For American arts educators, the Massachusetts Normal Art School (MNAS) and its first director, Walter Smith, have long provided a “founding myth” (p. 1). As Mary Ann Stankiewicz's book reveals, members of the close-knit MNAS alumni network wrote the field's early histories, edited its scholarly journals, and made up a majority of its professional associations until the mid-1920s. In assessing the school's importance, the omnipresence of the alumni inevitably creates problems of bias, but it also illustrates how preeminent MNAS really was, from its opening in 1873 until the Depression, by which time the creation of similar institutions had diluted its importance.
Stankiewicz, armed with decades of archival research, now gives us an account of Smith and MNAS disentangled from the early boosterism. She traces the school's evolution through a process of “dynamic interactions among institutions,” “social networks of stakeholders,” and “cognitive frameworks shaped by social, economic, and cultural contexts” (p. 1). These factors continually reacted with one another to push MNAS in directions that its founders did not foresee, through a series of adaptations that were sometimes principled and deliberate and sometimes (as in the school's constant search for a better location) haphazard and opportunistic.
Rather than reading MNAS as the expression of any one ideology, Stankiewicz shows how it reflected disagreements about the nature of art and education among the school's leaders and sponsors. Its initial promoters included textile barons seeking competent designers and Brahmin aesthetes looking to make American culture less philistine. Its first students included industrial workmen and women who saw art as a feminine accomplishment. Smith believed that MNAS had a responsibility to focus on useful industrial and scientific art, but he also insisted that arts education could never be merely technical and that it always required “human beings to minister to the wants of other human beings” (p. 77).
MNAS succeeded, in Stankiewicz's telling, by finessing these conflicts, giving ground on one side and then another as new movements, such as social efficiency education and consumer education, arose. In general, the school embraced administrative progressivism, an orientation toward quantification, efficiency, and streamlined bureaucracy, but it also advanced a charismatic view of the art teacher that demanded apostolic descent from some original genius (like Smith), rather than learning from printed manuals. (As Stankiewicz shows, this denigration of textbooks sprang as much from the desire to maintain a monopoly on arts education as it did from genuine pedagogical concerns.) As it continuously found its balance between such forces, MNAS exported its winning ideological blends to schools across the nation through its vigorous alumni network. As the United States transitioned from a producer to a consumer society, one in which mass-market tastes would drive the economy, the utilitarian case for arts education began to converge with the idealistic cultural case, and MNAS's high-wire act became less difficult. By the late 1920s, arts teaching had a wide range of middle-class sponsors, from chambers of commerce to women's clubs, parent-teacher associations, and the YMCA; no longer dependent on the clever maneuvering of a small group of leaders, it had finally found a firm institutional footing. The MNAS network, Stankiewicz argues, deserves credit for getting the field to that point. Also, she concludes in the book's final paragraph, its alumni “helped to shape the transition from producer to consumer society through their work in retail window display, motion pictures, illustrations, clothing design, industrial design, and the arts of painting, sculpture, and printmaking” (p. 239).
Not everyone accepted the compromises MNAS made along that path. The eminent art historian Charles Eliot Norton argued that the school's industrial focus was misguided because the real reason to study art is to empower the imagination to create a more organic society. Ruskinites and Morrisites were likewise unimpressed. These criticisms, however, seem to have had little effect. During the 1890s, Henry Turner Bailey, a high-profile MNAS alumni networker, held that the arts provided a spiritual escape valve that enabled America's soul-flattening industrial civilization to exist. By the 1920s, though, Bailey shifted his ground, noting that in the new consumerist regime artistic products sell and commerce thus extends the sphere of art. In the end, MNAS was able to ignore or co-opt those who criticized its alignment with business values.
One shortcoming of Stankiewicz's book is that, while she takes pains to recover these criticisms from the archives, she does not spend much time considering their justice. Her main interest is in how the MNAS network managed to make arts education a “normal” part of American society, safe from politicians’ budgetary pruning. She calls this a “creative achievement,” and it is something of a miracle after all, not to be taken for granted, especially today (p. 1). What is foregrounded is the remarkable fact of MNAS's influence, rather than the precise nature of that influence. This is fair enough, but it would have been interesting, in the conclusion at least, to step back and see how the complex and evolving MNAS ideology fits into broader historical accounts of the emergence of a consumer society. Did MNAS amplify certain elements of that social regime and suppress others? Did it make that new way of life better or worse? Without posing these questions, this narrative, so comprehensive in many ways, feels a bit incomplete.
The book is also open to some minor stylistic criticism. The wealth of detail is sometimes disorienting, and more explicit signposting of the turning points in the argument would have been helpful. Also, what seem to be very interesting primary sources are too often paraphrased with only minimal quotation. It would have been nice to see more of the verbal texture of Smith's thinking, or Bailey's.
Despite these concerns, for the depth of its sourcing, the comprehensiveness of its contextualization, and the thoroughness of its description of all aspects of the MNAS network, Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States should become an essential work in the history of American arts education.
