This is a text from a conference given at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris by Ernest Hamy, who was the first director of the Ethnographic Museum of Trocadéro. Hamy's thought dwells on the comparison of children's drawings and 'savage' drawings.
“From the point of view of the arts of drawing, in fact, as from so many other points of view, savages are real children; they draw, they daub, they model like children. And in the absence of the savages themselves, whose aesthetic evolution in space and time we cannot easily follow, it is the children who will inform us, and provide us, from an early age, with the terms of comparison, the most satisfactory and the most close. Let us examine the spontaneous works they perform before our eyes, we will find there all the elements of savage art and, what is more, the series of ages will reproduce the ascending scale of elementary civilizations”.
The affinities that are constructed among children and the 'Other' follow a developmental and stadial sequence in historical development. These affinities are based on the epistemologies of the eye. Not only they are constructed according to the principle of modern science of objectivity as visual evidence, as they construct these visual approximations through the notion of a 'family' of scribbles and shapes. The children's 'childish iconography', says Hamy, can be found among 'primitives and savages'. The way of describing the performances across the age of the child, in terms of their aesthetical equivalents, also obeys to the rationale of development. The early ages are characterised by a lack the capacity to reason properly:
"The child in the state of nature will always refuse, like the primitive, and like the savage, to this figuration which he will only understand later"
The affinities eradicate difference through the codifications mobilized to represent the ‘primitive’ and the child. Both are said to share a stage within the timeline of development and progress, although the 'white' child will continuously move until achieving the time of reason.
CM