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

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this childlike objectivity and intuition, Adolphe Thiers wrote in 1822 that we long for the naive but “we cannot be at once children and men”; only a genius has the ability to retrieve that innocence of observation. 14 Thus the nineteenth century inherited a double legacy about the child’s “innocent eye”; it was innocent enough of convention to see the emperor’s new clothes, so to speak, and at the same time the child was gifted with a privileged view into the mysteries of the divine plan. Baudelaire’s 1857 poem, “Correspondances,” was a paradigmatic statement of the premise for the latter. In this poem he asserted that everything in the tangible world was merely the material manifestation of an intangible higher reality, a sign to be read by the clear-sighted poet. “Nature is a temple,” he wrote and “...man passes there through forests of symbols....” 15 Baudelaire regarded the child as having a raw receptivity to the “correspondences” between the visible world and the higher truths that underlie it, a clairvoyance like that of the poet or artist but lacking in the analytic skills to fashion this intuition into art. 16 “The child sees everything in a state of newness,” he wrote in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). But whereas in the “man of genius” he says, “reason has taken up a considerable position,” in the child “sensibility is almost the whole being,” and he concludes that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood regained at will -- a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis.” 17 Even though Baudelaire admired children’s “great capacity for abstraction and their highly imaginative power” (which he contrasted with “the impotent imagination of the blasé public” 18 ), his romantic concept of the child had little to do with the reality of what children draw. For him the child symbolized an idea. But neither he nor any other writer had actually studied children’s drawings per se in any great detail. The Swiss artist and educator Rodolphe Töpffer seems to have been the first to do so in devoting two chapters of his 1848 Reflections and Remarks of a Genevan Painter to his analysis of them. Töpffer was also groundbreaking in that he extolled the expressive genius in the art of children and, by implication, he emphasized the centrality of ideas in art over technical execution. “There is less difference,” Töpffer wrote “between Michelangelo 130
Fig. 2 the child scribbler [gamin griffoneur] and Michelangelo the immortal artist than between Michelangelo after having become an immortal artist and Michelangelo while still an apprentice.” 19 Thus academic skills, according to Töpffer, had less to do with the artist’s mature genius than the guileless expressivity present in childhood and, as Meyer Schapiro has pointed out, even such established French critics of the period as Théophile Gautier were intrigued by Töpffer’s idea that children’s art had the quality of renderinga “thought,” in Gautier’s words, “in a few decisive strokes without losing any of its strength.” 20 A considerable literature exists on child art from the perspectives of pedagogy and developmental psychology. The former goes back to Baldassare Castiglione (in the 16th century) and includes Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (in the 18th century); the latter gets underway with a serious scientific intent toward the end of the 19th century when writers such as Herbert Spencer (Education, 1861), influenced by Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, began to look at children’s drawings from a developmental point of view. G. Stanley Hall’s book, The Content of Children’s 131
Page 2 and 3: A KID COULD DO THAT! galerie gmurzy
Page 4 and 5: Thus, for Friedrich art comes as a
Page 8 and 9: Minds (1883), and Corrado Ricci’s
Page 10 and 11: drawings and the humbleness of the
Page 12 and 13: This “innocence of the eye” was
Page 14 and 15: the symbolist critic Albert Aurier
Page 16 and 17: liberty and the chance to work from
Page 18 and 19: untutored eyes and trying to give e
Page 20 and 21: which are also influenced by the si
Page 22 and 23: of children for their work before t
Page 24 and 25: Fig. 13 such material also reveals
Page 26 and 27: 150
Page 28 and 29: Notes This essay is reprinted and s
Page 30 and 31: Phaidon Press, 1964), 8; Oeuvres Co
Page 32 and 33: and Theory (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Resea
Page 34 and 35: dessins de gosses. La vérité y es
Page 36: EDITORS Krystyna Gmurzynska Mathias

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

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