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

spirit of so-called modern work.” 44 Roger Fry also showed child art
at the Omega Workshops in London in 1917 and again in 1919 and
in Cologne, the 1919 Dada exhibition included child art, African art,
and the art of psychotics beside those of Max Ernst and the other
dadaists. 45
In addition, many of the greatest artists of the twentieth century
avidly collected children’s art and took, in some instances quite
specific, cues from them; Mikhail Larionov, Gabriele Münter and
Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet,
and the Cobra artists are leading examples and substantial portions
of their collections still survive. But other artists as far back as
Anne-Louis Girodet are reputed to have collected children’s drawings
46 and there are a number of important artists of the 20th century
who seem likely to have done so as well, even though their
collections cannot, at this time, be documented in detail. Certainly
Marc Chagall’s mature style reflects his fascination with the child’s
naive directness and the character of his own childhood (and childlike)
fantasy. The Nabis, who came together under Gauguin’s influence,
found authenticity in a return to childhood. That idea was at
the root of Paul Sérusier’s theory of “subjective deformation,” and
both Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis cultivated the awkwardness
of children’s drawings in the interest of a freer expression of
the artist. 47 One wonders if they didn’t also collect the material
that inspired these thoughts.
One of the most tantalizing examples is that of Henri Matisse.
Matisse is rumored to have helped to organize a salon des enfants
in Paris before the First World War and he had enough interest in the
drawings of his thirteen-year-old son Pierre to include one on the
wall in the background to his paintings Woman on a High Stool
and Still Life with Lemons, both of 1914. 48 Certainly many critics
of the time -- both in praise and condemnation -- noted a connection
between Matisse’s work and that of children: In 1913 a New York
critic wrote that Matisse “paints as a child might have painted in
the dawn of art, seeing only the essentials in form and color.” 49 An
anonymous reviewer of an exhibition early in 1908 remarked that
“Impressionism reaches its second childhood...with M. Matisse motive
and treatment alike are infantile.” 50 In 1914 another critic said
that Matisse used “the method of a child-man, facing nature with
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