The Changing Face of Rembrandt: Pedagogy, Politics, and Cultural Values in American Art Education
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The first official session of the Rembrandt Project took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Shortly after our meeting, I walked alone into the Met’s Rembrandt gallery, and as I stood before his Self-Portrait of 1660 (Figure 1), without benefit of a digital screen, text, or audio explanation, I became completely immersed in the timeless image of a man painted on canvas more than 346 years ago. I experienced a surge of spiritual energy that animated my imagination, an experience that continues in memory as an authentic human interaction.
Should, however, such a personal experience, like many of my past encounters with great works of art, justify my introducing to young people a master artist like Rembrandt? Is he important enough today to be included in a nationwide curriculum? Answers to these questions go beyond the initial impact of his art. They involve an examination of whether his life and work and the culture of seventeenth-century Holland have contemporary relevance. Might there be, for example, some interesting parallels between Rembrandt’s time and our own? The project’s research on Rembrandt clearly answers these questions in the affirmative. In doing so it emphasizes the importance of having both aesthetic and contextual knowledge about his art and life as well as the social, political, economic, and religious conditions of his time. The National Endowment for the Humanities funded the Rembrandt Project for the purpose of developing an online teaching resource that can provide a means for accessing Rembrandt’s art and his world. The Web site for the project includes numerous links that direct teachers to American museums that hold paintings, etchings, or drawings by Rembrandt and [End Page 57] will encourage teachers and students to visit museums exhibiting his works when possible. Thus, knowledge about one of the world’s most revered artists will be available to teachers and students nationwide.
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Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait (1660). Oil on canvas: 31 5/8” × 26 ½”. Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In order to address matters regarding the importance of providing information about Rembrandt, it will be helpful to review briefly some highlights of the history of pedagogical theories in American art education. For each stage of history one can ask: What place, if any, would an appreciation of masterpieces of Rembrandt’s excellence have had? Would the revelatory experience I had at the Metropolitan Museum be considered an appropriate educational outcome?
From Romanticism to the Present
The flourishing of Romantic Idealism in the 1890s marked the start of art appreciation in the United States. William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, considered religion, art, and philosophy to be the primary domains of human experience, domains that animated the senses, the soul, and the intellect. He believed that the visual arts in particular contributed to the development of moral values. Romantic art also had the effect of moving art education into the mainstream, and an appreciation of art history was likened to having moral and spiritual experiences.1 This may have been the first social reform movement in the United States undertaken in the guise of art education.2 The Picture Study Movement consequently rose in popularity, and magazines and prints were published [End Page 58] solely for the purpose of collecting, displaying, and lecturing about art. Proponents of the movement believed that great artists of the Western canon were examples of individuals who possessed admirable moral character. During the same period the idea of high culture was promoted, and young, wealthy women who studied art history in private secondary schools often became art teachers.3
As early as 1890 programs in major cities—for example, those of the Boston Public School Art League and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science—disseminated art reproductions in order to promote artistic culture in schools. One consequence was that Picture Study and School Room Decoration became popular movements in art education. Three primary publications, Art in the School...
