In her contribution on the history of her discipline, Anna Schürch explores how biologicistic argumentative figures have shaped the thinkable and sayable in the context of German-language art education. In particular, the "biogenetic principle", derived from evolutionary biology, has served the desire to establish the discipline on the basis of "universal laws" since the early 20th century. The artistic  development of the child was thereby brought to the center and seen in analogy to art history at large.  With reference to Switzerland, the reception of the Britsch/Kornmann theory in the late 1920s, as well as post-war discourses around the ‘musische Bildung’, illustrate these still virulent / powerful and discourse-shaping argumentative figures.