During the 1950s art and design education in Britain was transformed. A system of instruction going back a hundred years to the Great Exhibition was overturned, as the ideas and aspirations of the Modern Movement were used to bring art education into the mainstream of 20th-century visual culture. What happened at that time still shapes the ethos and philosophy of art education all over the world.
Tom Hudson was a key figure in these revolutionary changes. Born in County Durham, he studied at Sunderland College of Art. Then at King's College, Newcastle, he came under the influence of a brilliant teacher, Diana Lall. She encouraged him to enroll at the Courtald Institute to study 20th-century art in preparation for a career in teaching. This link between theory and practise marked the whole of Hudson's career, giving his educational work unusual depth and authority.
In 1950, he was appointed to Lowestoft School of Art to teach drawing and painting. Here he began to teach art to young children. Influenced by the example of the Bauhaus and the theories of Herbert Read, he encouraged intuitive expression and was astonished by the vitality of the response.
He realized that art had a developmental role in the lives of children and that understanding the nature of this was the key to good teaching. Hudson recognized that children, like Picasso, drew what they knew as much as what they saw. This view of children's drawings is today well recognized by cognitive psychologists, but in the 1950s it was struggling for recognition.
When, in 1956, Hudson went from Lowestoft to be head of the basic course at Leeds College of Art, the stage was set for the creation of a fresh approach to the initial education of art students. Working in conjunction with Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron, he developed the curriculum for a new kind of foundation course.
This was designed to take students straight from school and plunge them into the world of art and design, using a series of exercises and projects. Students developed their creativity through experiments in visual language, the use of materials and the development and communication of visual ideas. This was similar to the inter-war curriculum at the Bauhaus in Germany, although the course moved further towards personal expression.
Such new courses reduced the emphasis on learning art through the development of craft skills. Instead they established the idea of learning through a creative process. Gradually this approach has triumphed completely, influencing not only art education but also the teaching of architecture and environmental design. Today, GCSE and A-level pupils follow a curriculum much influenced by Hudson's ideas, and the national curriculum emphasises the creative process as the key to learning both in art and design and in design and technology. The fear now is that by so greatly reducing the time devoted to the formal teaching of drawing and other basic skills, art schools have produced a generation of artists with more conceptual ambition than manual ability.
Hudson moved from Leeds to Leicester and then to be director of studies at Cardiff College of Art and Design from 1964 to 1977. This was an exciting period for the visual arts in Wales. A series of summer schools explored open approaches to creativity, and the Welsh Arts Council committed itself to a programme popularising exhibitions and events. It was a time of egalitarian ideals, and developments in Wales went on the influence courses at the Open University and helped towards the emergence of "community art".
In 1977 Hudson went to Canada to become Dean of Instruction at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. Here he played a lively role in the politics of art and design in Canada. Art education had by now caught up with Hudson's pioneering work, and he was often frustrated by the inability of other teachers to grasp still more radical ideas. He began to emphasise not only the importance of the "developing process", but also the creative connections between art, science and technology. This too was an attitude with its roots in the Bauhaus, but Hudson now set it in the context of the microprocessor and the development of new ways of shaping and using natural and manmade materials.
Hudson always believed that a knowledge of art was of value to everyone, not just to artists and confirmed gallery-goers. In 1993, when he retired from Emily Carr as Dean Emeritus, he seized the opportunity to put all his long experience into television, producing four distance-learning courses for British Columbia's Open Learning Agency. It is notoriously difficult to deal with educational material in this way, but in 39 programmes, supported by printed material, Hudson was highly successful.
It is characteristic of Hudson that, towards the end of his life, he should be working in a new medium and be looking further forward still to the role of the Internet in teaching about art.
Tom Hudson married Moira Marshall in 1949. They divorced in 1967 and the following year he married Sally Smith, who survives him, along with one son and one daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second.