Learning and Seeing through Walls: The Karlín School's Form of Education through Art

This article examines the Karlín School in Prague as a work of educational art. Built between 1904 and 1906 the school appeared like a modern learning palace and was adorned externally with four large scale murals and a range of sculptural works that taught not just the children studying in the school but also the local citizens about the value of art in education. As much as the monumental artwork combined with the architecture of the school was about sensibility to beauty and quality, it was also pedagogical, historical, highly politicised and ideological. The nature of these multiple signs of the artwork is analysed here, and considered within the contexts of ‘the decorated school’ in the Art Nouveau era, national awakenings (particularly that of the Czechs in the early twentieth century) as well as the rise of teaching through art which Bohemia (through Comenius) had done so much to instigate.