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

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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. 7 136
Fig. 8 waters of self-examination with a wooden parody of the posturing narcissist in the foreground, on whom the artist and his dog lavish such attention. As Robert Herbert pointed out, Ruskin’s “condition of childhood” is what writers in the 20th century have referred to as “primitivism.” 33 By the end of the 19th century, the cultivation of naiveté had been absorbed into a wider interest in seeking all that the overdeveloped culture of fin-de-siècle Europe had buried. Sigmund Freud’s archeological excavation of the unconscious mind and the debate over Darwin’s evolutionary theories paralleled the pervasive “primitivism” of vanguard art from Paul Gauguin to Igor Stravinsky, and Baudelaire’s speculations on “childhood regained” were subsumed under a broader desire for authenticity. “You will always find vital sap coursing through the primitive arts,” Gauguin wrote. “In the arts of an elaborate civilization, I doubt it!” 34 The advice of 137
Page 2 and 3: A KID COULD DO THAT! galerie gmurzy
Page 4 and 5: Thus, for Friedrich art comes as a
Page 6 and 7: this childlike objectivity and intu
Page 8 and 9: Minds (1883), and Corrado Ricci’s
Page 10 and 11: drawings and the humbleness of the
Page 14 and 15: the symbolist critic Albert Aurier
Page 16 and 17: liberty and the chance to work from
Page 18 and 19: untutored eyes and trying to give e
Page 20 and 21: which are also influenced by the si
Page 22 and 23: of children for their work before t
Page 24 and 25: Fig. 13 such material also reveals
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Page 28 and 29: Notes This essay is reprinted and s
Page 30 and 31: Phaidon Press, 1964), 8; Oeuvres Co
Page 32 and 33: and Theory (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Resea
Page 34 and 35: dessins de gosses. La vérité y es
Page 36: EDITORS Krystyna Gmurzynska Mathias

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

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