painting, music notation, ornithology, and so on are included. The anonymous authors of The Home Teacher eagerly note that "The source picture [for handwriting] is the writing of Mr. AN. Palmer, the originator of the `Palmer Method of Business Writing"' (1913, p. 34).
Art education in the form of art appreciation was also included through one scroll panel on Picture Study. Holmes's painting Can't You Talk?, as well as Priscilla Spinning, both genre paintings, exemplify Picture Study practitioners' frequent reliance on anecdotal pictures. Raphael's Madonna of the Chair, another image in this section of the scroll, was also a frequently reproduced image for Picture Study lessons.
The information about this panel, however, is disappointingly skimpy. There are some vague exhortations about beauty brought into the home and a rather fatuous poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox that seems to equate art with blandness raised to the level of virtue:
Here are no sounds of discordno profane
Or senseless gossip of unworthy things
Only the songes fo chisels and of pens,
Of busy brushes and ecstatic strains
Of sounds surcharged with music most divine.
CONCLUSION
If the Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk is dismissed as a commercial gimmick with no bearing on art education's history, we miss clues it gives about the interests of American people as the Victorian and Edwardian ages terminated and the era of tumult emerged that began with World War I.
Assuredly, the makers of the Desk attempted and claimed too much just as today's educators sometimes assert that the computer will be the educator of the future-but, even though the promotional rhetoric for this object was overblown, the Desk suggested a forward-looking and exciting age.
Only in the "Fine Arts" panel, with its old master and genre reproductions, is there a look backwards. While the illustration panels and architecture and perspective drawings are firmly situated in the time of the Desk's manufacture, the Fine Arts examples looked to a rural and pre-industrial past, even though the Desk was a response to its industrialized and urbanized time.
The date of the Desk, 1913, is significant in American art. The Armory Show exploded on the American art scene that year. And, of course, in Europe a disaster was brewing whose legacy has lasted into our own age, World War I. The Desk is intriguing in itself as a reflection of its moment in history, but it is also a warning to art educators that too simplistic, too "packaged" solutions never seem to answer the needs of any day.
[Reference]
REFERENCES
[Reference]
Anonymous. (1913). The home teacher. Valparaiso, IN: Lewis E. Myers & Co. Gombrich, E. (1961). Art and illusion. New
York: Pantheon.
Korzenik, D. (1985). Doing historical research. Studies in Art Education, 26 (2), 125-128.
[Reference]
Logan, F. (1955). The growth of art in American schools. New York: Harper Brothers.
[Reference]
Smith, P. (1996). The history of American art education. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Smith, P. (1986). The ecology of picture study, 39 (5), 48-53.
[Author Affiliation]
Peter Smith is Professor and Coordinator of Art Education, University of New Mexico. Walter Pinto is an adjunct faculty member of the Art Education Program, University of New Mexico and art teacher at Highland High School, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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