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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

A KID COULD DO THAT! galerie gmurzynska
JONATHAN FINEBERG The Postman Did It - Children’s Art and the Avant-garde In letters to the editor in the February 1955 Art News, several dismayed readers complained that their grandchildren painted as well as Hans Hofmann, whose work had been reproduced on the cover of the Christmas issue [fig.1]. The editor responded with his best wishes to all these “talented grandchildren,” and expressed his hope that they might “keep up the good work.” 1 The idea that modern art looks like something a child could do is one of the oldest clichés around; it has been with us since the inception of the avantgarde. In its most familiar form, the comparison of vanguard painting and sculpture with the “awkward scrawls” of children has served as a rhetoric for dismissing the significance of radical ideas in art, as when a German critic in 1933 described the work of Paul Klee as “mad, infantile smearings” 2 or in 1908 when a journalist in Paris wrote that an exhibition of “infantile...sketches by urchins between the ages of six and sixteen, none of whom is gifted,” were “better than the fauves.” 3 Even in the nineteenth century critics often rebuked adventurous modernists with accusations of childishness: in 1874, a reviewer complained that Claude Monet’s Impression -- Sunrise was executed “with the childish hand of a schoolboy who was painting for the first time.” 4 Yet as far back as the romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were some to whom this comparison of modern art with the aesthetic of a child was not invidious. Like the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich, some praised the child as a model for the artist: “The only true source of art,” Friedrich wrote, in 1830, “is our heart, the language of a pure childlike spirit. A creation, not flowing from these springs, can only be mannerisms. Every true work of art is received in consecrated hours and born in jubilant -- to the artist often unknown -- inner urges of the heart.” 5 127
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 18 and 19: untutored eyes and trying to give e
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?