TURNER BAILEY

Born in Massachusetts, Turner Bailey attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School. A lithographer, illustrator, painter in oils, craftsman, teacher and writer, Bailey considered the industrial world to be ugly in all its aspects and cut off from the arts. In a pamphlet published in 1901 titled City of Refuge, he expresses his view that art was above all a refuge, a haven for the spirit above the grime of daily existence. Teachers of art were, in Bailey’s words, “blessed” because they could pass on to children the “keys to the celestial city, that dream city more real than all our New Yorks and Chicagos, to which in all ages the human spirit has looked for satisfaction.” Bailey was State Agent for the Promotion of Industrial Drawing in Massachusetts, a founding member of The Applied Arts Guild, and the first editor of School Arts Magazine. Bailey and his fellow editors were determined to “promote by every legitimate means the progress of Sound Art Instruction and the development of Public Taste in all matters relating to the applied arts.” To this end, they published their magazine and some of the earliest American books and folios of prints designed expressly for art educators. From its first issue in 1901, SchoolArts published and supported the most progressive ideas about the teaching of art. Ideas from many of the great minds of twentieth-century education have appeared in its pages, including Arthur Wesley Dow, Viktor Lowenfeld, and John Dewey. School Arts articles planted some of the first seeds for movements such as Picture Study, Arts and Crafts, and multiculturalism. Bailey was Dean of the Cleveland School of Art in 1917 and the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute, also in Cleveland. In his paintings Bailey focused on zoological, figural, hunting-fishing, and marine subjects.