Dancing in the Darkroom

Russian émigré Alexey Brodovitch, best known for leading a radical shift in magazine design in the United States during his twenty-four-year tenure (1934–58) as art director of Harper’s Bazaar, also pursued innovative practices in other fields of art, design, and education. His ballet photography, made during rehearsals and performances of touring dance companies in New York City from 1935 to 1938, explored unusual methods of capturing dancers in motion. Brodovitch’s images would eventually come to be celebrated for their unconventional approach, but at the time, Brodovitch was not sure of his direction. Recent archival discoveries suggest that Brodovitch reframed this graphic “problem” into curriculum for his classes at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, inspiring students to delve into a number of experimental photographic techniques and pioneering the teaching of such practices in American classrooms.

Re-Discovering Graphics

This chapter presents a historical account and analysis of Discover Graphics, a defunct museum-school-community partnership developed by the Smithsonian Institution, that for 24 years provided professional level printmaking studio and museum experiences to high school students, college students, and art teachers in the Washington, DC metropolitan region. The description and impact of the program on school districts, students, teachers, artists, and museum professionals are examined through archival materials, publications, the author's narrative of experience as a student participant in the program, and its transformative effect on her education and career. The chapter closes with a discussion about community printmaking programs that developed to fill the breach left by the closure of Discover Graphics and suggests possible future museum-school-community partnerships.

Atmospheric rooms as experience in the space-time in an evolutionary museum- Alexander Dorner's exhibition design

In order to contribute to the studies of exhibition design, its practice and related fields, the aim of the article is to present and organize in ahistorical perspective some of the contributions and proposals made by Alexander Dorner (1893-1957), art historian, supporter of modern art. Dorner is recognized for his proposals carried out in the design of the exhibition of the rooms of the Landesmuseum in Hannover, Germany, after assuming its direction in the early 1920s. Later, he improved his conceptions when director of the Rhode Island Museum School of Design, in Providence, after immigrating to the United States in 1937. Dorner conceptions were of a living and dynamic museum, not a dead monument in an established way, limited only to a set of exhibition rooms for historical artifacts and artistic treasures closed in shop windows, a kind of deposit of objects. His exhibitions proposals consisted inenvironments for the works, spaces that he called “atmospheric rooms”. In these environments, the aim was to evoke the spirit of each period, in which the user, immersed, would have an opportunity to approach a visual and sensitive logic of the culture in which the works had been created. The idea was not to create a simple imitation of the period, but to allow sensations suggested by colors and shapes, gardens, images of historical exteriors placed over windows, using of devices such as speakers and headphones (for music and poetry of the time), molding a “body imaginary” through experience. In its conception, the museum should demonstrate the history of art and its aesthetic changes over time, as the artistic production of a previous time would allow the exercise of projecting the imagination in the past and updating it with the perspective of the present. This would allow the learning of history, giving more meaning to the present time and boosting and shaping the culture of the future, once the evolutionary connectivity of artistic and cultural production is understood.In order to exhibit the artist production of his time, in partnership with the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941), he built during 1927 and 1928 what would become known as the first permanent abstract art gallery in a museum, the Abstract Cabinet (Abstraktes Kabinett). With an areasmaller than twenty square meters, it had metal slats on its walls and, as visitors moved, offered a kind of optical illusion. Also sliding panels forcedthe public to manipulate and choose to reveal or hide certain paintings. Historical, theoretical research on exhibition design is the starting point for establishing a historical descriptive method to generate conceptual and morphological analysis parameters to characterizes an exhibition.

Between Russia, Lithuania and Poland: The Life, Pedagogique Activity and Work of Stefan NaręBski – the Architect-Artist of the Vilnius School

It cannot be said that the creative biography of the artist-architect Stefan Narębski (1892–1966) remains a completely unknown page in the history of art, but everything that has been written and published so far about the life and work of Stefan Narębski is only the top of the iceberg which is his complete biography. The author restores many forgotten and unknown facts of this biography, mainly based on the materials of the Archive of the Nicolaus Copernicus University, first of all, the artist’s own notes (“Diaries”), which had never been published before. Discoveries of this kind relate primarily to the childhood and adolescence of Narębski, held in the Caucasus and Vilnius; his participation in the 1905 revolution; his educational and creative activities in Włocławek in the 1920s; his connections with Stephen Batory University; as well as the repressions that he faced both during the years of the Nazi occupation of Lithuania and during the restoration of Soviet power here, in 1944–45. In the artistic heritage of Narębski, a close-up is highlighted by the types of residential buildings developed by him, educational institutions (museum, school, university department), modern churches, projects for the artistic transformation and decoration of public interiors (the residence of the archbishop; town halls in Vilnius and Torun). The theoretical development of the artistic training program for masters of architectural design (design and decoration of interiors), carried out by Narębski, and the practical implementation of this program at the Nicolaus Copernicus University contained an innovative beginning and provided the most important breakthrough of Polish post-war artistic pedagogy towards a modern, progressive methodology. Of great importance is the international aspect of the work of Narębski, whose personal biography is connected not only with Poland and the strongest impulses of Polish patriotism, but also with Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine (with the places where he studied, lived, worked, built and planned the construction of new objects). His contribution to the development of art and artistic pedagogy is subject to measurement on the scale of not only national but also Eastern European culture.

IN SEARCH OF THE MUSEUM – SCHOOL COOPERATION MODEL: FACE CULTURE PROGRAMME OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM IN CRACOW

The paper is of investigative character for elaborating cooperation standards between museums and educational institutions. It aims at presenting and interpreting the results of the Museum’s own research of the Face Culture Project implemented in 2017–2019 at the National Museum in Cracow. The analysis of the factors favouring and impeding cooperation of museum and school has become the basis for a wider generalization and shaping models of museum and school learning in which the following elements have been distinguished: goals, subjects, objects, means, methods, conditions, and results. These elements have been presented from the perspective of both museum and school. The paper may prove of interest to school teachers and museum educators cooperating with schools, as well as to theoreticians of museology and of museum pedagogy, the latter developing as a subdiscipline of pedagogy.