Author: Kouvou Ourania
Title: About child art: an examination of the historical identity of an influential art educational practice.
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University College Dublin, 7-10 September 2005
Abstract: This paper presents an historical survey of the most representative views of educators, psychologists and artists about the notion of child art. The urgency for such an examination stems from the fact that this particular view and its corresponding educational practices have not ceased to dominate art education for more than a century. Although in a latent way, the claim that children’s work incorporates an innate aesthetic/artistic appeal and that adult interference will consequently hinder the child’s spontaneous creative processes is encountered even in contemporary art textbooks and children literature itself. The rationale of this paper is that in order to embark in a critical understanding of the premises and philosophical underpinnings of an educational model of such magnitude and pervasive power one needs to undertake an examination of its origins and historical identity.
Document type and origin: Conference paper, presented at European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in University College Dublin, September 2005.
Suggested key terms: art education, child art, primitive art, modernism, romanticism, artistic creativity, pictorial arts, children’s drawings, developmental stages, free-expression, naivite.
For more than a century, the practices of art education have been based on the notion that children’s creations have artistic/aesthetic claims and can therefore justifiably be described as child art. Although children are creative in ways different from those of adults, they are said to enjoy inherent artistic potential, which parallels that of the most celebrated modern artists, mainly of Western tradition.
The basic assumptions of child art are that the child is a natural artist who needs only encouragement and not formal instruction. Since children’s art comes from individual and innate sources, adult influence is understood as disrupting the natural flowering of their artistic creative expression. Art is a way for children to express feelings about themselves and their worlds disregarding realistic considerations of depiction. Like the adult artist, the child sees the world as light, color and mass. As a consequence, the modern artist finds in the art of children as well as that of primitive people the source of artistic creativity freed from all academic Western conventions.
These assumptions, rarely spelled out in the form of a full-blown theory, seem to constitute the backbone of the majority of contemporary art educational practices known as ‘self-expression’ or ‘creative self-expression’ in the States.
This paper intents to examine the origins of the notion of child art, its historical identity and evolution and its relation with societal and artistic factors in an attempt to explain why this specific educational perspective has persisted and achieved such a prominence within educational theory. Most importantly one feels that such an inquiry will reveal to the interested art educator the role this vision has played and is still playing in shaping practice in art education.
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1. The Cult of Childhood
The origins of the child art notion are to be found in the “cult of childhood”, the most important exponent of which is of course J.J.Rousseau. Towards the end of the Enlightenment, in the 18th century and especially with his novel “Emile”, Rousseau ascribes all forms of evil to social influences and claims that culture corrupts the intrinsically good nature of the child. He understands the child’s mind, as a natural self-evident source of truth and goodness, free of social corruption. In its time, Emile was read as a pedagogical treatise. It functioned as the catalyst for a series of educational reforms based upon learning through the senses that would culminate in the work of Pestalozzi and Froebel in the century to come. Progressive educators like Dewey also drew strength from Rousseau and, in effect, his influence on educational practice lasted more than 200 years.
Rousseau does not seem to attach yet any intrinsic value to the child’s first attempts at drawing. Rather he would like to focus art instruction completely on the empirical and the factual encouraging the child to draw what it sees and understands. For the purposes of our examination, it is important to mention that although for Rousseau the teacher does not dominate the learning process, a degree of adult guidance is nevertheless considered necessary.
In the 19th century it became fashionable to contrast nature and culture, the innate goodness of children and the enforced enculturation that ignored the natural stages of their development. The image of childhood was equated with a period of creative inspiration, rich in imagination, with an unspoiled perception of truth and beauty.
This conception of the child is also informed by the German idealism of Kant and Hegel, which attributes to art creation moral values. The young creator therefore, transcends the external aspect of reality, the illusion of everyday experience and approaches the divine and spiritual. This process frees the child’s innate intuition and cultivates its ability to perceive the morally just. The emphasis therefore shifts from mere imitation of nature or objects to the expression of the pupil’s inner life through his/her art.
These views however were not limited to educators or thinkers, but can also be found in the writings of poets and artists. Indeed this vision of childhood found expression in the work of the Romantic poets of the 19th century, who extolled the child’s innocence as a mark of “genius”. They believed in the artist’s personal unique expression freed from the burden of civilization’s constraints. The romantic poets then saw in the child a model of artistic creation and preached a return to the more natural state of childhood and of the origins of humankind.
Characteristic of that view is the call for an “artistic turnaround”, a rejection of the accumulated knowledge and refinement in skill that is observed in Western artistic tradition. The pictorial artist is called to unlearn what he has learned, and basically break with the tradition of painting that begun with Giotto.
Attempts to return to an innocent vision had already been made at the beginning of the 19th century by the Nazarenes, a group of German painters mainly of religious subjects. They hoped to regain the lost paradise of childhood by recapturing a naïve view of the brightness and beauty of nature by returning to the 15th century Italian primitives.
As early as 1883, the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro was urging his son Lucien to pay particular attention to the Italians because they were “naïve but knowing”. For Pissarro, naiveté was a necessary component of artistic vision and a requisite for experiencing nature truly. Following the Romantic tradition, he understood naiveté as the creation of a personal style whose simplicity will make evident the artist’s sincerity. Traces of this conviction can be found today in the flourishing for the so-called “Art brut”.
The generation of postimpressionists and symbolists at the end of the century will move a step forwards in giving more emphasis to subjectivity and personal vision to the expense of fidelity to nature. Here one could refer to Cezanne’s, Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s innovations such as the indifference to linear perspective, the emotional use of bright strong color contrasts, the technique of simplification and deformation. Among these artists, the influence of Rousseau’s philosophy is most pronounced in Gauguin’s case. His rejection of urban civilization and his desire for a simple, more natural lifestyle of people living in a “state of nature” was expressed both in his art and mode of living.
However, we cannot yet identify the influence of schematic forms of children’s work in the impressionist and postimpressionists work, as we will later on with the modernists of the 20th century. The reason for this is that in most of the 19th century art, the idea of naiveté is still closely related to the observation of nature.
In 1848 something quite extraordinary occurred. A Swiss pedagogue and graphic narrator Rudolph Topffer published a book, which contained two chapters devoted to child art. Topffer was a teacher, caricaturist and illustrator of children’s stories. Perhaps due to this background, he had a more informed and sensitive perception of children’s graphic configurations. In this book, Topffer makes the astonishing statement concerning childhood creativity: there is less difference between Michelangelo-the-immortal and Michelangelo-the-untutored-child than between Michelangelo-the-immortal and Michelangelo-the-apprentice. To Topffer, the child’s spontaneous graphic inventions were seen as closer to the creative expressions of great artists than were the works of artists whose drawings displayed mere conventional skill.
In 1890 in his “Principles of Psychology” William James tells us about artistic education that just as the child learns to behave like an adult, the adult artist, no longer a child, must learn to perceive like one. Following Topffer’s claim, James argues that artistic vision is a childlike vision where the artist disentangles from practical life and attends to the world as a collection of patches of color bounded by lines. ______
2. So far however, little attention is given to what children actually drew. We can say that there is still a gap between an idealized version of childhood and the behavior of real children. It is only towards the end of 19th century, that we observe a shift from a purely abstract concern with “childhood” to a study of actual children and their physical and mental development.
Interestingly enough, the first time an adult noticed the intrinsic qualities of actual children’s drawings was on the walls in the form of graffiti. In Milan, in the winter of 1884 and while taking refuge from a sudden shower under a portico, the Italian poet and philosopher Corrado Ricci observed the drawings that children had scrawled spontaneously on the walls. He found the drawings by older children high on the wall crude, those lowest, and presumably by the youngest, least technical and logical. He could not however avoid noticing their great decency and originality. The experience was sufficiently moving to lead him write the book “L’ Arte dei Bambini” published in 1887, the first entire book devoted to child art.
In the space of a dozen years before the turn of the century, and affected by the spirit of the time, psychologists, philosophers, educators and art educators had published an enormous amount of important studies on child art.
Perhaps the first person to connect children’s drawings with their mental development as well as with the notion of the primitive, was G.-H. Lucquet. In his first book “Dessin d’un enfant” published in 1913, he examines the story drawings of his own daughter, Simone. The book takes Simone as a special case by which to look more closely at children’s art in developmental terms. His study enables him to identify certain key stages in the child’s drawing abilities in an ascent towards realism. Lucquet is the first to identify a particular kind of realism characteristic of children around the age 4-7 which he calls “logical” or “intellectual realism”. Intellectual realism or logical realism for him meant that the child draws what it knows from seeing and not what it sees from a particular vantage point (which would be adult visual realism). He is here referring to the known characteristics of children’s drawings, such as, two-eyed profiles, bird’s–eye views for rooms, furniture and so on, transparency (exposure of the insides of houses etc), and others.
Throughout the book Lucquet remarked on the similarities between child, primitive and prehistoric art. Both child and the cave artist of the Aurignacian period, between 25.000 and 16.000 B.C. he tells us, invent for themselves figurative drawing as if they were the first artists. He claims that children, begin by making marks on paper, without any depictive intent. Then they see resemblances, which they later imitate with depictive intent and develop into signs. They make a scribble and subsequently identify it as a horse, a whip etc. This is, according to him, precisely how cave man starts with purposeless mark making (palm prints, finger-tracings) or with images apparently suggested by natural accidents of form (the natural demarcations, hollows and bumps of the cave wall). Whatever we may think now of so simple an analogy between the child and the prehistoric man as the first artists, it was highly influential by the early 1930s in France.
Since Lucquet, many educators, artists and art historians have speculated about the presumed similarity between children’s drawings and the so-called, primitive art. Comparisons of the artwork of preliterate societies and child art seemed to confirm the view that both are products of an early, cognitively naïve or immature stage in human development. According to this view, drawings of children, like primitive art, are culture-free products with universally common features.
It is against this background that F. Goodenough constructs her well-known Draw-a-Man test in 1926. This test is based on the premise that in the course of its development, the child goes through certain steady improvements in depicting objects, which in their turn indicate the child’s growth of conceptual skills. As the drawn figure gains in detail and its proportions become less idiosyncratic, this graphic achievement reflects the child’s increasing conceptual competence.