This text from the English art critic Roger Fry was published in 1917 in Burlington Magazine to publicize the exhibition at the Omega Workshops. Fry draws the equivalence of the child with the so-called 'primitive' and the loss of those qualities by the 'civilized' child once submitted to schooling practices. He argued that no modern adult could retain the "freshness of vision, the surprise, and shock, the intimacy and sharpness of notation, the imprévu quality of primitive art." In the following fragments, the reader can access the colonialities made through Fry's words in praising a state of nature, which was the apology of the 'noble savage.' He also gives notice of the work of the art educator Marion Richardson and her method of creating an 'inner' eye inside each child's mind.
"Indeed, children's art, like that of primitive races, the modern negro, for instance, is singularly at the mercy of outside influences. Native races produce almost unconsciously the most beautiful and tasteful work will throw them aside to make bad copies of the vilest products of modern European industrialism, so little does their work result from any clear self-conscious principle. [...] Miss Richardson has discovered a method of stimulating the individual perceptions and inventiveness of her pupils without ever imposing on them any artistic formula. The result is that her pupils, who criticize and discuss each other's work, have gradually developed a style of their own somewhat in the way in which some small Italian town in the 15th century developed a common characteristic manner. Miss Richardson's chief effort seems to be to train the children's power of fixing mental images and trusting them implicitly so that their drawings are almost literal renderings of inner visions. [...] the quantity and quality of the inventive design revealed in this one school is so surprising that I cannot doubt that if children were stimulated to create instead of being inhibited by instruction, we should no longer need to complain as we do today of the want of creative imagination."
CM
text from Roger Fry published in 1917 at the Burlington Magazine (June 1917) to publicize the exhibition at the Omega Workshops.
"When I say that children's drawings are genuine examples of primitive art I must be allowed to use the word primitive in a rather more precise and narrow sense than is usually done. By primitive is usually meant that phase in the artistic sequence of a civilisation which precedes the phase of more or less complete power of representation. [...] I should like for the time being to apply the word primitive not so much to a period in time as to a particular psychological attitude which occurs most frequently in those periods we call primitive, but which is not universal in these periods." (p. 267)
"[...] no modern adult can retain the freshness of vision, the surprise and shock, the intimacy and // sharpness of notation, the imprévu quality of primitive art. And it is just here that untaught children have an enormous superiority" (pp. 267, 268)
"Indeed children art, like that of primitive races, the modern negro for instance, is singularly at the mercy of outside influences. Native races produce almost unconsciously the most beautiful and tasteful work will throw them aside to make bad copies of the vilest products of modern European // industrialism, so little does their work result from any clear self-conscious principle" (pp. 268, 269)
"Miss Richardson has discovered a method of stimulating the individual perceptions and inventiveness of her pupils without ever imposing on them any artistic formula. The result is that her pupils, who criticize and discuss each other's work, have gradually developed a style of their own somewhat in the way in which some small Italian town in the 15th century developed a common characteristic manner. Miss Richardson's chief effort seems to be train the children's power of fixing mental images and trusting to them implicitly so that their drawings are // almost literal renderings of inner visions." (pp. 269, 270)
"[...] the quantity and quality of the inventive design revealed in this one school is so surprising that I cannot doubt that if children were stimulated to create instead of being inhibited by instruction we should no longer need to complain as we do to-day of the want of creative imagination" (p. 270)