History • 55and Montessori’s “infant schools” in Italy, many were persuaded that children needed to learn
in more direct, personally involving ways. Those in progressive education were especially
convinced that creative experiences in art were vital to healthy emotional development.
Early art education had been rigidly didactic, involving the copying of “good” art and
the learning of basic principles of color and design. With the growth of the child study
movement, along with the emphasis of psychoanalysis on the dangers of repression and the
virtues of expression, things began to change. In Vienna an art teacher named Franz Cizek,
who coined the term Child Art, encouraged children to paint and draw in a natural fashion,
which was then a radical idea (Viola, 1942).
There was another Viennese who observed Cizek’s methods, and who was especially sen-
sitive to the value of personal expression in helping children to achieve what he called “self-
identification.” He was also exposed to psychoanalytic ideas during the formative years of
his career, and was taught by Oskar Kokoschka, an Expressionist painter. Because he wrote
a textbook in 1947 that has been used to train art teachers for 60 years, Viktor Lowenfeld
had a profound influence on art education in the United States and on art therapy as well
(DVD 3.9).
Since his early work had been with blind and partially sighted children (Lowenfeld, 1939,
rev. 1952) (A), Lowenfeld was attuned to the perceptual and emotional impact of a disability
on a child’s self-concept (Figure 3 .2). In a chapter (Lowenfeld, 1957) omitted from later edi-
tions of Creative & Mental Growth after his untimely death (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1987), he
described what he called an “art education therapy” for children with various disabilities.
Figure 3.2 Viktor Lowenfeld, Art Education Therapist.