Paul Henry Hanus, 1855-1941

Chair, Division of Education, 1906-1912

In 1891, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot appointed Paul Henry Hanus to the first faculty position in education, thereby beginning the formal study of education as a discipline at Harvard. Hanus is generally considered to be the founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In 1859, Hanus and his family emigrated from Upper Silesia, in the Kingdom of Prussia, to Wisconsin. After earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, he taught mathematics at the high school and college levels. He soon discovered that he was “much more interested in studying schools than in studying mathematics.”

In appointing Hanus, President Eliot’s goal was not to establish education as an academic discipline at Harvard. Rather, he was concerned about the state of secondary education in the public schools and wanted to ensure that students would be properly prepared for college. Harvard became interested in offering courses in education, in part, to prevent an effort to establish a state-supported normal school for the training of secondary school teachers in Boston. Eliot felt that colleges and universities would be better suited to train them. Hanus possessed a much broader view of education.

Henry Wyman Holmes, HGSE’s first dean, recalled that Hanus “always viewed education as social process, looking at it in national terms and thinking of schools as an agency and instrument of social progress.” At first, the education faculty were members of the Division of Philosophy, Hanus being appointed a full professor with tenure in 1901. He realized that the department needed to grow to keep apace with the growth of other education schools in the United States and lobbied for the creation of a separate faculty.

Though not its own school, education became a formal division within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1906 with Hanus as the chair until 1912 when he turned leadership over to his former student, Henry Wyman Holmes. Hanus remained as a professor and, in 1920, saw the rebirth of the division into a separate Harvard faculty, the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He retired and became professor emeritus in 1921. In his first annual report as dean, Holmes remarked that for 30 years Hanus had “worked indefatigably for the development of instruction of education at Harvard” and that the Harvard Graduate School of Education stood as a “monument to his vision and zeal."

About the Artist: Sergei Timofeyevich Konenkov, Russian, 1874–1971

On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, friends and former students raised the funds to establish a “permanent memorial” to recognize Paul Henry Hanus’ many contributions to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hanus personally selected the Russian artist Sergei Timofeyevich Konenkov to sculpt and cast a bas-relief portrait. In addition to sculptures of Soviet politicians and artists, the Russian sculptor was known for his expressive interpretations in wood (his preferred medium) of imagery from Russian folklore and mysticism.

Konenkov was born to a peasant family in the village Karakovichi in the Smolensk province of Russia. From 1892 to 1896, he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under S.I. Ivanov and Sergei Volnukhin. Konenkov continued his education from 1899 to 1902 in the studio of Vladimir Beklemishev at the Higher Arts School of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. During the Russian revolution of 1905, Konenkov stood with the workers at the barricades and afterwards created portraits of the heroes of this Moscow rebellion. After the 1917 revolution, he taught at several state studios and was politically active, participating in Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda. From 1924 to 1945, he resided in New York City with his wife, Margarita Ivanova Vorontsova Konenkova.

During the American period, Konenkov accepted commissions from individuals and institutions. His busts of Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone reside in the art collection of the United States Supreme Court. Additionally, busts of Holmes and Cardozo were commissioned for the Harvard Law School Legal Portraits Collection. Other commissions include those of Albert Einstein for Princeton’s Institute of Advance Study and actress Ina Claire.

At the invitation of Stalin, the couple returned to the Soviet Union in 1945. He was given a studio on Gorky Street in the center of Moscow and became an acclaimed Soviet artist. He received the Order of Lenin in 1956, the Golden Star of the Hero of Socialist Labor in 1964, and the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1958. Konenkov remained an active sculptor who delicately balanced the demands of socialist realism with his own private projects in which he explored subjects of a more mythical and metaphysical nature. After his death in 1971, the Sergei T. Konenkov Studio-Museum opened in 1974 on the site of the artist’s studio in Moscow.