Jonathan Fineberg – The Postman Did It – Children’s Art and the Avant-garde

drawings and the humbleness of the shoemaker’s home, in which
this poor family gathers to hear the melodies of the ragged fiddler,
both affirm the noble simplicity and the directness with which
Wordsworth entreated the readers of this period to approach the
experience of nature. However, these two drawings also reveal a
more careful look at what children really do draw, as opposed to the
recurrent bonhommes.
In Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio, the two children (one drawing
and the older one standing beside the artist, looking on) directly
concern the parameters of the artist’s new style of “realism” in that
realism was putatively founded on a childlike innocence of seeing
what was there in front of him, without interpretation. “Everything
that does not take shape on the retina,” Courbet remarked, “is outside
the realm of painting.” 24 The idea of seeing like a child had a
direct bearing on Camille Corot’s approach to his subject too. “I
always entreat the good Lord to give me my childhood back,” he
confessed, “that is to say, to grant that I may see nature and render
it like a child, without prejudice.” 25 Courbet was probably no more
interested in what children actually drew than Cole, whereas Corot
is purported to have saved a body of his own childhood scribbles,
which occasioned conversation among the impressionists, who
also had a particular interest in the issue of naive spontaneity. 26
It is precisely at this point -- when the emphasis on spontaneity
overtook a reverance for traditional formal values - that a fundamental
change occurred that would make the “primitivism” of the turn
of the century possible. Throughout the nineteenth century artists
wished to maintain the status of painting and sculpture as equal
to the liberal arts -- rather than connected with the more narrowly
practical character of the professions -- and they took pains to
demonstrate its learned content, its reason and moral nature. 27 The
ascendance of empirical observation and spontaneous discovery
made it possible to pursue the implications of the romantic idea of
the “innocent eye” more directly.
Sometime around the turn of the century, Claude Monet confided
to Lilla Cabot Perry, his neighbor at Giverny, that he “wished he
had been born blind and then suddenly gained his sight so that he
could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the
objects were that he saw before him.” 28 The enlightenment con-
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