Abstract

Due to its considerable length, this article is being published in two parts. This first part briefly discusses the intriguing relationship between John Dewey and Albert Barnes, as well as the circumstances behind the creation of the Barnes Foundation and its innovative art-education programs. This is followed by examination of the prominent roles of aesthetic formalism and organic unity in Barnes's writings about the arts and their less technical, more contextual positioning in Dewey's aesthetics. To end Part 1 of the article, a similar dynamic is revealed in Barnes's and Dewey's ultimately disparate understandings of the relationship between form and content in the arts.In its heyday during the first part of the...