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

Phaidon Press, 1964), 8; Oeuvres Complètes (Bruges: Gallimard, 1961), 1159.
“L’enfant voit tout en nouveauté; il est toujours ivre....L’homme de génie a
les nerfs solides; l’enfant les a faibles. Chez l’un, la raison a pris une place
considérable; chez l’autre, la sensibilité occupe presque tout l’être. Mais le
génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté, l’enfance douée maintenant, pour
s’exprimer, d’organes virils et de l’esprit analytique qui lui permet d’ordonner
la somme de materiaux involontairement amassée.” Baudelaire’s phrasing of
the idea has reappeared often since, as in Alfred Stieglitz’s 1912 comment to
the press on his child art exhibition (“The great geniuses, says Stieglitz, are
those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision
and experience.” Anonymous review, “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young
Artists,” The Evening Sun (New York, Saturday, April 27, 1912): 9; reproduced
as a plate in Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, An American Seer (New York:
Random House, 1960), 116.); in 1948, Julien Levy (the pioneering dealer of the
surrealists in New York) said in an essay on “Max Ernst” that Ernst “develops the
child’s approach, combined with an adult perfection.” Julien Levy, “Max Ernst,”
in Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948),
190.
18 . Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” in The Painter of Modern
Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London:
Phaidon Press, 1964), 198; Oeuvres Complètes (Bruges: Gallimard, 1961), 534.
“de leur grande faculté d’abstraction et de leur haute puissance imaginative” as
contrasted with “impuissante imagination ce public blasé.”
19 . Rodolphe Töpffer, Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre génevois,
Genève, 1848, 254, 255; cited in Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery,”
Modern Art, New York, 1978, 61.
20 . Théophile Gautier, “Du beau dans l’art,” L’art moderne, Paris, 1856, 130,
131; cited in Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” Modern Art,
New York, 1978, 63.
21 . A detailed chronology of the literature on child art and the history of
exhibitions of child art, annotated with summaries and commentary, can be
found in my book and exhibition catalogue on the nature and history of child
art: When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (Berkeley
and Washington, D.C.: University of California Press and The Phillips Collection,
2006).
22 . The literature on Bosch offers no significant discussion of the sources for
such images, although “surreal” combinations of human and animal or insect
parts occur not only in Bosch and his followers but earlier in the marginalia of
medieval illuminated manuscripts. These too may be informed by childhood
fantasy and by dreams.
23 . See the discussions in Werner Hoffmann, “The Art of Unlearning,” in
Jonathan Fineberg, editor, Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996) and Pierre Georgel, “L’Enfant au Bonhomme,”
in Klaus Gallwitz and Klaus Herding, editors, Malerei und Theorie: Das
Courbet-Colloquium 1979 (Frankfurt am Main: Städelschen Kunstinstitut,
154