Yet unexpected complications ultimately derailed the project and prevented its publication, despite efforts to bring it to completion after the pedagogue’s death in 1946.

Cizek’s American book project was originally conceived to be a picture album of the most striking works of the Jugendkunstklassen. But the demand arose from American art educators that the work be of a more theoretical, authoritative nature, addressing the organic growth of children’s creativity and eternally valid laws of visual creativity. As such, the book project had to be re-conceptualized from the ground up and previously gathered materials scrapped. Ultimately, the costly image program, coupled with the economic crisis of the 1930s, made the Cizek project untenable. Per se the terms of his contract, the author had to subsidize the image program and costly preparation of the lithographic plates both personally and through private donations, including generous grants from the International Society of Friends, a charitable organization facilitating communications with the press. But the ripple effects of the economic crisis—the loss of private grants; Cizek’s 1934 retirement (whereby his income sank by 2/5th); and the plummeting value of the Schilling—made the completion of book project impossible. Ultimately, Cizek’s Anglo-American reputation would be sealed through English-language translations of his pedagogical manuals and the writings of his followers.

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Cizek’s slightly younger counterpart, Emmy Zweybrück, has often been understood—albeit incorrectly—in the shadow of more famous male contemporaries like Cizek or Hoffmann. Zweybrück shared with Cizek common emphases on expressing feelings, thoughts and emotions through free choice of handcraft media and permissive instructional methods. As writer Georg von Terramare encapsulated her school’s philosophies, “[c]hildren create freely from within themselves and should give thoughts and feelings personal expression, recording in a variety of media….everything experienced and seen.”[4] Zweybrück likewise de-emphasized traditional teaching methods in favor of students’ direct experimentation in handcraft materials, foregoing preliminary drafting on paper. As she held in her best-selling ‘DIY’ craft manual Hands at Work (1946), a work published and promoted by the ACC, “Everybody who works with color should experiment with his materials like a violinist uses his bow.”[5] Like Cizek, who disdained naturalistic copying and encouraged students to draw from memory, Zweybrück emphasized that applied design was “not simply a copy of nature” but should attempt to capture the rhythm or feeling of an object in a stylized or abstracted way rather than offer literal depictions thereof.[6] Both children and adult amateurs were to find inspiration in the ‘primitive’—and simultaneously modernist—visual qualities of folk art when decorating the world around them. As she instructed readers of The Stencil Book (1935), “[l]ike those peasant motifs, our designs should represent the objects stripped of all accessory details, in…a simplified manner.”[7]

Zweybrück’s lifelong interest in folk art—a critical source of inspiration for her workshops—reveals another point of overlap with, but likewise departure from, Cizek: the positive conflation of untrained children’s art with the art of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples from tribal folk cultures and potential of both categories as rejuvenating sources for contemporary art and design. While Cizek sublimated his painting career to teaching, Zweybrück’s prolific work in industrial and applied design was animated by a sustained engagement with folk art, which she collected and displayed in her school. Zweybrück readily admitted how her initial fascination with European folk art (including toys, painted furniture and religious objects) gave way to a freer style informed by Native American and Mexican objects after her emigration to America. However, in extending her appreciation of ‘primitive’ outsider art to the art of untrained amateurs, Zweybrück’s attitudes towards primitivism were more complicated than Cizek’s, who never broached the topic of the untrained. In her popular instructional writing, Zweybrück valorized the lack of formal training among adult hobbyists, summoning them to harness their unspoiled freshness much like the supposed “simplicity and naïveté” of folk artists.[8] As she advised: “[p]eople who are without art training should not be afraid of drawing because most of the time their motifs are even stronger and have more charm because they do not try to imitate nature.”[9] Unlike Cizek, whose experience with older pupils was limited to the high-school-aged students in his Ornamental Studies Course, much of Zweybrück’s career was dedicated to teaching adult amateurs, relating to her institute’s differential goals. Furthermore, while Čižek taught male and female students ages 4-14, Zweybrück’s school was only open to girls and was equipped with several divisions: 1) seasonal courses for very young children 2) a general division for girls not intending to pursue art as a vocation 3) a separate division for high-school aged pupils focused on professional handcraft training in preparation for guild examinations. In the latter regard, Zweybrück never rejected vocational training in the wholesale way that Cizek did even as her schools synthesized “the general humanistic training of the pupil” with vocational-professional goals.[10] As Terramare observed, a minority of “truly artistically gifted and talented” pupils were recruited for the Zweybrück Workshops, which specialized in embroidery, textiles, toymaking and interior design, where they found “encouragement and stimulation” through commissions, competitions, and the bi-annual school exhibitions open to all students. Such linkages between school and workshop, whereby successful school graduates went on to design for the workshop or teach in the school, paralleled the close institutional linkages between the Secession/Wiener Werkstätte/Kunstgewerbeschule, the latter of which Moser and Hoffmann used as a talent pool for the Werkstätte. Yet the Zweybrück Workshops were distinct from the WW in representing a distinctly female form of entrepreneurship: the firm was led by women; staffed by female school graduates; and focused on matrilineal forms of artistic transmission.