Franz Cizek: Liberating the Child Artist

Franz Cizek's working with his children in the Juvenile Art Class

Wilhelm Viola (1938) Child Art and Franz Cizek

© 1936, Austrian Junior Red Cross, Vienna

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, Dr. Franz Cizek was one of Vienna’s best known pedagogues of progressive art education. His moniker as, “the ‘father’ of creative art teaching,”1 was not immediately bestowed on the artist, teacher, and child psychologist, since it took years of diligent study and practice to give credence to his methods as a legitimate way to foster self-expression in children. His approach to teaching was minimal, and strikingly different than the rigid and skill based programs of copying and tracing that were offered in primary schools at the time. In his Juvenile Art Class, a two hour Saturday Program for students ages 5 -14, Cizek approached art making by creating a child friendly environment where formal instruction was non existent and the work was based on nurturing the creative tendencies inherent in all children, allowing them to freely explore their own ideas through a range of materials.

Cizek also expressed a profound admiration and respect for children’s artwork, considering their expressions to be of the purest nature. In short, Franz Cizek’s life work was to provide a free (both financially and psychologically) studio environment where children could revel in self-discovery. He was not making future artists, but allowing children access to their personal creativity. Ruth Kalmar Wilson, who was a young student of Cizek’s, went on to become a textile designer, recalling, ‘Cizek’s class was not directed at all to creating artists but, rather, to unfolding of the artistic personality of each individual.”2

It is worth noting the premise of what made Cizek’s methodology so remarkable and how he came to devote his life work to the study of children and the way they learn. Cizek was born in 1865 in the town of Leitmeritz on the Elbe River in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). When he was 19 he moved to Vienna and studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1885 Cizek rented a room with a carpenter’s family with many children. The young children loved to visit Cizek’s room, where he would give them drawing materials and encourage them to express their ideas. Without instruction and in this friendly atmosphere, Cizek witnessed a joyful self-discovery as these youngsters loved to make art. Cizek was truly impressed with the directness and purity found in these drawings and upon further study he learned that children, the world over, drew in very similar ways when they work in an unrestrained atmosphere working from their imagination.

During his own university study, Vienna was a hotbed of artistic activity. He was friends with many of the Vienna Secessionist artists and architects of the day; Otto Wagner, J. M. Olbrick, Koloman Moser, and Gustav Klimt were fellow artists. He shared with them his research and the work of his young students, and they were fascinated by the authentic expression found in these untrained illustrations. They encouraged Cizek to start his own school, and as a result of this encouragement, he soon applied to the educational authorities to begin his own practice. In his application he had stated a most simple mandate, “Let children grow, develop and mature.”3 The authorities did not immediately accept such a simplistic mandate, but with time and further development of his program, Cizek was allowed to open the Juvenile Art Class in 1897.

The doors to the Juvenile Art Class were open without charge to the children of Vienna, to work at their own free will. Children were interviewed and selected by Cizek, but not for their artistic promise or social standing. It was a place where children were respected as fellow artists. There were about 50 students in attendance each Saturday. Cizek had teaching assistants from his university classes at the School of Applied Art (Wein Kunstgewerbeschule), of which Erika Giovanna Klien was one. These younger artist/educators acted as assistants. Some would specialize in a specific media, be it embroidery or printmaking. Children were encouraged to explore a variety of materials: drawing with chalk, or pencils, cutting paper collages and silhouette cutting, wood and plaster carving, modeling with clay, embroidery, crocheting, etching and wood block printing and tempera painting. As Cizek would tell the children, “From every material, something creative can be made.”4

Wool Embroidery from Cizek's Juvenile Art Class

designed by a 10 year old boy, sewn by a 14 year old girl

Wilhelm Viola (1938) Child Art and Franz Cizek

© 1936, Austrian Junior Red Cross, Vienna

Gretl Hanus age 14, from Cizek's Juvenile Art Class

Cizek also discovered the process of linoleum block print, commonly referred to as the linocut. Linoleum was a fairly new material used for floor covering made of linseed oil, cork and wood dust and attached to a fabric backing. This was a highly affective material for young children to carve, making it easier to cut into the pliable surface than the traditional wood block. As a result of Cizek’s experimentation with the children, the success of the Linocut as an art form. Embraced by the Secessionist printmakers, the method expanded and traveled to Germany and France as the newest printmaking vogue of the day.

Ine Probst age 14, Linocut from Cizek's Juvenile Art Class

Wilhelm Viola (1938) Child Art and Franz Cizek

© 1936, Austrian Junior Red Cross, Vienna

The details surrounding the first meeting between Klien and Parkhurst are yet to be uncovered, but there must have been an immediate understanding between the two, as Klien’s belief in Cizek’s teaching philosophy was startlingly parallel to what Parkhurst espoused in her educational practice. They each placed emphasis on freedom in the classroom, nurturing a healthy degree of self-direction in students, and allowing the child to be guided by his or her own pace and process; all were fundamental to both methods of teaching and learning. This common foundation may have been the reason Parkhurst brought Klien to Dalton seeing the promise of augmenting the breadth and depth of the Dalton Plan through the arts. Both women recognized the importance of fostering creative thought and imagination in children.

One can imagine the young Erika Klien as a promising yet malleable artist in search of her own artistic voice. Soon after she began her studies at the Vienna School of Applied Art, she gravitated to the excitement and wisdom of Franz Cizek. She entered his course on the Theory of Ornamental Form where she was introduced to Cizek’s second great artistic contribution to the art world, the development of the short lived, but compelling, movement known as Viennese Kinetism. The term Kinetism was derived from the Greek root "kinesis" meaning movement, but artistically the roots were certainly connected to French Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Russian Constructivism. Kinetism represented the dynamic and bustling flow of a modern world.

Klien was one of the young artists captivated by this new spirit. She quickly became one of Cizek’s most gifted students and incorporated his theories of Kinetism into her own drawing, illustrations and paintings. Klien also discovered her professor’s enthusiasm for working with children and became equally devoted to teaching young children, assisting Cizek in the Saturday Juvenile Art class. She became Cizek’s trusted protégé representing his methods in numerous schools and conferences throughout Europe. For Klien the love of teaching and art making were inseparable, and she engaged in both throughout her career. In 1929 Erika Giovanna Klien sails for New York, carrying with her the hope and promise of artistic recognition and fervent optimism of bringing the Cizek teaching method to new territory.

1. J.P. Anderson (1969). Franz Cizek, Art education’s man for all seasons. Art Education, Volume 22 Number 7. pp. 27 – 30.

2. Peter Smith (March 1985) Franz Cizek: The Patriarch. Art Education, Volume 38 Number 2. pp. 28 - 31

3. Wilhelm Viola (1938) Child Art and Franz Cizek

© 1936, Austrian Junior Red Cross, Vienna

Printed in Austria by Fredrich Jasper

4. ibid

Erika Giovanna Klien Brings Cizek Method to Dalton

Erika Giovanna Klien

Photograph Frontispiece: Erika Giovanna Klien, Wein 1900 - 1957 New York

by Marietta Mautner Markof (Vienna: Gemaldegalerie/Michael Kovacek, 2001)

Erika Giovanna Klien only taught art at Dalton for three years, from 1932 - 1935, but she brings an important pedagogical piece to the foundation of the school’s robust art program. Her background and teaching also helped shape Parkhurst’s own philosophy towards cultivating the creative nature of young children.

Klien studied with the revolutionary art educator, Franz Cizek, a figure not commonly remembered today, but who is considered "the father of modern art education."1 In the early decades of the 20^th century, Cizek developed an important program at the Vienna School of Applied Art (Wein Kunstgewerbeschule). It was in his seminal course “Theory of Ornamental Form” that Klien first encountered Cizek’s teaching. The educator’s dynamic personality was an important influence over the young group of artist / educators. He, like Friedrich Froebel a generation before, fervently believed in early childhood education. He established free Saturday art classes for local school children that became a laboratory of learning for himself and for his elder students. Children encountered art making in an unstructured environment where personal expression was encouraged through various materials and processes. Cizek’s dictum “let it grow from its own roots”2 was a key to allowing students the freedom to find their own method of personal expression. Cizek’s Saturday class was a training ground for his academy students and Klien became his most ardent follower.

Cizek was also father to a short-lived artistic movement known as Kinetism. It was based in Vienna and centered on the students of the Kunstgewerbeschule. In the winter of 1919 and 1920, Cizek proposed the idea of Kinetism through his lecture The Renewal of the Spiritual Foundations of Rhythmical Creation 2. This extraordinary modern movement represented a conglomerate of German Expressionism, French Cubism and Italian Futurism. Sculpture, painting, graphic design and drawings exemplified in the works of Erika Giovanna Klien, Elisabeth Karlinsky and Otto Eric Wagner represent a dynamic form of modernism, which, despite artistic promise, never received the recognition warranted by the quality of the work produced.

Erika Giovanna Klien, Locomotive, 1926

gouche on Linen, 24 x 40"

Collection Michael Pabst Gallery, Munich

Erika Giovanna Klien was Franz Cizek’s exemplary and most gifted student. She represented not only the promise of Kinetism through her taut synthesis of kinetic movement found in her paintings, but as a teacher she was most dedicated to Cizek’s pedagogy. As such the professor employed her to implement the Cizek method of teaching in a number of venues. In 1926 Dr. Cizek received a request from the educator, Elizabeth Duncan in Klessheim, Austria, to use his approach in adding an art program to her school. Elizabeth was the sister of renowned dancer Isadora Duncan, the founder of the modern dance movement. Elizabeth’s pedagogical leanings brought her to design a program to engage the whole child and the Cizek method seemed an appropriate way to incorporate art into her concept of Body and Mind Education.

Klien spent two years developing the program before being asked by Cizek to again represent their work in a traveling exhibition in Vienna, Stuttgart, and Basel prior to her presentation addressing the International Congress of Art Teachers in Prague.

During 1926, Klien received substantial recognition for her work in America through the support of the Société Anonyme. Katherine Drier, the Brooklyn born painter turned patron of the arts, in conjunction with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, founded the Société Anonyme in April 1920. This organization promoted modern art by bringing new work to the public through lectures, concerts, publications and exhibitions. One of the Société’s most celebrated collaborations involved the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Together they sponsored the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Dreier and Duchamp curated this show with works that represented the first large-scale exhibition of modern art since the 1913 Armory Exhibition. It was truly international in scope including artists from 22 countries. Many of the artists in this show proved to be the seminal pioneers of 20^th century Modernism: Marcel Duchamp. Picabia, Gris, Miro, Brancusi, Leger, Mondrian, Klee, Schwitters, Marc, Man Ray, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, Archipenko, Naum Gabo, Kandinsky, Lissitsky, and Malevich were all represented in the exhibition. The sole artist representing Austria was Erika Giovanna Klien. Dreier had personally visited Cizek and Klien at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna in 1926.3 She sought out Cizek as the decisive leader of Kinetism in search of work that would represent this independent vein of Austrian art. Dreier was impressed with Klien's work and purchased many drawings and paintings to use as part of the Brooklyn show. Klien maintained a long-term friendship with Dreier and gave her subsequent gifts of her work.

Encouraged by the success brought on by Dreier’s support and the influential International Exhibition in America, Klien decided to move to America in 1929 to seek her future and explore the potential of her artistic career. This was not the easiest move however, as Klien had given birth in 1928 to a son out of wedlock. She had also lost her father, and despite requests to return to the Duncan School she found Klessheim remote and inhospitable. It was also a hardship for her to be so far away from her mentor, Cizek. She decided to chart a course for the place that seemed to offer her a promising future, and in September, 1929 Erika Klien left her son in the hands of foster parents and sailed for New York City.

Soon after her arrival in New York, using her experience as a Cizek protégée, Klien soon secured positions at Stuyvesant School (Stuyvesant Neighborhood House) on St. Marks Place and then in 1930 at the Spence School. She received an invitation to exhibit her works at the New School for Social Research and later taught adult classes at the New School. In September of 1932 Klien would bring her knowledge of the Cizek method to Dalton. And there is a photograph of her teaching young students in her classroom from the school’s archives. Cut paper collages in black and white, typical of Cizek's methodology, can be seen on the bulletin boards as well as clay figures of animals. Judging from the children’s enthusiasm, Klien must have been a dynamic and popular teacher. Despite her successes, New York life was strenuous for Klien as she juggled multiple part time teaching positions while producing and promoting her work as an artist.

Erika Giovanna Klien in her Classroom at Dalton mid 1930s

© The Dalton School Archives

Cizek’s method of teaching art was gaining world recognition through his Saturday classes and dissemination of exhibitions and reproductions of his students’ work in England and America. His combination of careful observation with a child’s artistic development was unparalleled in with art education of the time. Cizek’s disciples, such as Klien, were distributing his ideas worldwide. He was written up in 1923 article in Time Magazine with helped inform the American public about his teachings. Helen Parkhurst was compelled by his methodology and was intrigued by Klien. So much so that she traveled to Vienna to witness Cizek’s classes first hand. We are not sure what she thought, but her collaborator and patron, Josephine Boardman Crane, was knowledgeable of Cizek’s methods. She had clipped and saved a lengthy article from the New York Times Magazine section from November 1923, which spoke at length about the success of Cizek’s Saturday school. So the master was well known to both Parkhurst and Crane well before they were introduced to Erika Klien. She was just what the school needed to integrate the arts with the Dalton plan.

Success came to Erika Klien through another patron of the arts, Evangeline Stokowski, the second wife of conductor, Leopold Stokowski. Evangeline Brewster Johnson Stokowski was the daughter of Robert Wood Johnson, cofounder of Johnson & Johnson. She had lost much of her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, but still retained enough to support a few philanthropic and artistic causes including The Dalton School and Erika Giovanna Klien. Evangeline had recently married Stokowski and settled into a top floor apartment across from Central Park. Evangeline was good friends with Helen Parkhurst and she not only supported the school financially, but she so believed in the curriculum to the point that she wanted her own one year old child, Andrea, to be included as one of the first Dalton babies to be cared for by high school students in the school’s nursery program.

Erika Giovanna Klien's study for the Stolowski Mural

As far as support for Klien, Ms. Stokowski commissioned the artist to paint a mural from their apartment on the top floor to the rooftop garden. What remains today is Klien’s study for the project, a clever mechanical composition revealing the staircase and mechanical structures that lie beneath. Her approach to the mural is not kinetic but more closely aligned to Leger’s Purism which she had favored at a previous time. The Klien mural does not measure up to her mature work of either her Kinetic style while in school or her fractured interpretations of New York City scenes as represented in her delicate watercolor ”New York, St. Marks Place” of 1930 or the black and white drawing "Times Square Subway Station" of 1931. In these works Klien seems to have taken the Kinetism and made it a part of the staccato experience of New York. These works are at once both hauntingly beautiful but also strangely lonely. In both images the viewer is apart from the scene as voyeur and observer. Klien the immigrant from Austria was looking at this strange landscape with an astute eye and she managed to capture something about New York that few other artists could relay about that time and place. The ever present hustle and bustle, the despair, the haunting beauty are all there in Klien’s depictions of these New York scenes.

........

.....Erika Giovanna Klien New York St. Marks Place, 1930 .....Erika Giovanna Klien Times Square Subway Station, 1931

.................watercolor on paper, 9" x 15.5"................................................pencil and charcoal on paper, 14" x 20"

.........................private collection...........................................................................private collection, Cologne

1. Erika Giovanna Klien by Marietta Mautner Markhof, (English translation by Dr. John Matthew Mitchell), © 2001 Gemaldegalerie Michale Kovacek, page 10

2. Jahresberichte der Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule 1919-1920 “Erneuer der geistigen Grundlagen des rhythmischen Gestaltens” a lecture held in the winter of 1919 -1920. The Life and Work of Erika Giovanna Klien, ©1989 Rachel Adler Gallery

3. The Societe Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: a Catalogue Raisonne, Robert L. Herbert, © 1984 Yale University Press.

Discovering Early Artists at Dalton

During my research I have focused on 5 avant guard artists who contributed to the early development of the art program at Dalton. These individuals evolved highly personal styles rooted in the cubist and post cubist experiments of early modernism. They approached art making with a fervor and commitment to the new vocabulary of abstraction, moving away from the stagnancy of the 19th century art academies. These 5 Dalton artist / teachers from the 1920s-1940s represent a diversified group, bringing various permutations of modernism to New York City from art centers in Munich, Vienna, Kiev (by way of Paris), and Mexico City. When they arrived in New York they were part of a small group of contemporary artists striving to bring new ideas to a rather provincial American art world.

Helen Parkhurst must have been attracted to these individuals and their dedication to a progressive modernist spirit. Like her, they were ready to bring new ideas to the discussion and to reevaluate the status quo. Parkhurst deliberately wanted a global approach to learning, with many opinions and experiences to help broaden the learning base.

Dalton’s ties to modern art may have come from Helen Parkhurst’s close association with Mrs. Josephine Boardman Crane who was Parkhurst’s unflagging supporter, confidante, and spokesperson for the Dalton Plan. Crane had employed Parkhurst to educate her own three children in Dalton, Massachusetts and so believed in her theories of progressive education that she provided the financial underpinnings for The Children’s University School that opened on West 72nd Street in New York City. Crane moved to New York in 1922 after the death of her husband, U.S. senator and governor of Massachusetts, W. Murray Crane. Mrs. Crane would become one of the founding members of the Museum of Modern Art and was elected to the Board of Trustees in October 1929. As well as amassing a personal art collection, she also opened her home on Park Avenue for a weekly literary salon, which attracted writers and poets of the time (Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein to name two).

I would like to believe it was in the bond between Parkhurst, the educator, and Crane, the New York philanthropist, and their collaboration on the founding of the school, which eventually became Dalton, that included a fundamental component in the arts. Their determination was that this way for children to explore and express personal creativity is so important in the education of the whole child and as a citizen of the world.

Parkhurst definitely saw the values of the arts in education. She personally hired all the early art teachers and even recruited Konrad Cramer to be one of the first department heads in 1926 (he was eventually commissioned to paint mural(s) for the new building on 89th Street in 1929). The five art teachers were:

•

Konran Cramer studied in Munich and taught at Dalton from 1926 – 1928. He was also commissioned to painted a mural for the mathematics classroom in 1929 for the newly constructed building at 108 East 89th Street.

.

Erika Giovanna Klien studied with Franz Cizek, the "Father of modern art education" in Vienna. She taught at Dalton between 1932 – 1935.

.

Vaclav Vytlacil was born New York. He was one of the first Americans to study with Hans Hofmann in Munich. Vytlacil taught at Dalton from 1937 – 1943. He was also part of the faculty from 1947 -1954.

.

Alexander Archipenkpo studied in Kiev, Ukraine before moving to Paris and then Berlin. In 1923 he emigrated to the United States. Archipenko taught at Dalton in the early 1940s.

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Rufino Tamayo was born in in 1899 in Oxaca de Juarez, Mexico. He moved to Mexico City in 1911 and then to New York City in 1926. Tamayo taught at Dalton from 1940 - 1947.