Abstract

The seminal ideas of the most influential modern art educator are presented here as he developed them, in edited transcripts of Viktor Lowenfeld's 1958 class lectures and discussions on art education and art therapy. The transcripts serves as explication of Lowenfeld's_ Creative and Mental Growth_, now going into a seventh edition—with posthumous collaborators since the author's death in 1960—translated into all the world's major languages. The experiential basis of Lowenfeld's ideas is revealed through the autobiographical and reflective quality of his lectures and his Socratic dialogs with students. Both his vicarious experience, arising from his erudition, and his immediate experience, stemming from his sensitivity to everyday stimuli, are focused on the problem at hand. The result is a freshness and immediacy as though the author were speaking directly to the reader about mutual concerns. The book presents transcripts of 31 class sessions conducted by Lowenfeld on Art and the Child, Art and the Adolescent, and Art Education Therapy in the year after his election as "Art Educator of the Year" by national Art Education Association. The editor's introduction gives the highlights of Lowenfeld's life and work and the circumstances surrounding the recorded class meetings. The book concludes with a selected bibliography of the works of Viktor Lowenfeld