Training the Artist-Designer in Early Twentieth Century Chicago

The ubiquity today of schools of “Art and Design” encourages us to think of these practices as linked in fundamental ways. Yet the linguistic act of separation performed by the name—art and design—should also point us towards what is a deeper disconnect between the two terms. Theirs is, after all, a fraught relationship. What begins in 16th century Italy as the disegno tradition (the creative spark that raises painting from craft to art) runs smack into modern industrialism with perhaps predicable results: a splintering of meaning that continues to exert its effects: manual training; decorative designing; applied, commercial, or industrial arts; industrial design. Each of these terms has had its moment and in its time marked out a specific territory on the spectrum between art-for-art’s sake and design-for-use’s sake. Yet there have also been episodes of vigorous rapprochement. In Chicago, for example, a city renowned in the early twentieth century for its economic dynamism, one finds educational institutions and programs, including the obvious (Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus), but also the surprising (the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s First Year Program, adopted in 1917), that were single-minded in their focus on the production of a hybrid figure—the artist-designer, for whom the separate practices of art and design were, in fact, one. This paper will focus on the case of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, exploring its forgotten origins and development as a progressive school for artist-designers in the first half of the twentieth century.