Scrapbooks and articles

Abstract: Scrapbooks, articles by Florence Cane, publicity materials, and other records apparently created and maintained by Cane. Materials regard her artistic work and efforts to give children access to creating art, as well as her other art therapy work. Scrapbooks include photographs of some of her paintings, newspaper clippings, conference programs, personal letters, newsletters for organizations and associations, and other ephemera.

Biog. Sketch (Full): Florence Naumburg Cane was born in 1882, the second eldest of four siblings. Early in life, she decided she wanted to be an art teacher and help children understand themselves and their feelings through art. She began teaching privately in her own home and with the Walden School in New York in the early 1920s, founded by her younger sister Margaret Naumburg. Cane also lectured and founded a school of her own, which operated for a few years in Rockefeller Center.

Cane served as director of art for the Counseling Center for Gifted Children at New York University for fourteen years. As art director, Cane helped select students accepted to the center, based upon their portfolios; she looked for four particular elements in their work: body, psyche, mind, and spirit. She underwent psychoanalysis and believed that physical and mental health were intertwined.

Florence married Melville Henry Cane, with whom she had two children. Florence Cane wrote one book soon before her death in 1952, The Artist in Each of Us.