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

Fig. 13
such material also reveals a great deal about the aspirations of the
individual artists and the meaning of their work.
William Blake, in his Songs of Innocence (1789), was perhaps
the first artist to praise the “innocent” vision of childhood as a model
for the artist. For Wordsworth “The Child is Father of the Man.” 71
Marcel Duchamp’s pun “Enfant-phare” (“Headlight-child”) also
invokes the romantic idea of the prescience of the naive child. 72
Who hasn’t heard, or even repeated, the line, “out of the mouth of
babes”? 73 It is, by now, commonplace to recognize the freshness of
vision that children have and how often it “innocently” reveals profound
insights. Moreover, we admire child art for its expressive directness
and its ability to communicate an emotion to a wide range
of viewers. But aren’t these characterizing traits of child art also
qualities for which we praise the great paintings in museums? Yet
no aspect of modern art has elicited more anger from its defenders
and its alienated viewers alike than the sense that it looks in some
way like what children do.
Childhood is, after all, something all humans have in common.
Yet “the child within” each of us, to use the phrase of the Cobra artists,
is a child necessarily buried by the conventions of adult social-
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