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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2016
Like most modern institutions in nineteenth-century non-Western states, modern school systems in 1870s Japan and Egypt were initially mimetic of the West. Modeled on the British South Kensington method and on its French equivalent, drawing education in Japanese and Egyptian schools was taught not as an art but as a functional technique that prepared children for modern professions like industrial design. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Kensington method of drawing education had lost its popularity in Europe, but more than a decade before its decline Japanese and Egyptian educators began teaching children genres of drawing that did not exist in European schools. In 1888 drawing education in Japan saw the replacement of the pencil with the brush, which was recast from the standard instrument of writing and painting of early modern East Asia to an instrument that came to represent Japanese art. In 1894 drawing education in Egypt saw the introduction of “Arabesque designs” as the Egyptian national art. This transformation of drawing education from a functional method that undergirded industrial capitalism into an art that inscribed national difference marked the end of the mimetic moment. On one hand, a national art served to make the nation into an autonomous subject that could claim a national culture in what was becoming a world of cultural nations. On the other, a national art helped to make the nation into an aesthetically seductive core whose magnetic appeal could bring together the national community.
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2 See, for example, Rathbone, P. H., The Place of Art in the Future Industrial Progress of the Nation (Liverpool: Lee and Nightingale, 1884), 8 Google Scholar; and Albrespy, André, De l'enseignement du dessin dans les écoles primaires de province [On the education of drawing in primary schools outside of the capital] (Montauban: Imprimerie Coopérative, 1872), 9 Google Scholar. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Arabic, French, and Japanese are mine.
3 See, for example, Owen, Roger, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Botsman, Daniel V., Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 129–40Google Scholar. Even when mimicking the laws of non-Western societies, colonial administrators were confirming their inferior status. In his study of Portuguese administrators in East Timor, Ricardo Roque convincingly argued that colonial administrators ruled by mimicking the customary laws of their colonized subjects, seeing in this a method for integrating native populations into the Portuguese Empire. This integration of the customary laws of colonized peoples was nevertheless instrumental and European colonizers inevitably regarded the colonized and their laws as primitive and inferior to European laws. Roque, Ricardo, “Mimetic Governmentality and the Administration of Colonial Justice in East Timor, ca. 1860–1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 1 (2015): 67–97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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6 On how Western technological superiority came to anchor an ideology of Western dominance, see Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014 [1989])Google Scholar. Although art was relatively more capable of escaping linear narratives of progress, this was far from always the case. Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, for example, likened modern art to the naive art of “primitive” societies, while the early twentieth-century Japanese collectors described by Kim Brandt were attracted by what they saw as the primitive purity of Korean folk art. Macdonald, Stuart, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2004 [1970]), 320–54Google Scholar; Boissel, Jessica, “Quand les enfants se mirent à dessiner. 1880–1914: Un fragment de l'histoire des idées,” Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne 31 (Spring 1990): 15–20 Google Scholar; Brandt, Kim, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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9 For histories of art and nationalism in three different contexts, see, for example, Elizabeth Miller, Nationalism and the Birth of Modern Art in Egypt, PhD diss., Oxford University, 2012; Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Sato, Doshin, ed., Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, Nara, Hiroshi, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011 [1999]Google Scholar.
10 Some of the key elements that differentiate modern schools from the educational institutions that preceded them are the division of classes vertically by subject and horizontally by grade, the state influence over educational materials, and the employment of state-certified, if not state-trained, teachers.
11 For more on education in the Egyptian kuttāb, see al-Jawwār, Muhammad ‘abd, Fī kuttāb al-qarya [In the village school] (Egypt: Maktabat al-ma‘ārif, 1939)Google Scholar; and Dor, V. Édouard, L'instruction publique en Égypte (Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboechoven et Cie, 1872), 45–115 Google Scholar. For education in Japanese terakoya, see Rubinger, Richard, Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaiˋi Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Rubinger, Richard, “Education: From One Room to One System,” in Jansen, Marius B. and Rozman, Gilbert, eds. Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 195–230 Google Scholar; and Dore, R. P., Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 271–90Google Scholar. In both early modern Japan and Egypt there also existed a small number of elite educational establishments, like fief schools (hankō) in Japan and palace schools (ṭibāq) in Egypt. Other than instruction in a few additional subjects like etiquette or the arts of war, however, the subjects that they taught were largely similar to those of the non-elite terakoya and kuttāb schools.
12 See note 1.
13 All Japanese names are cited in their Japanese order, with last name first, unless the author's work was originally published in English.
14 Burn, Robert Scott, The Illustrated Drawing-Book (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, [1853])Google Scholar; Kan, Kawakami, Seiga shinan [Guide to Western drawing] (Tokyo: Monbushō, 1875)Google Scholar.
15 The “Guide to Western drawing” was a liberal translation of a popular British manual that was a creative adaptation of the South Kensington School, which itself was the outcome of debates between advocates of geometric drawings and advocates of figure or landscape drawings that both predated the South Kensington School and transpired across Europe. As Christopher Hill writes, before reaching the shores of non-European societies, practices like drawing had already undergone so many mediations within Europe that their very characterization as European or Western is problematic. Hill, Christopher, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and “Conceptual Urbanization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century,” in Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 134–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See Kazuo's, Kaneko comparison of drawing manuals in Japan and Great Britain in Kindai nihon bijutsu kyōiku no kenkyū: Meiji-taishō jidai [Research on modern Japanese art education: Meiji and Taisho eras] (Tokyo: Chūō kōron bijutsu shuppan, 2000), 55–80 Google Scholar. This is a good example of how a popular and somewhat peripheral work in England was retitled “Guide to Western drawing” in Japan and repurposed to represent the drawing practices of an entire hemisphere.
17 Sanpei, Miyamoto, Shōgaku futsū gagaku hon [General book for the primary school study of drawing] (Tokyo: Monbushō, 1878)Google Scholar.
18 d'Enfert, Renaud, L'enseignement du dessin en France: Figure humaine et dessin géométrique [The teaching of drawing in France: Human figure and geometric drawing] (1750–1850) (Paris: Belin, 2003)Google Scholar; d'Enfert, Renaud et Lagoutte, Daniel, Un art pour tous: le dessin à l’école de 1800 à nos jours [An art for everyone: Drawing in schools from 1800 to today] (Rouen: Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique, 2004), 17 Google Scholar.
19 Vachon, Marius, Rapports à M. Edmon Turquet, sous-secrétaire d’état sur les musées et les écoles d'art industriel et sur la situation des industries artistiques en Allemagne; Autriche-Hongrie, Italie et Russie [Report to Mr. Edmon Turquet, under-secretary of state, on museums, schools for the industrial arts, and the condition of art industries in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia] (Paris: A. Quantin, 1885), 77 Google Scholar. Also see Mainardi, Patricia, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 62–69 Google Scholar.
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21 Ministère de l'Instruction Publique, Programmes de l'Enseignement pour les Lycées [Program for school instruction] (Cairo: Imprimerie nationale, 1888), 113, 119Google Scholar. Another French writer that was commonly recommended in early Egyptian curricula was Claude Sauvageot. Like most other works from this period, his books also began with straight lines and geometric shapes. Sauvageot, Claude, Enseignement du dessin par les solides [Teaching drawing with shapes] (Paris: Librarie Ch. Delagrave, 1882)Google Scholar. Sauvageot's drawing method was first recommended in the 1886–1887 curriculum. Wizārat al-ma‘ārif al-‘umūmiyya, Burūgrām durūs al-madāris al-ibtidā’iyya min al-darja al-ūwlā [Program of study for primary schools of the first level] (Cairo: Madrasat al-funūn wa al-ṣinā’i’, AH 1303 [1886–1887]), 24.
22 Smith, Walter, Technical Education and Industrial Drawing in Public Schools: Reports and Notes of Addresses Delivered at Montreal and Quebec (Montreal: Gazette Printing Company, 1883), 28 Google Scholar.
23 Hasan Tawfīq [al-‘Adl], Kitāb al-bīdājūjiyyā fī al-ta‘līm wa al-tarbiyya al-‘amliyyīn [Pedagogical guide for the education and instruction of teachers] (Bulaq: Al-maṭba‘a al-kubra al-amīriyya bi būlāq, 1892), 99.
24 Gen'ichirō, Ima'izumi, Jinjō shōgaku kyōjugaku ryakusetsu [Outline of a study on general primary school instruction] (Tokyo: Iwamoto Yonetarō, 1887), 244–45Google Scholar.
25 Albrespy, De l'enseignement, 14.
26 Niḍhārat al-ma‘ārif al-‘umūmiyya, maṣlaḥat sikkat ḥadīd al-ḥukūma, Mashrū’ lā’iḥa tata‘allaq bi-qubūl talāmīdh waṭaniyyīn taḥt al-tamrīn wa irsāluhum khārij al-quṭr li istikhdāmihim ‘inda ‘awdatihim fī furū’ maṣlaḥa sikkat ḥadīd al-ḥukūma [Draft plan regarding the admission of national students to a program for foreign study and employment in the branches of the state railroad company upon their return] (Bulaq: al-Maṭba‘a al-kubrā al-amīriyya bi-būlāq, 1899), 7.
27 Efland, Arthur D., A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1990), 139 Google Scholar; Haslam, Ray, “Looking, Drawing, and Learning with John Ruskin at the Working Men's College,” in Romans, Mervyn, ed., Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005), 157 Google Scholar.
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29 Boissel, “Quand les enfants se mirent à dessiner,” 15–43; Pernoud, Emmanuel, L'invention du desin d'enfant en France, à l'aube des avant-gardes (Paris: Hazan, 2003), 42–47 Google Scholar; d'Enfert et Lagoutte 2004, 36–37, 67–71.
30 Contrary to secondary schools, which were sometimes separated into several tracks or by gender, primary schools have the advantage of offering a single curriculum that can be used to trace and compare the development of drawing education.
31 Shōseki, Kose, Shōgaku mōhitsu gajō [Primary school book for brush drawing] (Kyoto: Fukui Shōbōdō, 1888)Google Scholar.
32 Noriaki, Kitazawa, Kyōkai no bijutsushi: ‘bijutsu’ keisei nōto [An art history of boundaries: Notes on the formation of ‘art’] (Tokyo: Burukke, 2005)Google Scholar.
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37 Uichirō, Murata, Tokushimaken shihan gakkō dai nikai shōgakkōchō shōshūkai ni okeru kaku gakka kyōjuhō kōwa [Lecture on teaching methods for every subject at the second Tokushima Prefecture Teacher's College meeting of primary school principals] (Tokushima: Awakoku kyōikukai, 1901), 109 Google Scholar.
38 For an analogous debate that pitted the soft tip of the brush against the hard tip of the pen or pencil in Japanese writing education, see Adal, Raja, “Japan's Bifurcated Modernity: Writing and Calligraphy in Japanese Public Schools, 1872–1943,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, 2–3 (2009): 233–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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43 Yūsuf Kāmil and Rāghib ‘Ayyād, “Namādhij al-rasm al-naḍharī” [Models of freehand drawing] (cards, Ilhāmiyya Industrial School Press, n.d.), cards 1–5, 7, 10–13, 15, 16, 18–20, 22–25 (the set is not complete since some of the cards have been lost). The cards are undated but were produced when ‘Ayyād taught at the Higher Coptic College (kulliyat al-aqbāt al-kubrā), which is approximately between 1911, when he graduated from the School of Fine Arts, and 1925, when he went to study art in Italy. It is not specified in what schools these cards were used, but they are of a clearly educational nature, featuring a large ornamental design in the center complemented by a smaller sketch entitled “technique of drawing” and showing the geometrical calculations involved. They may have been modeled on Bacon's Excelsior cards, which were mandated in the 1907 elite primary school drawing curriculum that continued to be used until 1930. For Bacon's Excelsior cards, see Steeley and Trotman, Bacon's Excelsior New First Grade Drawing Cards: Soft Grey Line Series (London: G. W. Bacon & Co., n.d.). For more on Kāmil, see Miller 2012.
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