From the 1870s onwards, children’s drawings started to be systematically collected and analyzed by child psychologists to study the child’s mental growth process. Drawing as an instrument to study the child’s mind soon created an equivalence between what the child was (the drawings mirroring her mental processes) and what she should become. By the end of the 19th century, Corrado Ricci, in Italy, collected more than one thousand drawings. In England, James Sully conducted extensive inquiries to enhance a theory of children’s drawing through a staged approach. In 1893, Earl Barnes made a study based on 6393 drawings of children. In 1906, Lamprecht, in Germany, coordinated a study involving several countries (Belgium, Sweden, Italy, England, Russia, Japan, India, African countries, and the United States) that gave rise to thousands of drawings. Edouard Claparéde, in Switzerland, was another pedagogue that analyzed the drawings of approximately 3,000 pupils. In Brazil, Mário de Andrade collected more than 2000 drawings of children.
Collecting children’s drawings spread as a practice for studying the child while it also created a visual grammar of what was child art and how the child developed through drawing stages. At the beginning of the 20th century, to count, measure, and find patterns and laws in the child’s development through drawing was a demand for the scientification of the child (Martins, 2018). It was not rare, by the end of the articles or in books, to invite the readers to send to the author more drawings of children. In Germany, on the occasion of the publication of Levinstein’s book Kind als Künstler, Karl Lamprecht made the same ask and provided a detailed framework for the exercises. The announcement appeared in the last pages of the book. It was explained that child-study was able to “help materially in making comparative studies in the history of civilization of the various races of man”, and therefore it was necessary “to collect, study and preserve great quantities of material, that will make it possible to study the mental development of children” (Levinstein, 1905, p. XI). The psychologist intended to collect drawings from all over the world, “whether the children be black, white or brown, so as to make a huge comparative study” (Levinstein, 1905, p. XI). Lamprecht promised the readers that this task would prove the most exciting and useful for their work. The exercise was prescribed as follows:
“1. Wherever possible, each drawing should be on a separate piece of paper.
2. Each paper should have the name, age and sex of the child marked in the left-hand top-corner. If possible the position or trade of its father and a general remark on the child’s mental abilities.
3. Let children draw with whatever they like, pencil, crayons, watercolors, ink, or anything else.
4. Send in all the pictures drawn, good, bad, and indifferent. The worst are often the most instructive, and this is in no sense a test of the children’s ability to draw as seen from the artist’s point of view.
5. Careful notes should be made on the back of drawings in every case where the drawing does not explain itself.
6. Every parcel of drawings should be accompanied by a note saying whether the drawings were from memory or whether there was a model. Also by what system children are taught drawing and whether they are accustomed to draw during object lessons or not” (Levinstein, 1905, p. XII)
Following these instructions, Lamprecht designed four groups of exercises: spontaneous drawings, special drawings, biological series drawings, and drawings of adults. The ‘child-as-primitive’ and the construction of visual affinities between children’s drawings and those of racialized persons made it possible to compare the ‘white’ child with the racialized ‘Others’. In this last group, he specified he was waiting for drawings done by “adult Negroes, Indians, Eskimos, South Sea Islanders and so forth” (Levinstein, 1905, p. XIV). The ways that framed how data was being collected, classified, and represented, as well as the parameters that allowed the comparison between the western children and the non-western adults, were not neutral. Under the objectivity of the scientific lens, drawing was being constructed as a colonial tool to make and differentiate different kinds of people and hierarchies among them.
CM
explain or not the cutting of the words?