John Dewey, Albert Barnes, and the Continuity of Art and Life

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Author’s note: The author expresses gratitude for the use of material adapted from the following:

Chapter 1 adapted in part from “The Science of Art: Aesthetic Formalism in John Dewey and Albert Barnes, Part I,” by David A. Granger, in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 52, no. 1, Spring 2018, 55–83, copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used by permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Chapter 2 adapted in part from “The Science of Art: Aesthetic Formalism in John Dewey and Albert Barnes, Part II,” by David A. Granger, in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 52, no. 2, Summer 2018, 53–70, copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used by permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Prologue

In its heyday during the first part of the twentieth century, the philosophy of John Dewey was often recruited to serve the cause of one or another “big idea.” It is also no secret that Dewey, as a progressive thinker and committed public intellectual, was occasionally a willing partner in these enterprises. Such endeavors were always a gamble, and it is clear that some did not pay off satisfactorily in the end. Others, however, did, and Dewey appears to have benefited from them both personally and professionally. As one of Dewey’s biographers, Jay Martin, astutely observes,

It was and remained a characteristic of Dewey that he was always receptive to alternative ideas. With professional philosophers, he generally held to his own positions, but with intelligent women, non-philosophers, odd thinkers, and ordinary folk, he was a student again.¹

This was one of the most significant and profitable ways in which Dewey remained faithful to the moral and intellectual imperatives of democratic openness and life-long learning. Like Emerson before him, he routinely refused to segregate the personal from the professional. The wisdom of Dewey’s impartiality was to prove momentous for his contributions to the arts and education.²

Introduction: John Dewey and Albert Barnes: The Fruits of an Unlikely Friendship

One of the more intriguing and improbable of Dewey’s ventures outside academe began with Philadelphia art collector, philanthropist, and educator Albert Barnes. The catalyst was Barnes’ lofty ambition to develop the means for, in his words, “an objective study of pictures.” Following modern developments in art theory and interpretation, such study was to be based principally on the formal properties of the fine arts, which included the elements color, light, line, and space.¹ According to Barnes’ original conception, the endeavor would also enlist a Deweyan theory of perception and culminate in a personally and culturally enriching “scientific aesthetic method” of interpretation. In addition, it was this particular method that students would eventually learn, with Dewey’s seal of approval, through the innovative education programs of the Barnes Foundation and its extraordinary gallery. Located originally just outside Philadelphia in Merion, Pa., the Foundation is now situated more prominently in Philadelphia’s Logan Square (appropriately, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art), and it remains an active center of the arts and education today. Barnes’ circuitous path to the Foundation resembles the quintessential “great American success story.”

A native son of Philadelphia, Albert Coombs Barnes was born a little over a decade after John Dewey in 1872. Through a unique confluence of factors this specific place and time would prove crucial in shaping his famously acerbic personality and uncompromising opinions. As a young boy, Barnes lived in a series of tough, working-class neighborhoods, where, after a string of humiliations, he soon learned to stand tall, be assertive, and fend for himself. Some years earlier, his father had been dependably employed as a butcher, but that prospect had tragically vanished with the loss of an arm during the Civil War. Thereafter, the family lived a modest life at best, moving frequently within the city and struggling to make ends meet when times were hard. Despite these difficulties, Barnes, like his Quaker ancestors, would make the area in and around Philadelphia his home and an ongoing concern for most of his life.

There is no denying that Barnes was a complex, larger-than-life figure. Among both friends and foes, he was routinely described as very ill-tempered, and he blazed his own path through life while leaving his mark, for better and for worse, on everything and everyone he came into contact with, including Dewey.² He was also, by current standards, a veritable Renaissance man—a trained physician with a knack for chemistry and baseball, a fascination for psychology and philosophy, a passion for art, and, most significantly in the end, an almost messianic belief in human perfectibility through education. Like Dewey, then, Barnes openly espoused the moral and intellectual necessity of life-long learning. And his own education would be extensive.

As an energetic and ambitious high school student in Philadelphia, Barnes had at first endeavored to explore his possible talents as a painter. The arts at that time occupied a prominent place in the curriculum of the city’s schools, including his own Central High School, widely known and respected as an institution for academic elites. By Barnes’ own admission, however, he did not show enough aptitude or skill with the brush to continue beyond that point. (The same was certainly not true of some of his classmates, including William Glackens—who was a close friend—John Sloan, and James Preston, all of whom would secure a place in the annals of American art as members of the popular “Ashcan School” of painting.³) Moreover, given his perfectionist demeanor, Barnes was not the kind of person to carry on with something he could not hope to master.