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

This “innocence of the eye” was only the surface of the child’s “innocence,”
however. Ruskin also said that the artist needed to maintain
a childlike vitality and freshness that he called the “condition of
childhood.” 30 “You do not see with the lens of the eye,” Ruskin said
emphatically. “You see through that, and by means of that, but you
see with the soul of the eye.” 31 This “condition of childhood” resembles
that “state of newness” discussed by Baudelaire and it manifested
itself in the “objectivity” of Monet’s classic impressionism of the
70s as well as in the subjectivity of his later “grainstacks,” “Rouen
Cathedrals,” and “Waterlilies.” The inspired “condition of childhood”
is perhaps what Paul Cézanne had in mind too when he told Émile
Bernard in 1904: “As for me, I would like to be a child.” 32
Even some dedicated academics, whose styles were founded on
skillful rendering (which is the opposite of “the awkward scrawl”),
knew that it was the spiritual depth -- some version of that “condition
of childhood” -- and not objective vision or proper academic
execution that makes a great painting. Ernst Meissonier (one of the
most celebrated military portraitists in 19th century France) seems
to have engaged in some poignant introspection on precisely this
point in his 1874 Portrait of the Sergeants [figs.8 & 9]. The child’s
graffiti on the wall (to the right) tentatively fords the treacherous
Fig. 7
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