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

untutored eyes and trying to give expression to what instinct told
him about life.” 51 One of the most extreme negative examples was
a review of the Christmas 1908 exhibition of Matisse’s works at the
Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin in which the critic for the Leipzig
Kunstchronik, after careful consideration, concluded that Matisse’s
work represented a “danger” to young German artists because it
was so “ridiculous and childish!” 52
On June 7th, 1914, Guillaume Apollinaire reviewed an exhibition
at the Galerie Malpel in Paris of “Dessins d’enfants” in which he particularly
praised the work done from imagination by the children
(many of whom were the children of artists, including Kees Van
Dongen’s daughter). The review concludes with two paragraphs
about Matisse. “I remember when Matisse used to show off his
children’s drawings,” Apollinaire wrote, “some of which were really
astonishing. Matisse was very much interested in them. ‘Nevertheless,’
he used to say, ‘I don’t believe that we should make a lot of fuss
about children’s drawings, because they don’t know what they are
doing.’” 53
Maybe not, but that did not stop Matisse from using a vocabulary
of simplification that was inspired by child art as a lever “to free
himself from literal renderings imposed by objects,” as Jack Flam
described Matisse’s concerns of 1906. 54 The pivotal works were
the two versions of The Young Sailor and The Pink Onions from
the summer of 1906, Portrait of Marguerite of 1907, and the 1909
Portrait of Pierre. Matisse spent the summer of 1906 in Collioure
and he said of himself and André Derain that summer: “We were at
the time like children in the face of nature and we let our temperaments
speak...” 55
Leo Stein reported that Matisse had brought the two paintings of
The Young Sailor back from the country at the end of the summer
and at first pretended to Stein that the postman had painted the
highly abstract (and childlike) second version and then reluctantly
admitted he had painted it himself. Flam rightly identified the influence
of a more “primitive” style in it and noted that Matisse needed
to get away from his own empirical tendencies by making the painting
from another painting rather than from nature. But the style has
the deliberate awkwardness of child art not the highly schematized
simplification of African carvings, indeed it looks like the drawing
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