The All-Powerful Freedom: Creativity and Resilience in the Context of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’ Art Teaching Experiment

This paper examines the pedagogical legacy of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944), an avant-garde artist and progressive art teacher of the interwar period. As a collaborative effort, it promotes an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis and interpretation of Friedl’s teaching method, combining art history with education (Reform Pedagogy) and study into resilience (social pedagogy and developmental psychology). While incarcerated in the Terezín ghetto (1942–1944), Friedl organized children’s art classes within which she used an experimental method based on her own schooling experience in Vienna and at the State Bauhaus in Weimar. Offering her students a perfect outlet for processing their traumatic experience by the means of creativity and selfexpression, she became a perfect example of what would today be described as a resilience tutor. A group of collages and drawings will be shown and analyzed.