56 • Introduction to Art Therapy
Although he made it clear that he was not advocating that teachers do counseling,
Lowenfeld himself was briefly employed as an “art therapist” at institutions for the blind
and the retarded in 1938 and 1939 (B). Thanks to a student who recorded his lectures and
a colleague who transcribed and published them, the warmth, brilliance, and humanity of
Lowenfeld shine through perhaps more directly than in his books (Michael, 1982) (C).
Lowenfeld was not alone in championing the psychological value of spontaneous expres-
sive art for children. In England, freer art teaching was being advocated by Herbert Read
(1958) and others. One was Maria Petrie, an art teacher who like Lowenfeld had fled Nazi
Europe. In Part III of her book, Art & Regeneration (Petrie, 1946), entitled “Art & Therapy”
Petrie described how art could help those suffering from physical, sensory, mental, medical,
and societal ills.
In the United States another refugee, Henry Schaeffer-Simmern (1961), described his
“experiments” in teaching art to several atypical groups, including individuals who were
developmentally delayed and others who were incarcerated (Cf. Sarason, 1990). In New York
City, Florence Cane (Figure 3.3), an art teacher to whom psychiatrists referred patients (D),
wrote a book about her methods (E) for evoking creativity and promoting healing, which
she called The Artist in Each of Us (1951).
Artists in Hospitals
The history of art in psychiatric settings is almost as old as the units themselves.
Figure 3.3 Florence Cane teaching a student.