History • 57As early as 1907, a teacher of clay modeling was working at Massachusetts General
Hospital. And in 1929, William Alanson White, superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
in Washington, DC, presented a paper titled “The Language of the Psychoses” with many
references to patient art.
From 1935 to 1943, one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), employed out-of-work artists in the Federal Art Project (DVD 3.10).
A young artist (A) who was to become an art therapy pioneer (B), Georgette Seabrooke
[Powell], was one of those who made murals (C) in Harlem Hospital through the WPA
(Figure 3.4). Through this avenue, in addition to painting murals in public buildings, many
art teachers were enabled to offer classes during the 1930s to psychiatric patients in various
settings, such as Bellevue Hospital in New York City (Bender, 1952).
By the 1940s the ground had been prepared, as it were, for the planting and budding of
the discipline of art therapy. Most of the early work on the psychopathology of expression
had been done by European psychiatrists. However, the same political situation that drove
Petrie to England and Lowenfeld to America richly fertilized the soil in the United States,
largely due to the influx of analysts and of the psychodynamic thinking that permeated both
American education and psychiatry for many years.
Art Therapy Is Born
Naumburg and Kramer
Two remarkable women were primarily responsible for the planting, tending, budding,
and blossoming of the American art therapy garden. Their contributions were distin-
guished not only by their pioneering work, but also by their articulate prose, which
defined the new field (DV D 3.11). Both Margaret Naumburg (A) and Edith Kramer (B)
Figure 3.4 Georgette Seabrooke (Powell)—WPA artist.