Edmund Feldman and Art Criticism

Edmund Burke Feldman was an Alumni Foundation Distinguished University Professor of Art at the University of Georgia. He was an art educator as well as an art historian. He has written several books about art including The Philosophy of Art Education, First Edition, 1995. The primary focus of this paper is to inform and show what Doctor Feldman thought was important to art teachers by correlating the practices of teaching art to the issues of philosophy Doctor Feldman wanted to bring together both subjects of art education and art teaching. He outlined the principle issues of art education and provided art teachers with a way of creating goals for teaching art.

Dr. Feldman revealed that the approach to art education should be seen as a discipline and as a philosophy. His foundational practices included the earlier thoughts of Manuel Barkan. Doctor Feldman felt that there was a conflict between our capitalist and socialist nature, which could generate personal and professional creativity. His beliefs were that art teachers are conditioned by political forces and that the power of art education comes from the psychological impact of the visual image and the power of the art teacher comes from their ability to relay these images.

Doctor Feldman teaches that art needs to be meaningful and art students must connect to the information presented, then be able to use it as an experience. Then students can use the experience to create a path to transform the idea into a work of art. He presented that art teachers could show students that life and art are connected and that one could inspire the other. He insisted on educating students in art appreciation through critiques and developed the four-step critique method. In the fi...

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...sured in the degree to which the intuitive, internal notions of what happened in the classroom can be brought out into the full light of external inspection and meaning making. In as much as the supervision of teaching becomes an artful practice, then some understanding of the language of art is in order. Artful structional supervisors can begin to utilize reflection, as in art criticism (Feldman, 1995), as a mechanism for reflecting on teaching in a much Instructional Supervision as Dialogue 5 broader, fundamentally different, and possibly more profound way than some methods currently provide.

Works Cited

Corleto, D. (2009, July). NEH Picturing America. Salem, Massachusetts, USA.

Feldman, E. B. (1995). Philosophy of Art Education . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Feldman, E. B. (1994). Practical Art Criticism. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall .