“Louis Sullivan on Art Education”

AboutDon de Nevi argues that Louis Sullivan deserves recognition as an art educator and theorist alongside his architectural achievements, comparing his ideas on teaching to those of Walter Smith, Arthur Wesley Dow, and, especially, John Dewey — asserting that Sullivan had developed a pragmatic philosophy of art and "art as experience" well before Dewey's more famous formulations, and noting recent scholarly interest in whether Dewey drew on Sullivan. Surveying Sullivan's educational writings (*Education*, 1902; *Natural Thinking: A Study in Democracy*, 1905; *Democracy: A Man's Search*, 1908; *Kindergarten Chats*, 1918; *The Autobiography of an Idea*, 1924), de Nevi presents Sullivan's view that art is a necessary democratic force against cultural and technological deterioration, that teachers should resist rigid rules in favor of imaginative instruction, and that architecture and art criticism are properly branches of social science since buildings encode the thought of the people who produce them. The essay quotes at length from Sullivan's writings and from Frank Lloyd Wright's tribute to his mentor, concluding that Sullivan's legacy lies in his insistence that art must stand alongside business, politics, science, and religion in shaping democratic society.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28197023%2930%3A1%3C45%3ALSOAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q