“Invention”
The interest and the pleasure we take today in looking at children’s
drawings and paintings constitute one of the rare meeting points between
avant-garde art and everyday taste. The gulf between the boldest adventures
in the plastic arts and the general public is so often mentioned that
it seems to me to be important to underscore from the outset how much
this shared way of looking at children’s art is rare and has been,
until now, neglected. The great merit of Emmanuel Pernoud’s work
is to have attempted a history of this shared experience at the very
place where we did not until now see anything worth thinking about.
In reading Pernoud’s book, I was amazed to observe that the association
that until now seemed to me natural between childhood and drawing was
the fruit of very recent changes in the domains of art and pedagogy.
As is often the case, the “invention” of the concept created
its own object. If hardly any children’s drawings remain for us
from the period before the second half of the nineteenth century, that
is no doubt because children were hardly allowed any time or means to
make them. If by chance, this time and these means were brought together
for the child, the drawing in question was immediately thrown out along
with the other refuse from this early age of man, without being looked
at. By considering such drawing in a new way, the artistic avant-garde
certainly transformed its own aesthetic canons, but above all what it
gave rise to was an ocean of drawings and paintings at the very place
where, beforehand, there was nothing or almost nothing. This time, Robert
Filliou’s formula—viz., that “art is what makes life
more interesting than art”—seems to me to be entirely justified.
Still one had to undertake this history to which Pernoud has applied
himself. Now we can establish this singular connection.
Early Age
Like many parents, I myself have noticed how the child’s entrance
into the first year of elementary school has influenced his production
of drawings and paintings. While starting to learn writing, arithmetic,
and authority does not immediately dry up the huge flow of “works,”
it alters their aesthetics.
Before the age of five or six, the child uses models little or not at
all. Among the young in nursery school, trees and faces can be fantastic
forms. Right before Christmas, all schools yoke themselves to the traditional
exercise of asking the children to paint fir trees that will then form—already—the
matter for a major exhibition. The result is always magnificent for
the inventiveness, accuracy, and efficacity of the means employed. Of
the three basic tools of painting—drawing, color, and value—children
retain only the first two. I do not know why, but value, the depiction
of light and dark over the same tone, does not seem to correspond to
the psychomotor structure of one’s early years. Colors are often
laid down flat and—when allowed by the schoolteacher—it
is mixtures or contrasts that suggest what we see as shadows or depths.
This first peculiarity obviously was not able to escape the notice of
the tenants of colored shadows, who saw therein the spontaneous application
of the theories of Eugène Chevreul.
Another characteristic is also blindingly obvious: this is the ease
with which children pass from the abstract to the figurative. Here again,
one can imagine how much this “easiness” must have stimulated
the interest of early twentieth-century painters. Before language acquisition,
it seems to me, children do not use models—that is to say, they
do not enclose an object in a previously thought or learned typical
form. They seem to react in an impulsive way to the stimulation the
motif or the theme constitutes.
The Learner’s Curve [L”Apprenti
sage]
With the learning of writing and geometry comes a concern to conform
to a model furnished by adults. Very rapidly, one witnesses the disappearance
of the incredible accuracy and appropriateness of the child’s
first drawings. The “works” smack of care, sometimes of
hard effort, and any deviation from the model becomes a blunder [une
maladresse]. Depending upon the pedagogical ability of adults, their
aptitude for furnishing the child with varied and stimulating models,
drawings and paintings may retain at this age a real interest in the
view of adults. At this age, children have a very good perception of
how artists play with models. The paintings on permanent display in
the Children’s Workshop at the Pompidou Center in Paris are good
examples of the complicity between artists and children at this moment
in their development. For their part, the artists try to stay away from
models that have weight for them (morphology, spatial representation,
etc.) when the children are still at the age where it is not always
easy to assimilate those models.
What Children’s Drawings Teach Me
The two ages I have just distinguished here teach me different things.
From the very young, I learn first of all not to “do too much,”
not to emphasize the effect, not to stumble into repetition, style,
formalism, that is to say, into a kind of composition that would become
unmoored from the motif and turn in circles. A nursery-school drawing
is always right. It may, to my taste, lack elegance or, on the contrary,
I might find in it an amazing grace. But it is never chic, fabricated.
It never smacks of the “artist’s mannequin,” as used
to be said at the Fine Arts School, referring to the small wooden figures
artists use as models.
From this early age,
I also learn about the incredible power of the plastic means available
to a painter. Whoever has a young child in his company cannot despair
“that it’s all been done.” One can certainly feel
inhibited by the blank page, but the presence of a small child reminds
you that the block always comes from you and not from these means that
for several tens of thousands of years have allowed people to say everything.(1)
Last but not least, it seems to me that what the very young show me
is how to paint outside what I have previously called “models.”
This is a delicate question, for of course, once one is an adult, no
one—not even a madman, under the influence of drugs or alcohol—can
truly claim to undo entirely what he has learned. Paul Klee wanted to
include, in the catalogue of his work, his children’s drawings
and to exclude his years of apprenticeship. His will to do so was more
an act of faith than of realism. It is because children do not know
what a tree or a face must be that they are so well disposed to catch
an expression or grasp the force of germinating plant life. For my part,
these drawings remind me that the important thing—that is, the
depiction of an emotion, of the “sensation” of which Paul
Cézanne spoke—depends not on my capacity to think the form,
not on my technique.
It seems to me that, with these drawings of young children, as well
as, moreover, with those of the mentally ill, the works of early cultures,
and so on, the twentieth century never ceased in its quest to go back
to this initial state of emotion. Subsequent education incontestably
enriches it, but at the price of a near-total erasure of this state
of grace we suffer as the loss of a paradise lost. I do not know why
present-day art has for so many years been in worship of origins and
has thus bathed in a neoprimitive atmosphere. Moreover, it is highly
unlikely that the explanation would interest me. Nevertheless, I feel
this historical determinism strongly when it weighs on my tastes, and
I believe that our interest in children’s works is tied thereto.
From the second age
of childhood, the one marked by the learning of models and by clumsiness,
I retain especially the aesthetic value of clumsiness. Each time a child
becomes bogged down trying, for example, to represent a table in perspective,
he produces a gap [un écart] of which I can make use
in order to free myself from the power of a typical representation that
for me it is always a matter of criticizing and of trying to revitalize.
It is thanks to the works of educators and artists that this impotence
of the child before the model can now be read as a felix
culpa.(2) Even when it is uninteresting from the plastic standpoint,
it offers an endearing human value, even a poetic force.
Work in Regress(3)
Although the history
of the relationship between children’s drawing and twentieth-century
art has barely been sketched out, the statements and references of artists
who underscore the importance of children’s works in the development
of their art are beyond count. It seems to me that, at this dawn of
the twenty-first century, the glorification of youth and the privileging
of innovation over experience are based in part on this frenzied quest
for the original, for the primary, for the authentic, which is the guiding
thread that weaves art and children’s art together. Pop art marks,
for me, the moment when interest in childhood passed from the status
of stimulus to that of gimmick. In a few decades’ time, the reference
to childhood acquired a cultural legitimacy of its own. In most cases,
I think, children’s approach to the plastic arts ceased to be
the occasion for a reflection on means in order to serve simply as tools
used to subvert the values of bourgeois high culture. The appearance
of motifs borrowed from comic books, cartoons, and adolescent movies
was made possible because, in the Sixties, the idea that youth could
be a regenerating alternative value was making its way. Since then,
we have started to act like children, as others made like madmen, idiots,
primitives, and so on. After having been revolutionary in the first
half of the nineteenth century, Bohemia has become regressive ! I did
it in my time, and I don’t regret it. But I took the time to glimpse
that these poses were limiting the range of my means and shrinking the
horizon of the subjects likely to interest me. The passage through what
has become a rhetoric of childhood henceforth has meaning only for its
subversive value. But, here again, is it because with age one becomes
blasé or else by weariness of the “subversion-subsidy”
pair dear to Rainer Rochlitz that subversion now bores me if it does
not enlarge my capacity to apprehend the world ?
I wish to retain of children’s art only that which can enrich
my means of plastic expression. I remain rather circumspect about neoprimitivism
and its regressive tendencies. Having had the opportunity to be the
father of young children, my interest in these types of works has been
renewed outright, and the stakes are now doubled. It is a matter all
at once of seeing, of understanding, and, upon occasion, of “stealing”
what might be useful to me, but, especially, of reacting to it by transmitting
at the right moment those models, those means, that will arouse ever
greater desires to understand the beauty of the world. This is my role
as a father, but it is also, I believe, the role of every painter, so
much does it seem to me that, once past the early age of childhood,
learning and transmitting are but one.
Of course, children’s drawing is rich with lessons, but our marveling
at such works should not lead us to abandon the duty to transmit this
experience of drawing and painting. It is a precious, incredibly diverse,
and not at all academic inheritance that is at stake here, the study
of which is emancipatory and in many regards disinhibiting for the child
or for the inquisitive adult who wishes to see and to communicate. The
idea that today children’s drawing might become an authorization
to regress toward graphical and pictural monomanias therefore upsets
me a bit.
Notes
1.
I very much like the following phrase Antoine Coypel spoke when talking
about painting: “Everything is within its province, be it on the
earth, on the water, or in the air.” I often remind myself of
this statement when I am experiencing doubts. The phrase may be found
in his Discours sur la peinture (1721), in Les Conférences
de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIIe
siècle, ed. Alain Mérot (Paris: École Nationale
Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2003), p. 417.
2. See, on this topic, the article by Emmanuel Pernoud,
“Zigzag: l’arabesque ratée,” in the volume
I edited that is entitled La maladresse, une faute heureuse
(Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2003), pp. 44-57.
3. This formula comes from Werner Hoffmann, quoted
by Emmanuel Pernoud in L’invention du dessin d’enfant,
p. 91.