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

liberty and the chance to work from imagination. Only a few of the
investigators studying child art at the time shared Cižek’s appreciation
for the unique aesthetic of children in itself. But there were increasing
numbers of educators like Ebenezer Cooke, Konrad Lange,
Georg Hirth, and Carl Götze who anticipated or confirmed Cizヒek’s
belief that art instruction, encouraging free drawing and imagination,
could awaken the creative powers of the child.
Some of the early studies of child art resulted in important
collections that were either published or available to be seen in
exhibitions. Ricci collected some 1,450 drawings and Georg Kerschensteiner,
the superintendant of schools for Munich, gathered
nearly half a million of them as a data sample for his 1905 book, The
Development of the Graphic Gift. 43 In 1907 the first volume of the
Leipzig journal Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie was devoted
entirely to child art and it cites various collections and exhibitions
of child art circulating at the time including the collections
of Dr. Kerschensteiner and that of the historian Karl Lamprecht in
Geneva. Cižek also toured an exhibition of his collection. Indeed,
there were prominent exhibitions of child art every year in important
art centers from the turn of the century to the beginning of
World War One.
Artists were increasingly involved in organizing the growing number
of exhibitions of child art after the turn of the century while at
the same time looking ever more closely at various aspects of how
children drew as a stimulus to their own work. For the artists of
the 20th century, a serious interest in the art of children became as
remarkably varied and complex from one artist to the next as it was
pervasive. Expressionists, cubists, futurists, and the artists of the
avantgarde Russian movements all hung the art of children alongside
their own in their pioneering exhibitions in the early years of
the century: The first room of the 1908 Vienna “Kunstschau” (in
which Oskar Kokoschka debuted) was an exhibition of children’s
art from the classes of Franz Cižek. Alfred Stieglitz organized four
exhibitions of children’s art at his “291” gallery in New York in the
four years from 1912 through 1916; according to a contemporary
review in the New York Evening Sun the exhibition of 1912 was
the first of its kind in America and it quoted Stieglitz as remarking
that the work of these 2 through 11-year-olds had “much of the
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