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

and Theory (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1986), 49.
36 . Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals,
Francis Golffing, trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 79.
37 . Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of
Morals, Francis Golffing, trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 90. More recently,
Theodor Adorno observed that society has divided and reduced thinking to a
hierarchical set of functions where reason - more evidently useful than memory,
emotion, or fantasy but barren without them - had been given prominence to
the detriment of thinking. See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections
from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978 [1951]), 123.
38 . Kirk Varnedoe, “Gauguin,” in William Rubin, editor, “Primitivism” in 20th
Century Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 181-182.
39 . Paul Gauguin, L’Echo, August 15, 1895; cited in Oviri, écrits d’un sauvage,
edited by Daniel Guérin (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 111.
40 . Paul Gauguin, Intimate Journals, translated by Van Wyck Brooks, preface
by Emil Gauguin (New York: Crown Publishers, 1936), 41. Vincent van Gogh
reported in a letter to Theo that Gauguin and Bernard talked of “painting like
children”; in Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh
(Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1958), III, letter 527, 20. Also
Dr. Marc Gerstein of the Toledo Museum of Art pointed out to me that Gauguin
may have taken inspiration for the geese in the background of his 1886 Breton
Women from Caldecott’s illustrations for children. See A. S. Hartrick, A Painter’s
Pilgrimage Through Fifty Years (Cambridge, England: The University Press,
1939), 33, for Gauguin’s remarks to Hatrick about Caldecott. Nevertheless,
child art itself seems not to have influenced him particularly.
41 . There is a concise history of the general idea that children resemble
primitive peoples in their thought and recapitulate the evolution of the human
race in George Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London: Studies of the Warburg
Institute, vol. 29, 1966), 60-67.
42 . Franz Cižek, quoted in Wilhelm Viola, Child Art (Peoria: Chas. A. Bennett
Co., 1944), 34.
43 . Georg Kerschensteiner, Die Entwicklung der Zeichnerischen Begabung
(München: Verlag Carl Gerber, 1905).
44 . 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.
45 . Noted in John MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 279.
46 . Noted by 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, 1980), 109. In addition, Girodet’s
own childhood drawing of a giraffe survives today in the drawing collection
of the Louvre, presumably saved by the artist who, we must conclude, found it
interesting enough to save.
156