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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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 142
of a twelve-year-old -- which was precisely the age of his daughter Marguerite that year. At that age, children begin to have an awakening concern with visual realism but still use the highly simplified, flat patterns and reductive descriptions of forms. Leo Stein’s anecdote about The Young Sailor II acquires further significance when one learns that during that same summer Matisse told his fauve colleague Jean Puy that the postman painted The Pink Onions, and then recanted. 56 Flam is perhaps correct that these works were so radical and new that Matisse was feeling unsure and consequently embarrassed about them. Certainly, the connection to child art was loaded for Matisse (as it would be for any vanguard artist in the first half of the century); he may also not have wished to have to explain himself while still in the midst of trying to work out what he was finding there. In the 1907 Portrait of Marguerite, which immediately followed The Young Sailor II and The Pink Onions, Matisse deliberately emulated a child’s style not only in the flat, unmodelled, contour renderings of the forms but in the typically childlike patches of pink on the cheeks and the unabashed reference to children’s drawings in the juvenile block lettering of the child’s name, awkwardly situated at the top margin. A number of important Matisse works over the next three years seem deeply engaged with the simplifications of child art. John Elderfield has argued that “before Fauvism, Matisse had dealt iconographically with the theme of childhood. Now, with Fauvism, he has created a form of painting made as if with the temperament of a child. The next step will be to repaint, with the benefit of his new, more appropriate vocabulary, an instinctive, prelapsarian world associable with childhood experience. Matisse takes that step in Le bonheur de vivre.” 57 If Le bonheur is painted with “the temperament of a child,” Matisse takes the next step in systematically exploiting a childlike vocabulary with The Young Sailor and The Young Sailor II, done immediately after Le bonheur; he followed a similar pattern with Le Luxe I and Le Luxe II (painted over the summer of 1907 through winter 1907-8, with an even more childlike manner of simplification). He then painted the Portrait of Pierre Matisse in the summer of 1909 (resembling Portrait of Marguerite in style) and the sequence of large, greatly simplified large figure compositions from Le Luxe II to The Dance and Music of 1911, 143
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 12 and 13: This “innocence of the eye” was
Page 14 and 15: the symbolist critic Albert Aurier
Page 16 and 17: liberty and the chance to work from
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
Page 26 and 27: 150
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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?