after World War I. Like Lismer, Lowenfeld urged instructors to begin with society’s youngest members. He suggested that art was how children communicated; without art, they—and thus, society—were stifled and unhealthy. “Whenever we hear children say ‘I can’t draw that,’ we can be sure that some kind of interference has occurred in their lives,” Lowenfeld noted. It was the teacher’s task to cultivate children’s natural urge to communicate. To ensure that expression remains free and unencumbered, he wrote in 1947, “never prefer one child’s creative work over that of another! Never give the work of one child as an example to another! Never let a child copy anything!” Copying ruined originality; ranking and comparison undermined confidence; to insist on what the teacher thought was the correct representation of reality destroyed creativity. “How ridiculous to overpower these little children’s souls!” Lowenfeld exclaimed. Scribbles were a first stage of their mental growth and communication, which, if cultivated, would result in a more humane and successful society made up of confident, expressive people. Let the children scribble! he urged.65
Or work clay or grass. Lowenfeld’s scheme for art teaching reinforced Grossert’s conviction that Europeans had been the wrong kind of teachers. Convinced of their own righteousness, they had ridiculed and mocked the conventions of African artistry. They had even denied that the good, tasteful objects that Africans created were worthy of being called art. They had overwhelmed the souls of their charges—primarily the adults but also, through the alienating experiences of the schools, the children as well. To Grossert’s mind, it was a happy accident that the authorities had retained a space on the syllabus for creative work, and he intended to exploit it. He applauded the advent of Bantu Education. Even if the National Party and its ideologues did not necessarily grasp how essential art was to human development, their policies had kept the door open for the work of art in South Africa.66
THE INVENTION OF SOUTH AFRICAN ART
Grossert trusted that the schools would provide the space to experiment and to build, at least as far as the visual arts were concerned. Aesthetic activity was already on the syllabus. Tradition called it craft, but like Dewey and like Grossert’s coeditors on The Art of Africa, he believed that crafts differed from art in name only. Grass and paint were nothing more than “different media for the expression of the same aesthetic activity.”67 The only difference was that African children were more familiar with the former than the latter. The real work of art would follow. “Art and crafts as school subjects are taught because they provide basic educational experiences for the development of imagination and constructive thought processes,” Grossert explained. “For educational value it is of less concern . . . what materials are used, provided they are within the range which pupils can fashion and shape, than the ideas which can be developed from them.”68 Craftwork was focused, self-conscious labor. In effect, it tricked students, administrators, and parents into thinking that the children were just modeling clay animals or weaving mats, when in fact they were developing their own selves. By giving students a space to make things, teachers seeded “creativity and originality.” From those seeds would flower adults able to “face the world with a confident ability to use all its challenges as creative opportunities.” Bantu Education would create artists, not in the sense that art was listed in the school curriculum but in the fervent, hopeful faith that art was, in reality, “a way of life.”69
As Grossert began to plan and publicize the nascent Bantu Education art program and especially its teacher-training initiative, it was clear that he had learned from Lowenfeld and Lismer. “It is a bad method for the teacher to sit at the table while the children stand waiting heir turn to show her their work,” he counseled. “Hours of time are wasted this way.” Instead, he believed that teachers ought to circulate around the classroom, offering encouragement and support but not talking “too much during a lesson”: “After the pupils have been questioned, give them time to get started, before interrupting their train of thought. When about ten minutes have passed, go around the class noticing each pupil’s individuality.”70 He, too, recognized that only the right kind of teaching could produce the right kind of art; simple pedagogical decisions could promote expression. As art produced real, thoughtful life, life would produce better art. Crafts were seeds and not “tribal” curios, which Grossert ridiculed as the “sentimental repository of pseudo art [and the] sluggish backwater from which no refreshing drink can be obtained.” Bureaucrats and businesspeople who wanted to market and sell traditional crafts were charlatans and their business “anathema to all those who have a genuine interest in the education of the Bantu.”71 It was “facetious” to expect to sell student work, as so many had intended; African schools were schools, not industrial centers.72 And schools were about adapting tradition to the demands and possibilities of the future, in both senses of the “work” of art.
Instead of feeding the curio market, Grossert imagined that the South African art education program would begin with crafts and eventually incubate what he hoped would become “a school of indigenous art” in the country.73 “African pupils could produce “high artistic” expression in painting . . . on a level equal to that of any other race,” he assured a group of African teachers after his experiments had gone on for a few years.74 Later, he reflected on several urban schools where “picture-making” had supplanted craftwork. He had not yet had an opportunity to staff those schools with trained art teachers; they were “staffed” only with materials and the conviction that students ought to be “left free to express themselves.”75 But he noted that these schools were enjoying tremendous success. This move into graphic arts confirmed his conviction that all children could carve, model, paint, and create.76
For this vision of art education to succeed, South Africa needed more specialist art teachers, trained with the insights of Dewey, Read, Lismer, and Lowenfeld in mind. Advertisements for a specialist art teachers’ program began to appear soon after Harrison and Grossert returned from Cyrene in 1949. “There is an Art class at . . . Indaleni,” the Native Teachers’ Journal informed its readers that year. Teachers who were “interested in Drawing, Painting, Modeling, Design, etc.” were encouraged to apply.77 By the early 1950s, Native Teachers’ Journal began to feature covers designed by Indaleni art students, in addition to Grossert’s ever-present drawings of school craft. A Richmond-born Indaleni student named Selbourne Mvusi drew one of the first covers; it showed an ancestor, wearing an inkatha (a coiled grass headdress) looking on approvingly as a schoolboy in short pants worked a lathe—tradition, updated, manifest in the creative exertions of the twentieth-century school student.78
By the mid-1950s, Mvusi had left the Indaleni Mission and was both teaching art in Durban and developing his own reputation as an artist. In Mvusi’s own progress, Grossert saw confirmation that art education in South Africa was going to work—that Bantu Education could cultivate humane expression in mid-twentieth-century modernity.79 When thinking about successful artists such as Mvusi, the father of national art education in apartheid South Africa fantasized about a future in which the regular work of art in South African society would result in a special class of artists, “prophets . . . creative geniuses” who “transcended the physical world and gained visions of an ideal order.”80 He acknowledged that South Africa was far from ideal—the people were poor, and art was still poorly understood. But he was optimistic that from children’s scribbles and molding of clay would emerge masters who could help to harmonize society. Or so he hoped, as he put his faith in his art school.
. . .
Figure 3.8 Cover by Selbourne Mvusi, Native Teachers’ Journal 33, no. 3 (April 1953): 212
Of course, the reality was that in South Africa, art education existed only because its primitivist and racialist aspects were popular with the ideological pretensions of the white minority. Even if people were
