John Dewey and Albert C. Barnes: Art, Aesthetics, and Democracy in Early Twentieth
Century America
William M. Perthes, Assistant Director of Education, The Violette de Mazia Foundation
In March of 1925, in Merion Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, John Dewey,
America’s preeminent philosopher, and Albert C. Barnes, a multimillionaire, former
pharmaceutical industrialist who had built the country’s largest collection of modern art,
presided over the opening ceremonies of a unique endeavor, The Barnes Foundation. The
Foundation’s opening realized a vision shared by both men for, although today more often
confused with a museum, the Barnes Foundation was established and chartered with the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a school, one where Dewey’s principles of experiential
education could be applying to aesthetic understanding through the direct engagement and
analysis of works of art. Moreover, the Foundation was not intended to merely promote personal
improvement, but an underlying principle of its mission was to nurture a better informed citizen,
one prepared to participate in the cultivation of a more complete democracy.
The intimate friendship and intellectual collaboration between John Dewey and Albert
Barnes was as unlikely as it was productive. The gentlemanly Dewey made a career of building
coalitions and championing progressive causes, while the irascible Barnes was known as much
for his quick temper and combative personality as for his art collection. Yet both Dewey and
Barnes believed that education rooted in social interaction and derived from lived experiences
was indispensable to the advancement of a vibrant and equitable democracy. Together they built
an important body of work regarding the understanding and interpretation of art. Yet, while
Dewey’s efforts promoting education and democracy are well know, Barnes’s contributions have
been largely marginalized.
Polish Project
Barnes and Dewey began to correspond in 1916; two years later Barnes attended
Dewey’s graduate seminar, “Ethics and Educational Problems,” at Columbia University. That
summer, with the help of several of Dewey’s graduate students, they collaborated on project in
Philadelphia that attempted to understand why the city’s Polish community resisted social
integration and why a seeming majority supported the restoration of the Polish monarchy over
the establishment of a democratic socialist state. Despite being largely unsuccessful in effecting
their desired outcome, the Polish Project as it was known, demonstrated Barnes and Dewey’s
joint commitment to the promotion of democracy, and for Dewey showed an unexpected
willingness to intervene, sometimes aggressively, in order to further these goals (Westbrook 214223).
Dewey Barnes Background
John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington Vermont. He was educated at the University
of Vermont (1879) and completed his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. He taught at the
University of Michigan for ten years before joining the faculty of the newly formed University of
Chicago (1894-1904) were his philosophy made its final evolution towards American
Pragmatism - a school of thought that sought to make philosophy relevant - to making ideas
functional (see Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club).
Albert Barnes was born in Philadelphia in 1872. His father, like Dewey’s, was a veteran
1
of the American Civil War. Despite a hard scrabbled childhood, the young Barnes was admitted
into Philadelphia’s Central High School, the city’s premier public institution. Upon graduation
Barnes was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine, graduating three
years later. With little interest in practicing medicine Barnes turned instead to chemistry.
Between 1896 and 1902 he developed a silver salt antiseptic compound called Argyrol which he
soon began producing in his west Philadelphia factory. Production and world-wide distribution
of Argyrol quickly made Barnes a multi-millionaire, giving him the freedom to indulge his
growing interest in art.
Barnes Factory Education
At the Argyrol plant Barnes demonstrated his commitment to democratic principles. For
instance his work force was unusually integrated for the time, employing both men and women,
white and black on the factory floor. He encouraged his employees to tailor production methods
to best suit individual strengths, abilities, and needs, and to coordinate these methods with other
employees - recognizing a direct correlation between workplace democracy and improved
productivity. He also began to offer educational classes to his employees.
Argyrol seminar
Although factory schools designed to improve worker welfare were not uncommon at the
turn of the twentieth-century, Barnes’s approach was hardly routine. Classes were open to all
employees and rather than the typical worker training or hygiene classes’ common elsewhere
Barnes’s seminars were devoted to the reading of plays and novels, and to the study and
discussion of history, psychology, and philosophy, the latter including works by American
Pragmatists William James, George Santayana, and John Dewey. Participants were encouraged
to challenge themselves regardless of their educational background and to express their thoughts
in ways most natural to them (Meyers 21). As Barnes later recalled:
Education is a social process. It becomes a potent force in democracy when the interests
of a group are shared by all members, and when a group with a particular interest
interacts fully and freely…In that chemical factory…we put democracy into our plan for
the education of our employees, not by watering down knowledge, nor by relaxing the
standards of intelligence, but by making the whole process a cooperative affair, free from
any authoritarian control. [Barnes in radio address, 1942] (Wattenmaker 1)
Seminars were organized around principles developed by Dewey at the University of
Chicago Laboratory Schools (1896) a testing ground for experiential education. There students
learned not through rote memorization but through active, engagement with their subjects,
making practice and meaning part of a single, continuous process of exploration modeled on
scientific investigation, prompting students to ask questions, build a hypothesis, experiment,
draw a conclusion, and then verify the validity of that conclusion. Under this model theories are
objectified and ideas actualized through lived experiences, for Dewey understood the “necessity
of testing thought by action if thought was to pass over into knowledge” (Westbrook 96).
For Dewey learning and education were inextricably linked to democratic standards as
only a democratic system allowed for true experiential education and only a citizenry so
educated could secure, protect, and extend democratic rights. Indeed, education, democracy, and
experience form the three pillars of Dewey’s metaphysics, each being interdependent and
2
inseparable. However, at the heart of Dewey’s philosophy was his concept of experience.
Dewey Experience
Dewey explained experience as a transaction between an organism and its environment.
He wrote that, “Life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through
interaction with it” (Dewey A as E 12). An organism is acted upon by its environment, and in an
effort to regain equilibrium is forced to act back on that environment, to regulate itself to a new
set of conditions, or to attempt to control its environment to suit its needs, engaging in a never
ending ebb and flow of adjustments. However, this process of adjustment does not return the
organism to its pervious state, but instead establishes a new set of conditions. This process
results in growth which is the product of true experience. [In this one can clearly hear the
influence of Darwin on Dewey].
However, unlike base organisms which are at the mercy of their innate ability, humans
are endowed with an intelligence that enables us to make use and meaning of past experiences.
As we grow experiences accumulate and become the resources by which new situations are
understood. “The past is carried into the present so as to expand and deepen the content of the
latter,” Dewey wrote [LW 10:30]. Past experiences are re-called and applied to new situations in
an act of creative adaption, which makes those past experiences more significant. This process
makes the experience “known” rather than merely “had”; it is the foundation of learning and a
condition of life; it signals growth and as such is at the center of educational development. For
Dewey it therefore followed that education was not something restricted to school age children
but was a lifelong process. As such, all people should have the opportunity to continue to grow
and learn, which Dewey believed was best enabled in a state of democracy. Barnes’s factory
seminars followed this philosophy.
Finally, Dewey made a distinction between common experiences that are disjointed and
incomplete and experiences that reach a conclusion, ones he called having an experience [with
an being italicized]. Experiences stop or are interrupted while an experience comes to a
conclusion and as such is associated with an over arching quality, a self-sufficiency, that
distinguishes it from everything that came before and everything that will follow; it marks it off
as that experience: that meal with a spouse or that argument with a colleague. Dewey’s
friendship with Barnes eventually led him to see that the act of expression which is the creation
of a work of art is an aesthetic experience, the result of which is the expressive object - the
painting or sculpture - which does not reflect that aesthetic experience but literally embodies it.
With a limited background in the plastic arts, Dewey relied heavily on Barnes for guidance in
fleshing out this theory which he spelled out in Art as Experience published in 1934.
Having sold his interest in the production of Argyrol, Barnes turned his attention to
collecting but was not satisfied with simply acquiring works of art; the scientist in him was
compelled to understand what art meant. For Barnes this required a method through which art
could be objectively evaluated. This pursuit led him to develop an analytical approach modeled
on scientific exploration and informed by Dewey’s concept of experience.
Art is not a reflection of the natural world, Barnes held, but a synthesis of an artist’s
experience within it, expressed plastically, and guided by his or her individual interests. The
richness of an artist’s expression is directly related to the breath of his or her experiences, which
are the raw material - what Dewey called “funded capital” - on which he or she may draw.
Motivated by a sensual impulse – inspiration one might call it - this funded capital is combined
with new sensations which are reconfigured and distilled by the artist. The object that results
3
from this expressive act embodies the artist’s aesthetic experience As such,
The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing for us more clearly than we can see ourselves,
and showing us what an experience more sensitive and profound than our own has shown
him. (A in P 12)
Barnes concentrated on a picture’s plastic content, the foundation of which he saw as an artist’s
use of color, considered the primary plastic mean, and from which all other aspects of a painting
are derived: light, line, space, form, design, and so on. He felt that an understanding of how an
artist used these plastic means - essentially an artist’s expressive vocabulary - was the only
objective method through which the expressive meaning of a work of art could be determined.
Meaning therefore is grounded in the lived aesthetic experiences of the artist made manifest in
the art object so that lived experiences and the expression of aesthetic experiences which are
works of art are interconnected. It was never a question of art for art’s sake for Barnes but art as
lived experience.
A similar process was true for the viewer, because only a viewer attuned to paintings visual
language can perceive a work of art’s “meaning as an embodiment of an artist’s experience in his
contact with the world,” (Art of Renoir 10) wrote Barnes and Violette de Mazia. Elsewhere
Barnes wrote,
What distinguishes the response to works of art is that it takes the form of understanding,
not merely intellectually but with our whole personality; of re-creating in ourselves, so
far as we are able, the experience which the work of art records and embodies. (A in P 9)
Furthermore, because these plastic elements are physically present in the object, and are
therefore available to all capable viewers, they form the most concrete basis for any discussion of
a work of art’s expressive meaning. In addition, because perception of these plastic elements
does not rely on any specialized knowledge Barnes saw this method as the most democratic form
of aesthetic analysis.
Dewey’s Aesthetics
Although Dewey approached the aesthetic late in his career he came to see it not as an
addition to his philosophy, but as the culmination of it. For him the aesthetic was the felt, sensual
aspect of having an experience, it is the emotional thread that runs through, and binds together,
an experience. And because the aesthetic is something inseparable from experience it is not
something isolated in art museums or concert halls, but a common condition of life, one we share
with the artist. The artist however, is better able to focus felt aesthetic qualities into an expressive
object. Works of art concentrate and objectify these felt values. Dewey described his work in the
aesthetic as an effort “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of
experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are
universally recognized to constitute experience” [LW 10:9].
This was Albert Barnes’s goal when he opened his Foundation in the spring of 1925, to
establish a place where, following democratic principles, anyone with an interest was given the
opportunity to discover the value of these “refined and intensified forms of aesthetic
experiences”. There the visitor was confronted by a juxtaposition of works that Barnes hoped
4
would provoke thought, even confusion, in the viewer, the disequilibrium of Dewey’s experience
- works are not identified, they are hung close together, are surrounded by object and furniture,
and are not hung in any discernable chronological or geographical order. But, Barnes believed
that this initial confusion would eventually give way to discovery, growth, and learning. And
although much has come to pass since that opening day, what Barnes and Dewey set out to
accomplish at the Barnes Foundation remains a unique chapter in American history.
5