The Ecology of Picture Study

Abstract

icture Study was one of the elements in art education in the United States for more than fifty years. It appeared sometime in the late 1800s and began to fade at the end of the 1920s (Stankiewicz, 1983). It was, therefore, feature in the formative years of art education, and yet its practices have led later art educators to look on it with attitudes ranging from skepticism to distaste (Mathias, 1924; Hendrickson and Waymack, 1932; Eisner, 1972; Hurwitz and Madeja, 1977). In the following, I intend to examine this movement, bearing in mind Erickson's suggestion that it is worthwhile for art educators to look at the past for a different sort of situation against which we can compare ourselves (1977, p. 27). The practice of Picture Study seems to have been widespread (Morrison, 1935) and doubtless involved many individuals, as studies by Saunders (1966) and Stankiewicz (1983; 1985) imply. The movement at one time or another related to number of other features of American education. In regard to this, Stankiewicz (1983) has listed factors that she felt shaped Picture Study, including: a) new and improved technologies of reproduction and dissemination of printed images, b) growing interest in art fostered by the Columbia Exposition of 1893, c) Idealism in both philosophy of education and aesthetic theories, d) growing feminization of the classroom and school cultures, and e) growing numbers of immigrant children who understood the language of pictures better than English, (p. 1).

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