Williamson

© Beth Williamson 2008
Design; and a School of Silversmiths’ Work and Allied Crafts. Johnstone’s
desire was to ‘synthesize the different Schools into a far more integrated
unity.’ 16 To achieve this, he intended to introduce a Basic Design course that
would ‘be geared to give a grammar of art in such a way that each student
could develop any particular medium he or she happened to choose.’ 17 The
notion of a ‘grammar of art’ had originally come from the writings of Walter
Gropius and Lázló Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, who marked out a way
forward for art education that was taken up extensively in Britain and America. I
would want to add that Johnstone’s personal experience of training in the Paris
studio of artist André Lhote may have made him sympathetic to these ideas. As
Johnstone intimates in his autobiography, Lhote’s idea of teaching, ‘was to give
you a grammar, the root of his teaching. He gave his students a new freedom,
but also a new restriction; he gave an understanding of the endless possibilities
in variations of analysis, and then he turned you out to find your own motif.’ 18 By
concerning itself less with any academic knowledge of art, and more with the
experience of it, art education of this sort could focus upon the form of art
teaching rather than being overly concerned with the content presented. Now
method and matter take on equal importance.
The Basic Design course that Johnstone sought to establish at the Central
School in 1947 came only a year after the Ministry of Education introduced its
National Diploma in Design or NDD course in 1946. The phrase ‘Basic Design’
was used to express a way of teaching the elements or rules of design, as well
as a method of communication through art; hence it was often said to teach a
grammar of art. The course provided training in an understanding of the
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