Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 1-1-2011 "Art Feeling Grows" in Oregon : The Portland Art Association, 1892-1932 Patrick A. Forster Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.edu/open_access_etds Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Forster, Patrick A., ""Art Feeling Grows" in Oregon : The Portland Art Association, 1892-1932" (2011). Dissertations and Theses.220 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access.
It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: pdxscholar@pdx. “Art Feeling Grows” in Oregon: The Portland Art Association, 1892-1932 by Patrick A. Forster A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Thesis Committee: David A.
Horowitz, Chair Richard H. Johnson Sue Taylor Portland State University ©2011 ABSTRACT Founded in 1892, the Portland Art Association (PAA) served as Oregon’s and the Pacific Northwest’s leading visual arts institution for almost a century. While the Association formally dissolved in 1984, its legacy is felt strongly today in the work of its successor organizations, the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Emerging during a period of considerable innovation in and fervent advocacy for the arts across America, the Association provided the organizational network and resources around which an energetic and diverse group of city leaders, civic reformers and philanthropists, as well as artists and art educators, coalesced.
This thesis describes the collaboration among arts and civic advocates under the banner of aesthetic education during the Association’s first four decades. Though art education continued to be critically important to the organization after 1932, the year the Association opened its new Museum, art was no longer conceived of as an instrument for improving general community life and programs focused on more specialized, fine arts-related activities. During the PAA’s early development, educational concerns trumped the accumulation of art objects, collection building, and the formation of a specialist arts institution that are typically associated with post-World War II art museums and art schools. I propose that the early Association is best understood as a community arts organization dedicated to the aesthetic education of the Portland community as a whole.
I discuss the meaning of and goals set for the promotion i of art education within the Association, which issued from various, yet mutually supportive, positions. I describe Association programs as having been generally informed by prevailing ideas in art education, especially after the founding of its Art School in late 1909; art and art instruction were considered to involve an inherent moral dimension, civic improvement potential, and aesthetic value. Looking more closely at these assumptions, we can observe a shift in emphasis regarding the key purpose of art education programs at the PAA during the period discussed. Whereas the founding trustees generally harbored more idealized notions of art and placed aesthetic education primarily in the service of civic development and civilizatory achievement, professional educational concerns soon gained currency at the Association.
To put it simply, this shift moved the focus of art’s presumed moral resonance from the (external) identification of great masterworks and styles to the (internal) capacity for and recognition of authentic aesthetic experience. Previous scholarship has considered early Association history primarily in light of its promotion, or neglect, of modernist art or of particular artists. I focus instead on the privileged position of art education and its organizational scaffolding in order to cast a different light on the growing Association and its supporting milieu. I suggest that the Association’s championing of aesthetic education was part of an extraordinary emergence of competing ideas and organizations regarding the proper identity, purpose, and value of art and aesthetic education in America.
Within that context, the PAA’s energetic advocacy and diverse programs suggest a belief in art’s ii capacity to improve individual lives and community bonds, a belief that is, however differently conceived, still closely held today. iii Acknowledgments My curiosity about the history of the Portland Art Association was nourished by Sally Lawrence, President Emerita of Pacific Northwest College of Art. She insisted that an important story about the Association’s early history, its influence on the region’s arts community, and its eventual transformation into the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Northwest College of Art needed to be told. Furthermore, I am indebted to the excellent service and unfailing patience of Debra Royer, Librarian of the Portland Art Museum.
She kept the Portland Art Association Archives available to researchers during the two-year period when the Library of the Portland Art Museum was closed and its collections were in storage due to building renovation. While I have come to share Ms. Lawrence’s and Ms. Royer’s enthusiasm for the earliest decades of the Portland Art Association and the organization’s pivotal role in advancing the city’s and the region’s early arts community, any errors of fact and interpretation contained in this thesis are entirely mine.
iv Table of Contents Abstract.iv Chapter 1 Introduction.1 Chapter 2 Civic Visions: Founding the Portland Art Association in Progressive-Era America .16 Chapter 3 The Discriminating Eye: Elevating Taste in Art and in Craft.39 Chapter 4 The Portland Art Association and the Art School.57 Chapter 5 Becoming the Museum Art School.135 v Chapter 1: Introduction The founding of the Portland Art Association in 1892 marked Portland’s and Oregon’s most significant advocacy effort for the visual arts during that era. The Association deserves credit for creating and sustaining the region’s two most prominent, influential and vital visual arts institutions of the twentieth century, the Portland Art Museum and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. At the time of its founding, however, visual arts activities and interests had at best a modest place in a rapidly growing but provincial city. Voluntary groups of artists and architects, annual agricultural and industrial expositions, and occasional painting workshops by visiting artists and limited patronage of their work by frugal local collectors characterized the scene.
There was even an art gallery operating in Portland – but none of these activities enjoyed the support of city leaders or a solid level of institutionalization, let alone the attention of the general public. The founding of the PAA, however, signaled the start of a more ambitious and committed form of promotion of the visual arts. 1 The Association and its activities quickly became a centerpiece of Portland’s civic life that was second, if not equal, to the public library. In 1895 the PAA began holding art exhibits at that library; in 1905, the Association secured a museum building and, in the context of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, mounted an exhibit of modern artworks unprecedented in scope in the Pacific Northwest; in 1909 the organization started its Art School and a formal studio arts education program, arguably the most significant undertaking 1 during the organization’s earliest decades; by 1915, the Association managed extensive art docent and instruction services in Portland Public Schools; and by 1926, the Art School offered a five-year art teachers degree in collaboration with Reed College.
Rachael Griffin, a long-time curator and instructor for the PAA, has suggested that, until well into the 1920s, the Association’s “staff, students, members, and regular visitors were the art community [of Portland].”2 While art education and art appreciation enjoyed a privileged status, the size and quality of the organization’s collection remained quite modest until the 1930s. With the building of a large modern museum facility in 1932 and the concurrent financial challenges by the Great Depression, the era of exuberant expectations and advocacy for the role of the arts and art education in the life and identity of the community came to a close. Though not a radical break with the Association’s past, the 1930s brought a concentration on collection-based, fine art museum activities. The late-1940s opened the door to the expanding arena of undergraduate study and four-year degree completion.3 PAA sponsored programs to acquaint Portlanders with art objects from Western antiquity, European masterworks, non-Western artifacts, and, quite regularly after the opening of its school, modernist and even avant-garde artworks.
Certainly, such endeavors built on notions of refinement and hierarchical cultural values. However, PAA leaders by no means viewed art as a domain open only to members of the social elite, wealthy collectors and connoisseurs, or the professional studio artist. Instead, art was associated with 2 civic improvement and championed for its moral and spiritual potential rather than with conspicuous consumption. Association programs and resources were directed toward the Portland community as a whole, not just toward art specialists.
By 1910, a PAA trustee could therefore boast with reason that “Portland is freely spoken of as in the lead among all the cities on the Coast in its equipment for Art Education.”4 In recent years, centennial anniversaries of Portland art institutions and collections with direct or indirect roots in the Association have encouraged reflection, research, and publication on the history and relevance of local and regional arts, artists, and art organizations. In addition, questions about cultural agency and traditions, and artistic practice and standards, as well as newly invigorated claims as to the importance of the arts and creativity in individual and community lives, have inspired investigations into traditions and values of art and art education, locally and nationally. Recent scholarship on the Association and the early Portland arts community includes the work of art historians Prudence Roberts and Faith Emerson. Roberts has described the role of Association founders and the Association’s first professional curator, Anna Belle Crocker, in shaping the organization’s early exhibition and modest collection efforts.
Emerson has explored the surprising presence of avant-garde artworks in the Association’s exhibits in the 1910s and 1920s. Both Julia Hoffman, generous patron and first life-time trustee of the Association, and the Portland Arts and Crafts Society have been carefully described by historians Lawrence Kreisman 3 and Glenn Mason in their history of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Pacific Northwest. Historian Richard Christen has critically examined the education and self-improvement imperative of Hoffman and of the Portland Arts and Crafts movement, which she promoted tirelessly throughout her life. Similarly, Ginny Allen’s and Jody Klevit’s Oregon Painters: The First Hundred Years 1859-1959 (1999), a comprehensive index and dictionary of Oregon artists and its institutional affiliations, adds details to the picture of the state of the arts and the PAA’s crucial role in Progressive Era Portland.5 I began my research in order to provide an account of the “equipment” for art education that the Association introduced and supported during the era under consideration.
I was surprised to find PAA publications replete with references to its educational and broadly community-minded endeavors, since these topics had thus far received little attention or critical review in writings and scholarship on the development of the visual arts and arts institutions in Portland. In fact, Emerson’s study of exhibitions of avant-garde artworks at the Association’s Museum closes with a call for an inquiry into the organization’s educational mission, in part to illuminate the paradox of the promotion of avant-garde art by the PAA in a presumedly conservative community.6 Accordingly, I was excited to focus on this previously overlooked topic and thereby add a new element to the research that has been done on the PAA over the past decade. I initially assumed my research would describe a relatively narrow range of educational programs, art studio pedagogies, and aesthetic values that we 4 readily associate with those artworks which represent the period in the exhibitions and collections of art museums today. However, I soon realized that I needed to treat my account of educational activities as an Association imperative, not as an ancillary aspect of the organization’s operations and growth in its earliest decades.
The PAA not only dedicated resources primarily to education, but also insisted time and again that its educational goals served a broad public.