Markéta Peringerová

The School of Artistic Thinking

Markéta Peringerová – Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Abstract:

Prof. PaedDr. Igor Zhoř, CSc. (*1925, †1997) was an art teacher, theoretician and art historian, publicist, founder and dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Technical University. After leaving the Faculty of Education in Brno in 1970, he found himself without the possibility to work and publish publicly. During the period of political oppression, he organized unique courses of the School of Artistic Thinking for non-professional artists. The courses, referring in their name to the theory of Paul Klee, were inspired by the method of the progressive American educator John Dewey, i.e. project teaching according to the slogan Learning by doing, and the Bauhaus Vorkurz, especially the concept of Johannes Itten. In this way, he connected several previously unexplored territories. Firstly, the mediation of the artistic movements of Land Art, Body Art and Action Art, on which the courses were based, and secondly, pedagogical principles that were unknown in Czechoslovakia. In 1990, after returning to the Faculty of Education, he founded the Action Art course and continued his unique project of artistic thinking. His experience from 1971–1990, when the courses of the School of Art Thinking were held, was unique in preserving continuity in the mediation of the then modern artistic trends suppressed by the regime and further developing progressive pedagogical methods. The year 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of the distinguished art educator, a member of INSEA since the founding of the Czechoslovak National Committee, which he chaired from 1990–1993, and the founder of the field of Art Mediation. The paper will focus on the concept, technique and methods of the School of Artistic Thinking as described by Igor Zhoř in two publications of the same name. In his time, Igor Zhoř created unique procedures for understanding modern art of the 1960s–1980s.