ART FOR CHILDREN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 199, 23 July 1937, Page 8

ART FOR CHILDREN

AN AUSTRALIAN’S METHODS FREE AND HAPPY.

WELLINGTON, July 22. An outline of the new era in children’s art in Vienna introduced by Professor F. Cizek, who came from Czechoslovakia but lvas really a German, was given by Dr. Paul L. Dengler, director of the Austro-American Institute of Education, Vienna, in a New Education Fellowship conference seminar to-day. Professor Cizek’s dream, Dr. Dengler said, had been to become an artist, and, with this idea, he went to Vienna to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Through the children of his landlady and of neighbours, he discovered that his talent lay, not in tho practice of art, but in the development of creative ability in others. He became a teacher, but his unorthodox methods did not please the authorities, and he was about to bo discharged when he was engaged by a semi-private institution, the School for Applied Arts. In 1898 he formed his first youth class as a private affair. Cizek’s first principle was that the child must be made to feel free and happy. ‘‘You can’t expect a child to become a creator in a prison cell -I almost wanted to say a school-rooin,’ said Mr Dengler. So Cizek encouraged the children to beautify the room they used and to feel the joy of living. His second principle was not to impose teaching upon tho children; he realised that any attempt to develop technical skill would probably have some measure of success, but that, in the process, it would destroy all that was interesting, new and fascinating in children’s art. His third principle was to concern himself only with those children who were gifted; he was not for mass production, but for the aristocracy in the realm of creative art. “I had a hoy who went to Cizek s class,” said Dr. Dengler. “When he came homo the first day I. asked him, ‘What did Cizek say ?’— ‘Nothing. ‘What did he ask you to do?’—‘Nothing.’ ‘What did you do?’—‘Looked out of the window.’ So my boy dropped out of Cizek’s class, and, although Cizek was a close friend of mine, ho did not even notice.” The Austrian public schools had ultimately adopted Cizek’s ideas ' n a modified form, the lecturer said. The ideal was to keep tho child’s freshness of expression, yet try to give a certain guidance. The old guidance had suppressed everything; the new guidance kept everything, yet gave a helping hand. It had been found that a class usually divided itself into two groups: Visionaries, or storytellers, who saw and drew an object as a whole, and constructionists, who saw and drew it piece by piece. Where one group had the sense of colour and beauty, the other had mental soundness. ‘The ideal was to give to each group what it lacked.