ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Breath, “Ah,” Form: Florence Cane’s Psychophysical Art Pedagogy

• In Event: When Scientific Images Go Rogue: Popularization, Pluralization, and Contestation

English Abstract

During the 1920s, an artist, art educator, and art therapist in New York City taught students a method for turning vocalized sounds and kinesthetic experiences into works of visual art. This paper reconstructs the work of Florence Naumburg Cane (1882–1952) at the intersections of experiments in aesthetic modernism, progressive education, and psychotherapeutics. Cane instructed her art students to chant open vowels, adjust their breathing and posture, swing their bodies, and to draw kinesthetically inspired forms. Whereas her sister Margaret Naumburg is remembered for integrating art making into the psychoanalytic clinic, Cane’s practice rejected both prevailing psychoanalytic frameworks and academic art instruction in favor of methods that treated the psycho-physical self as an instrument for creative and therapeutic expression. While her space of practice was the art studio rather than the clinic, this paper traces her multiple influences—F. M. Alexander’s posture-reform method, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythm pedagogy, and Gurdjieff’s movement work—showing how contested sciences of habit, attention, and posture were naturalized and quietly reworked in art education. It argues that Cane’s breath-vowel-movement sequences and “scribble” technique were experiments in psychophysical knowledge-making that contested both dominant art pedagogies and psychotherapies. Rather than training eyes to reproduce canonical models or language to report psychic material, Cane sought to train a kinesthetic sense so that artists’ lines and gestures could register intra-psychic phenomena such as fear, blockage, and integration. Cane’s epistemic disobedience—and her marginality in historiographies of art and science—offers a rich case study for excavating plural worlds of knowledge at the boundaries of science, therapy, and artistic practice.

Author

• Julian Chehirian, Princeton University