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

the symbolist critic Albert Aurier was “to exile ourselves, far, very far,
to take refuge in the distant countries of the Orient, closed to the
unhealthy influences of Europe.” 35
Friedrich Nietzsche brilliantly embodied this end-of-the-century
malaise in the metaphors of Greek myth. He described a perennial
opposition between what he called the Apollonian tendencies for
restraint, harmony, measure, the creativity of the dream as against
a powerful drive to exceed all norms that found an outlet in the
drunken frenzy of the Dionysian festivals. Dionysos was the only
Greek god with a fully developed childhood and he represented an
unbroken continuum of the child’s primitive urges and irrationality
into adulthood. Nietzsche saw an affirmation of life in the Dionysian
excesses and, in The Birth of Tragedy, he attacked the over-rationalized
naturalism of what he called “esthetic Socratism.” 36 He
suggested that “perhaps there is a realm of wisdom, after all, from
which the logician is excluded? Perhaps art must be seen as the
necessary complement of rational discourse?” 37
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