Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago

In his recent book, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Howard Singerman describes as ironic the fact that when the design curriculum developed at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s was assimilated in the United States some fifteen years later it was as instruction in "fine arts."l The irony, however, is both less and more than Singerman's observation allows. Less, I will argue, because distinctions between what counted as instruction in design, or industrial arts, and instruction in fine arts in the United States never have been clear-cut. But also more, because it is exactly the kind of statement that makes it difficult for us to reconstruct