John Dewey’s Socially Instrumental Practice at the Barnes Foundation and the Role of “Transferred Values” in Aesthetic Experience

. . . there is a difference between the art product (statue, painting or whatever), and the work of art. The first is physical and potential; the latter is active and experienced.

—John Dewey

JOHN DEWEY’S philosophy of education rests on the axiom that the indispensable elements of the democratic way of life—scientific method as intelligence in operation, art, education—are all bound together in A SINGLE ORGANIC WHOLE. To put the matter in other terms, all genuine experience is intelligent experience, experience guided by insight derived from science, illuminated by art, and made a common possession in education.

—Albert Barnes

Introduction

When Albert Barnes established an art education program at the Barnes Foundation in 1924, he asked John Dewey to become the first president and director of education and named Thomas Munro (a former student of Dewey’s) as the foundation’s associate educational director.¹ Hoping to create an alliance with the University of Pennsylvania, Barnes made arrangements with the university to hire Munro on a two-year renewable contract; he served as a visiting lecturer/exchange professor during the 1924–1925 and 1925–1926 academic years, with Barnes paying the salary. However, Munro’s contract was not renewed; he left, on amicable terms, in the summer of 1927 for a position at Rutgers and, ultimately, a long and distinguished career as curator of education at the Cleveland Museum of Art.²

Barnes and Dewey enjoyed a sustained and fruitful relationship with regard to aesthetic experience and scientific theory as applied to education. Indeed, in their dedications to their books, Dr. Barnes and Dr. Dewey have been mutually appreciative of each other’s work.³ Moreover, in the preface to Art as Experience, Dewey wrote in detail about his indebtedness to Dr. Barnes while visiting him in his Merion, Pennsylvania, galleries and home and abroad as they toured the museums and galleries of Europe together:

My greatest indebtedness is to Dr. A. C. Barnes. The chapters have been gone over one by one with him, and yet what I owe to his comments and suggestions on this account is but a small measure of my debt. I have had the benefit of conversations with him through a period of years, many of which occurred in the presence of the unrivalled collection of pictures he has assembled. The influence of these conversations, together with that of his books, has been a chief factor in shaping my own thinking about the philosophy of esthetics. Whatever is sound in this volume is due more than I can say to the great educational work carried on in the Barnes Foundation. That work is of a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not excepted. I should be glad to think of this volume as one phase of the widespread influence the Foundation is exercising.⁴

Figure 1.

John Dewey, Albert C. Barnes, and Fidele seated in the Gallery beside “After the Concert” (BF862), 1941. Photograph collection. The Barnes Archives. Photograph © 2012 The Barnes Foundation. Reproduced with permission.

Many art educators are familiar with Thomas Munro’s work in the field regarding the use of the scientific method in aesthetics,⁵ but they are less familiar with the contributions of Dr. Albert C. Barnes to Dewey’s philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular. While Thomas Munro went on to explore the scientific method in aesthetics at other institutions after his three years at the Barnes Foundation, Albert Barnes and John Dewey continued to explore the application of the scientific method to education in art through their ongoing conversations, in the presence of Barnes’s great collection at his foundation and abroad.

Socially Instrumental Scientific Method in Education at the Barnes Foundation

Barnes and Dewey shared a serious and abiding interest in educating “the masses,” being deeply involved in bringing art to many people in a way that affects their lives by integrating the aesthetic...