Child Creativity and the Visual Arts: From Secessionist Vienna to Postwar America

The strength of Brandow-Faller’s study lies in its ability to yoke together disparate cultural realms—Secessionist Vienna and postwar American childhood, and vastly successful designers and pedagogues with those largely forgotten—to reveal surprising and fascinating points of connection. * Laura Morowitz, Associate Professor of Art History at Wagner College, New York, USA *A deeply informed examination of three visionary art educators from Vienna—Franz Cizek, Emmy Zweybruck, and Viktor Lownfeld—and their profound influence on progressive art education in the United States. * Ellen Winner, Professor Emerita, Psychology & Neuroscience, Boston College, USA *Insightful and compelling, this book draws on previously unexamined sources to explore how three educators disseminated, popularized, and commodified ideas of child art from the Vienna Secession to mid-century modernism. * Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Emerita Professor of Art Education, Penn State University, USA *This book brilliantly reframes the legacy of Vienna 1900 by highlighting its significant transnational impact beyond the visual arts, recovering the lasting effects of ideas around child creativity that we can still find in our homes today. * Julia Secklehner, Research Fellow, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia *

Megan Brandow-Faller is Professor of History, CUNY Kingsborough, USA, and the author of Childhood by Design (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Female Secession (2020). She is the co-editor of Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art Architecture and Design (2022).