Schools of arts and crafts in Buenos Aires: the training of artisans and workers in the Industrial Education Society

Abstract

The Industrial Education Society (Sociedad de Educación Industrial) was founded at the beginning of the 20th century with the participation of specialists from the industrial and artistic fields. Among its many educational offerings, a drawing school was opened for workers whose first director was the painter Ángel della Valle; his teaching included architecture, decoration, and machine drawing. Over the years, Drawing courses for young ladies and also courses in Ornamental Modeling would be opened, aimed at workers of different types. The proposal of this work consists in the study of the instruction in these three schools, which were organized within the proposal of the so-called “art industries”, that is, their existence was recognized as inbetween the artistic and industrial worlds. In this sense, the research is oriented to reflect on the place occupied by the arts in industrial education in the early years of the 20th century.