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

Fig. 11
Of Matisse’s contemporaries, André Derain was quite explicit
in a letter to Maurice Vlaminck of August 1902: “I’d like to study
the drawings of kids. That’s where the truth is, without a doubt.” 60
Vlaminck, some years later, commented: “I always look at everything
with the eyes of a child.” 61
The Brücke artists (including E.-L. Kirchner and Emil Nolde)
were Matisse’s German contemporaries. But it was not until June
1928, that Kirchner wrote in a diary that: “The artist is after all the
free responsive child, who reacts to each new stimulus,...not in any
logical or historic sense, but reconstructing them in his dreams [or
imagination],” 62 and that: “The development of an artist’s language
of forms certainly comes from a highly ecstatic vision, but along
with this, it is created through a [deliberate] consciousness [implying
it is not aimless], thus the artist is no different than the child
who draws....” 63 It was also during the mid twenties that he made
a series of woodcuts for Gustave Schiefler after drawings he had
done in or around 1884, when he was 3 1/2 years old [figs.10 & 11].
The art historian Will Grohmann, who knew Kirchner, remarked
that: “Repeatedly Kirchner points out the relationship of his later
development as an artist to his childhood drawings, which he loved
to reproduce beside his mature works.” 64 But several of the Brücke
(including Kirchner) already had a keen interest in the inspiration
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