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

I have discussed elsewhere 68 the involvement of Paul Klee, the
artists in the Blue Rider circle, the Russian avant-garde, and Picasso
with child art before (and after) the First World War but it is worth
remarking that with them and the artists already mentioned there
emerged a sense of the breadth of interest in child art by the leading
artists of the first decades of the century. The outstanding exception
is curiously dada, which named itself after the infantile term
for a child’s hobbyhorse and constantly referred to its hankering
after the perambulator and yet found little inspiration in the actual
work of children. For the dadaists, childhood was largely a symbol
for their own strategic retreat from social norms; in August 1916,
Hugo Ball remarked: “To outdo oneself in simplicity and childlike
thoughts - that is still the best defense.” 69
Among the surrealists, Miró is certainly the artist most seriously
involved with child art, as we shall see in the chapters that follow.
Much of the other important new painting in the interwar era
was quite formal or monumental in character and seemed less concerned
with the romantic tendencies that would lead to an interest
in child art, although it continues to crop up in surprising contexts
such as in the studies for Picasso’s Guernica [fig.12], the most terrifying
and political and monumental canvas of his career and in Le
Corbusier’s “Pavillon des temps nouveaux” at the 1937 Exposition
Universelle in Paris, where Corbusier had a studio assistant of Fernande
Léger’s (this just happened to be the young Asger Jorn, who
a few years later would be a leading figure in the formation of Cobra)
enlarge two drawings by a 12-year-old boy to 50 square meters
each, as murals for the walls [fig.13]. 70
After World War Two Jean Dubuffet as well as the Cobra artists
collected and worked with ideas from child art. But virtually every
major artist in the first generation after the Second World War became
involved with psychoanalysis and existentialism which in turn
led them back to childhood through personal introspection. By the
fifties the vocabulary of child art and psychoanalytic introspection
were so much a part of the common language that the widespread
interest of artists in the second half of the twentieth century in
child art hardly seems remarkable. Yet the same exchange of accusation
and denial perseveres and as with the artists of the first half
of the century, finding out how the more recent artists have used
147