murals, their creative vision, design and colour, is breathtaking.”52
At Cyrene, Patterson’s pedagogy was simple. He trusted in his students’ innate taste and eschewed sharing other people’s work with them, both that of European and of their predecessors at the mission. Indeed, after the walls were completely covered in authentic expression, he had them whitewashed and then started over. For Patterson, art was most decidedly not a matter of the finished work but was instead about the regular work of self-expressive creating.
Grossert and Harrison returned to Natal excited, for at Cyrene they had seen the progress they envisioned in African art. First, they would revitalize craftwork; then, trusting in taste and the unceasing stream of African creativity, their students and South African society would rediscover that rooted openness for which Senghor called. They left Southern Rhodesia “convinced that we were fully justified in introducing” art in Natal, Grossert remembered, “since many of the students there showed a . . . standard of aesthetic sensibility” comparable to what they had seen at Cyrene. In South Africa too, taste had survived conquest, and from students’ “beautiful grass mats and bowls and carved wooden artifacts” would come new harmonies.53 Patterson was a bit of an eccentric, isolated in the Matopos Hills far from the centers of aesthetic theory, but he had arrived at a critical point. He trusted in his students’ capability and good taste, and he practiced a gentle pedagogy designed to cultivate both. John Dewey had arrived at a similar place, writing in the late 1920s about the ideal relationship between teacher and student. “Nobody else can see for [the student],” Dewey suggested, “and he can’t see just by being told,” yet teachers were still essential, “for the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see.”54 Teaching—and especially art teaching—was itself an art, requiring acute sensitivity and finesse. Returning from the Matopos Hills to the Natal Midlands, Grossert and Harrison talked about how they would begin to train Africans to teach with such skill.
Looking back over the history of art education in the Bantu Education schools, Grossert credited two people for laying the program’s foundation. The first was Charles Loram, who was famous in South Africa and whose influence was obvious. The second was Arthur Lismer, the Canadian art educator who had first visited the country to attend the NEF in 1934.55 Grossert credited Lismer for laying the practical, institutional groundwork for the South African art program, while noting that he was also a critical theorist. In 1934 Lismer had explained to his audiences at the NEF that the work of art in the schools was twofold: the development of personality and, as children matured, the social dividend of empathy. Each child who was granted an opportunity to experience and produce beauty was an investment in a better, more humane community. “Art education is the encouragement of a whole people towards the appreciation of beauty,” Lismer reflected. To some extent, art education was about the identification and “encouragement of individual talent,” but it could only “prepare the soil” for genius “by developing the natural instincts of [all] human beings towards the lovelier things in life. [Art] provides room for self-expression and opportunities for the lighting by each of his own little lamp.” In referring to “the lighting by each of his own little lamp,” he was asserting that each person, regardless of creed or color, was capable of self-expression and aesthetic appreciation. This was Lismer’s credo. Truly artful teachers and sensitive education systems were those that offered a light of inspiration equal to the task.56
Figure 3.7 Beaded objects, unknown artists, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC
Lismer’s talks generated an intense interest among the NEF delegates. E. G. Malherbe, the conference organizer, had met Lismer in Toronto in 1933 and raised funds for his trip to South Arica. Malherbe assumed that Lismer’s lectures on such an esoteric subject—child art?—would struggle to draw a crowd, however, so he assigned Lismer’s first lecture to a room that held less than one hundred. Lismer proved so popular that his second talk was moved to the University of Witwatersrand’s Great Hall, one of Johannesburg’s largest venues. After the conference’s end, Lismer was invited to stay on in South Africa and even to assume the directorship of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.57 He declined the latter offer but did return to the country in 1937 to embark on a grand tour to assess the potential for art education in the Union’s native schools. He visited elite schools such as Adams College, where students reported that “Mr. Lismer . . . spent several hours instructing training college students on the elements of Art. To Mr. Lismer, Art is not simply a subject, it is the expression of life itself.”58 He visited government primary schools as well. Everywhere he went, Lismer reflected on the teachers’ responsibility to help their students’ creative efforts in search of harmony.
Given the prevailing primitivist mood, it was perhaps not surprising that Lismer claimed in 1937 that “traditional Bantu crafts” were the best means of achieving this.59 Schools were foreign impositions on African society, he explained, and without a link to Bantu culture, Lismer suggested that “serious damage will be done to the minds of the Bantu pupils.”60 Craftwork would be a bulwark against the African student’s rootless wandering through the modern world. At the NEF, the South African politician D. D. T. Jabavu had claimed African children “[came] to school armed with a strong bias for handwork.”61 Lismer agreed and suggested that Africans’ unconscious, innate, natural aptitude for craftwork would be the foundation of an artful society in South African.
Lismer’s critical innovation was his insistence that crafts were only the beginning. On the surface, his call for crafts in schools was reminiscent of the insistence of anthropologists, artists, and others that crafts stay on the syllabus, but he sharply criticized those who failed to understand the real reason why this was so. In the face of derision, he proclaimed that all people were artists, whether they painted landscapes or made pots. “The people slapped their thighs and laughed when he told them their pots were art,” his biography recounts.62 Lismer’s audience did not understand that he did not necessarily mean the pots deserved to be in a museum. Crafts were not valuable in themselves, however accomplished and visually pleasing they might be. Rather, they were tools. In schools, African pupils would be given a medium familiar from their regular, nonacademic life. Clay, grass, wood, beads--Lismer believed that such things were abundant and familiar in the communities from which students came to attend school. This was the raw material with which the “richness” of their African background—taste, aesthetic sensibility—could be cultivated in the schools, not to make prettier baskets but “to cultivate the uniqueness of their individuality.” This was where teachers came in. According to Lismer’s vision, teachers would circulate throughout the classroom, encouraging students to make their thinking explicit, to continue probing their material, and to reflect on why they molded the clay this way and not that or why they emphasized this color and not another. As Lismer explained, the goal of craftwork was to discover “the potentiality of the Bantu pupils and help them to discover themselves.” It was not necessarily about developing talent; it was about ensuring that South African students were able to contribute to art’s work in human society.63
Lismer submitted a report to the Natal provincial government before returning to Canada in the winter of 1937. His argument was threefold: craft was the tool that unlocked art, art was the expression and consciousness of the individual student, and the Natal Education Department ought to recognize this by training teachers to guide, rather than dictate to, students. He further recommended that the department name an art organizer to ensure that the program was able to walk the line between craft for culture’s sake and art for society’s sake.64 Over the next few years, Natal began to implement Lismer’s recommendations. South African art education moved forward, carried by the odd combination of primitivism and progressive ideas about the work of art.
Jack Grossert absorbed these theories during his stint as a provincial art teacher. Over time, he had other “teachers,” among them
