1919 - Teaching Art (Roger Fry)

"The words sound wrong, somehow, like 'baking ices', 'polishing mud' or 'sliced lemonade'. This was the way Roger Fry started the text on Teaching Art. 'Art Teachers' seemed to sound also wrong, and yet, he vented, large amounts of money were being spent in 'breeding' the type. "What has been overlooked is the fact that Art cannot, properly speaking, be taught at all". The canons, the conventions, and historical facts could be taught, but "one cannot teach a thing which does not exist". The text argues against the possibility of teaching the intuitive powers of creation. In it, it traced the separation between the 'civilized man' and the 'Other' as the primitive but also the child. As we can read in the fragments we selected, he praised the methods of Marion Richardson as an example of how an art teacher should be. To respect and protect the nature of the child, or, as he called it, the child's native powers. This nature has been invented throughout the 19th century in the equivalences made between the child and the 'primitive' and the closeness of the child to a 'raw' nature.
"It is very difficult to be an artist - much more so than the schoolmasters and men of goodwill who incite us to industry and application have any idea of. It is very difficult for a modern civilised man because it is so difficult for him to be himself, to retain under the immense compulsion of his surroundings the conviction of the value and importance of his own personal reaction. It is not difficult for savages and children to be artists, but it is difficult for the grown-up civilised person to be one. The whole process of education is in fact antagonistic to this personal reaction. Education consists, indeed, in extending the individual experience by communicating the accumulated stores of human experience. In face of the wealth and richness of this second-hand experience, the individual tends to lose sight of his own immediate contacts, so that it would be almost true to say that by maturity the average civilised man has replaced most of his sensations by opinions." 
"Could an Art teacher not teach anything at all, but educate the native powers of perception and visualisation of his pupils merely by exciting and fixing their attention? The question was answered for me some years ago when I first came across the drawings done by the Dudley High School girls under the tuition of Miss Marion Richardson. I say 'under the tuition' by mere conventional habit. 'Intuition' would be nearer the mark, because Miss Richardson, being a peculiarly honest, hard-headed and sceptical young woman, reflected, when she found herself appointed Art teacher to a large school, that she didn't know what Art was, and had certainly nothing that she could confidently hand over to her pupils as such. She therefore set to work to interest them in their own personal vision, especially the mental vision which occurs with the eyes shut, without giving them any hints as to what that vision should be. In this way she has encouraged in her pupils the most extraordinary acuteness and definiteness of mental imagery, so that a poem read to them or a description given sets up in their minds such vivid images that they can draw and colour them with an ease and sureness of hand and a logical use of their material that go far beyond the skill acquired by laborious practice in the ordinary way. [...] every drawing that I have seen shows a passionate application, and often a research for new technical possibilities, such as could never be got out of the best pupil from a sense of duty. And when one reflects that most of these drawings are done in spare hours out of school, one cannot deny the efficacy of the method for the self-discipline of hard work. The fact is that the work the artist sets himself demands of him a much more concentrated effort than any that can be got out of a pupil by moral stimulus." 
However, Roger Fry argued the nature of the child was in danger:
"It is evident to any who have studied children's drawings that the majority of them are more or less artists until they begin to be taught Art. It is also true that most savages are artists. But both children and savages are so easily impressed by the superior powers of civilised grown-ups that they can, with the greatest case, be got to abandon their own personal reactions in favour of some accepted conventions. So that although they are artists they are weak and imperfect artists."
As such, the question was: what could an art teacher be, and do?
"The problem for Art teaching, then, must be how to preserve and develop the individual reaction to vision during the time when the child is also receiving the accumulated experience of mankind, and so to enable at least a few of them to pass from being child-artists to being civilised artists. That this would be the case with only a small minority is probable, but such a training as I have suggested would provide even the average child with a possibility of understanding and enjoying Art far more keenly than the ordinarily educated man does at present."

CM