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.

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.....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.

Konrad Cramer and Mr. Stieglitz

In the first two decades of the 20^th century there were few “Modernists” among the painters and sculptors in America. This country was behind the times compared to an expanding avant-garde in Europe with special attention given to the recent developments in Cubism taking place in France. Picasso’s notorious Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, arguably the first “Cubist" painting, had been completed in 1907 but was not seen by the public until 1916. Picasso had shown his novel canvas to friends and had received mixed reviews. Braque and his dealer, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler were supportive of the new work, but his friend and life long rival, Matisse was not.The more lyrical Matisse considered Picasso’s sharp angles and masked whores “hideous” and the work an assault on the efforts of other modern painters. Picasso would roll up the painting and keep it out of site for years and his direction took a tamer route before arriving at Analytical Cubism.

At about the same time Picasso was experimenting with Les Demoiselles, Alfred Stieglitz, along with Edward Steichen, were working in New York City to elevate the craft of photography to the same heights as painting and sculpture. They were pioneers in the Photo-Secession movement and began a gallery on 5^th Avenue to showcase the work of early photographers. In 1908 the gallery shifted across the street and took up the name 291, that of its address on Fifth Ave.Stieglitz broadened the venue and began showing works by the European Modernists. Auguste Rodin exhibited a series of watercolors and Matisse exhibited his first works in America at 291.Stieglitz had established a beachhead of modern art in America. He envisioned the gallery as a place where dialogue between artists and patrons could exist and where new ideas about art could be available to the public. Alfred Stieglitz would persistently and slowly change the way America felt about Modern Art and provided one of the only places in New York for young American artists to see modern European art.

Brancusi Exhibition at “291” in 1916

photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, published in Camera Work

The Young Konrad Cramer came to New York as a German immigrant. He had recently married a young American art student, Florence Ballin, in 1911 and settled in New York. He soon became an acquaintance and friend of Alfred Stieglitz, as he was most likely drawn to 291. The two shared a common history. Stieglitz who was a first generation American of German-Jewish parents had moved back to Karlsruhe, Germany with his family in 1881 when he was a teen. Kramer had studied at Karlsruhe Academy. Their common background and love on modern art must have generated many interesting conversations. Cramer also enjoyed photography and over the course of his career he devoted more and more time to this. At one point he felt his pursuit of painting was exhausted, but he was invigorated by the photographic medium. Much of his passion for photography could have been derived from his association with Stieglitz.

Konrad often came to “291” and in 1913 he visited the gallery to see an impressive collection of watercolors by the French painter Francis Picabia. Picabia was in New York City, for the important 1913 Armory Exhibition. He was the only Cubist to attend the exhibition and was able to witness his works hanging alongside those by Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and the controversial Marcel Duchamp with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase. The public furor surrounding the exhibition was considerable, but Stieglitz was impressed with the work. He purchased Kandinsky's The Garden of Love (Improvisation No. 27) and offered Picabia a one man show at "291."Three days after the close of the Armory Exhibition Picabia's show opened at "291." The works were completed during his stay and represent the artist's interpretations of New York. The show was influential to Cramer and he immediately wrote his wife to suggest that she see the exhibition. 1.

Stieglitz was helpful to Cramer’s career. Although he never offered Konrad an exhibition at 291, he did place him in a number of group exhibitions he curated. Cramer was expanding his own photographic career, experimenting with the possibilities within the photographic medium. He was a proponent of the new 35mm Leica camera and started the “School of Miniature Photography” in Woodstock (miniature because of the “small” 35mm negative size). Cramer also started one of first photography courses offered in a college program at Bard College. Stieglitz wrote his letter of recommendation for the position.

Perhaps the most endearing connection between these two artists exists in a series of portraits taken by Stieglitz in the gallery at 291. After the session Cramer writes about the experience and demystifies the process. He makes Stieglitz seem to be a magician with the medium, using the simplest of tools and adjusting light from an overhead skylight with the simplest of techniques. Here is Konrad’s observation of Stieglitz’s photographic method.

The Equipment was extremely simple, almost primitive. He used an 8 x 10-inch view camera, its sagging bellows held up by pieces of string and adhesive tape. The lens was a Steinheil, no shutter. The portraits were made in the smaller of the two rooms at 291 beneath a small skylight. He used Hammer plates with about three second exposures. During the exposure, Stieglitz manipulated a large, white reflector to balance the overhead light. He made about nine such exposures, and then we retired to the washroom which doubled as a darkroom. The plates were developed in a single tray. From the two best negatives he made four platinum contact prints, exposing the frame on the fire escape. He would tend to his prints, with more care than a cook does her biscuits. The finished print finally received a coat of wax for added gloss and protection. 2.

"291"

Alfred Stieglitz © George Eastman House

Konrad Cramer at "291" 1914

Alfred Stieglitz © George Eastman House

What is interesting in these two photographs is how Stieglitz poses the painter in front of different framed pictures in the gallery. He carefully aligns the picture frame with the edge of the photograph, making them appear as two parallel rectangles that hold the figure in suspension in a shallow three-dimensional space. Cramer is positioned diagonally in each picture resting his elbow on the shelf that ran the perimeter of the room. This helps to stabilize the sitter during the long three-second pose. Konrad also seems to have a fixed view as if told by Stieglitz to look at a specific point on the opposite wall. The overall effect shows the power behind a Stieglitz portrait; posed, framed and contemplative it allows us to look into the subject and find meaning in the soul of this particular artist. Both Stieglitz and Cramer seem to have reached an understanding at this moment. The photographer capturing the essence of the painter as the painter relays the simple method of the photographer in his description of the process.

Postscript:

It is surprising to note how few individuals there were in New York City in the first decades of the 20^th century involved with progressive ideas with a commitment to shaping the future. Parkhurst, Cramer, and Stieglitz were certainly three such individuals. Their lives intersected because of their visions for a more open, accepting, and to them, natural society. Parkhurst was life long friends with the artist, Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz’s wife. Parkhurst remained involved in the small world of modernist art in New York City through these and other friendships.

In my research I am still searching for more answers to questions about individual story lines that keep crossing. A case in point is a recent discovery in the Dalton Archives from the December 1933 issue of the Daltonian, Volume 1 Number II. The school was preparing for the annual Christmas Pageant, an important event at the school from that time, and I was caught by one of the news items: “Along with the pageant comes the Christmas card contest, from which is chosen the official school card. This year the judges were Dorothy Brett and Mr. Alfred Steiglitz [sic]. The two cards chosen, one to be used for the cover of the pageant program, were two exceptionally beautiful ones by Mariam Rous.”

So Stieglitz, the champion of modern art in this country and one of the world masters of modern photography helped select the student card for the Christmas pageant at Dalton in 1933 - how about that.

1. Tom Wolf, Konrad Cramer: His Art and His Context (1985 New York University Institute of Fine Arts Ph.D. dissertation)

2. Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz A Beginning Light, © 2004 Yale University Press, page 276

Konrad Cramer Heads the Art Program at Parkhurst’s School

Konrad Cramer and his wife, Florence Ballin had settled into the life of country artists as they moved to Woodstock, established studios and continued painting. The rural environment provided a rich experience for the young couple. Konrad began teaching at The Woodstock School of Painting and Applied Arts and the Cramers began remodeling a pre-revolutionary house in nearby Bearsville. Florence had established a shop, selling art books, prints, jewelry and antiques to supplement the couple’s income. It was a productive and energetic time for them. Life was simple, money sometimes scarce, but in comparison to their previous life in New York City, the rural setting allowed time to paint and provided an active social community.

Some time before moving to Woodstock, Konrad had met Helen Parkhurst. The two shared conversations regarding education, and Cramer may have spoken of his experiences while visiting Europe in the spring of 1920. While abroad, the artist had studied the educational methods used in the training of craftsmen and designers. Parkhurst must have been impressed with Cramer, as she asked him to join the faculty of her Children’s University School in its new quarters on Manhattan’s West 72^nd Street. Cramer at first refused, preferring to continue his studio activities and Woodstock teaching. But finally money became scarce, as Florence wrote in her diary at the time, “we are damn broke.” Konrad acquiesced and accepted Parkhurst’s offer to teach in Manhattan.

In the fall of 1927, Konrad Cramer became the head of the Children’s University School’s art department, framing the art program and becoming the first active artist to teach at the school. It is not know how many classes or teachers were working at the school, but there are a few surviving photographs of the art room from 72^nd street. They show multiple activities. While students in these photos are most likely posed, the picture does reveal the range of art activities that were offered at the school. Weaving and embroidery (sewing), drawing and painting, sculpture, and ceramics, and printmaking seem to be offered to the children.

Arts Students from the Children's University School

Josephine Boardman Crane Papers Relating to the Dalton School.

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Cramer dedicated himself to developing art curriculum. He spent his weekdays in New York City and traveled north to relax and enjoy weekends in Woodstock. Because of the busy schedule, he was unable to produce any new art while teaching. Florence laments the fact that her busy husband has not done any painting for a long time.

Konrad managed to stay at The Children’s University School for two years. At times his wife Florence also came to New York and conducted classes at the school. Cramer finally decided not to return to teaching at Parkhurst’s school for the fall semester of 1928. The artist must have parted on good terms for when Parkhurst decides to expand school facilities and move to a new location on East 89^th Street, building a new building there, Konrad Cramer is commissioned to paint murals for the classrooms. It is at this point that The Children’s University School is transformed into The Dalton School, taking the name from the “Dalton Plan” which was the foundation for Parkhurst’s educational model. The name “Dalton” comes from Mrs. Josephine Boardman Crane’s home in Dalton, Massachusetts where Parkhurst first formulated her educational philosophy, with Crane’s encouragement, as she privately educated Crane’s three children.

When Cramer begins to work on the Dalton murals he returns to cubism, yet retains much of the dynamism of New York City. Despite the fact that we only have documentation of one mural constructed for one of the 5th floor mathematics classrooms, there is evidence there were two. In Florence Cramer’s diary there is a reference to multiple murals at the school,

“For a time he was head of the Art Department of the Children’s University School in New York, and later did mural abstractions, in oils, for two mathematics rooms in this school. This mural was paid for by Mrs. Victor Harris, and Cramer was assisted by Woodstock artist, Lorenzo D. “Tode” Brower.”

Though the mural does not survive today, we do have Cramer’s preparatory study, an unfinished drawing, showing the geometric composition and beginning to hint at his color choices. The final painting was estimated to be 3’ x 9.5’ and has the top of a doorway cut into the bottom edge of the mural, just to the left of the center. Cramer builds a dynamic composition of carefully scribed lines, concentric marks and architectural details. His imagery represents a modern Manhattan at the beginning of its jazz age – skyscraping towers, an airplane ready for take off, the luxury of a fine Ruxton motor car with it’s spare tire resting on the front fender as it speeds uptown, all displayed in a cinematic flux. The discernable elements of airplane and automobile erode to the geometries of engineer’s drawings showing the draftsman and mathematician’s craft behind these modern forms. Cramer provides inspiration for the daydreaming student showing the beauty and potential behind mere number study. This work is unquestionably the most avant guard mural to be commissioned in New York at the time. The works of famous Mexican Muralists and those by Thomas Hart Benton and others would embellish the next generation of skyscrapers, yet would come a decade or two after Cramer’s work. The significance of Cramer’s modernist approach to imagery, a cross between the pulse of the city and the mechanics that lies underneath were surprising. A momentous, though largely unrecognized chapter in modern art, known only to the children who took their classes in this mathematics classroom for three and a half decades. A later head of school, Donald Barr, removed the mural in the 1960s. It is the only work like it in Cramer’s oeuvre and seems his only attempt at mural painting.

Konrad Cramer

Study for the Dalton School Mathematics Classroom

mixed media on paper

Courtesy of Franklin Riehlman Fine Art

Study for the Dalton School Mathematics Classroom (detail showing Ruxton Automobile)

Advertisement for Ruxton Automobile

Study for the Dalton School Mathematics Classroom (detail showing airplane)

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Though Konrad Cramer’s time at Dalton was short, his influence set the groundwork for the importance of including art as part of every child’s education. Parkhurst continued the program and as she did with Cramer, she looked for individuals who represented a new wave of thinking and teaching to influence her school and the young minds of her students.

Dalton School 5th Floor Mathematics Classroom

A corner of Konrad Cramer's mural can be seen in the upper right of the photograph.

© The Dalton School Archives

Konrad Cramer (1888 Wurtzburg, Germany - 1963 Woodstock, NY)

Konrad Cramer

Self Protrait, 1925

Oil on Masonite

20" x 16"

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

Konrad Cramer was born in 1888, in Wurtzburg Germany. He studied at Karlsruhe Kunstakademie in Munich from 1906 -08. Kramer found his interactions with fellow students to be much more stimulating than many of the art classes at the Academy. He did, however, study with Ludwig Schid-Reutte who most likely introduced him to cubism, an approach that would remain central to Cramer’s work throughout his life.

In 1909 and 1910 he had the opportunity to see two exhibitions of French artists in Munich, among them Picasso and Braque, along with post-impressionist paintings by Cezanne, Seurat and others. He was part of the bourgeoning Blaue Reiter group where artists were beginning to exhibit a new form of Expressionist art. Kramer was particularly influenced by the spiritual and improvisational nature of Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings of the period. Cramer visited Franz Marc’s studio, bringing along his young American fiancé Florence Ballin before they married in London and moved to New York.

In New York City he befriended the photographer and gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz, who studied at the Karlsruhe, Realgymnasium in Munich in 1881. Stieglitz’s gallery 291 was the only place New Yorkers could find the contemporary art from Europe and later its counterparts in America. It was 291 that established what we now consider to be the model of a private contemporary art gallery. Cramer maintained a close lifelong friendship with Stieglitz. He contributed to the periodical Camera Work and had his portrait taken by the photographer, offering an insightful description of the simple techniques employed by Stieglitz to make a photographic portrait.

In America, on the heels of the controversial Armory exhibition of 1913, Cramer became an important early figure of abstract modern painting, developing a style closely related to the works of Kandinsky. In November of 1913 he held his first exhibition of 6 non-objective paintings at the MacDowell Club at 108 West 55^th Street. This 10 day exhibition represented some of the most radical paintings shown at MacDowell at the time. A number of paintings are titled “Improvisation” a reference to the work being generated by Kandinsky in Munich around same time.

Konrad Cramer

Improvisation, circa 1911 - 1913

Oil on Board, 16" x 18 3/4"

Christie's Sale October 4th, 2000

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:

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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.

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

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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.

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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.