Child Art

"The words sound wrong, somehow, like 'baking ices', 'polishing mud' or 'sliced lemonade'. This was the way Roger Fry started the text on Teaching Art. 'Art Teachers' seemed to sound also wrong, and yet, he vented, large amounts of money were being spent in 'breeding' the type. "What has been overlooked is the fact that Art cannot, properly speaking, be taught at all". The canons, the conventions, and historical facts could be taught, but "one cannot teach a thing which does not exist". The text argues against the possibility of teaching the intuitive powers of creation.

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.

Marion Richardson was an English art teacher whose work became well-known close to the names of Franz Cizek or Victor Lowenfeld. In the United Kingdom, Roger Fry often referred to the importance of Marion Richardson's work at the Dudley High School for progressive arts education practices, as Richardson refers to Fry's Omega Workshops. This book contains the memories of Richardson as a teacher and her views on child art. Richardson believed children were creative and had to be taught to trust their inner eye.

Katherine Ball was the Director of art in public schools in San Francisco. In this article, the naturalization of the child as an artist is evidenced, but not a given. The value of arts education was not to produce artists but rather "to give a training designed to develop the faculties of observation, imagination and graphic expression".

We highlight some of the passages in the text:

This book was published in 1936 by Wilhelm Viola and contains a forward by R. R. Tomlinson, author of the book Children as Artists. Viola was one of the voices that most spread Cizek's work in the English-speaking world. In this book, he began by explaining what could be understood by child art. 

This exhibition, 'Month of Children and Madmen', was organized in 1933 by Osório César and Flávio de Carvalho at the Club of Modern Art in São Paulo, Brazil. In an article published in the magazine Rumo, Flávio de Carvalho stated that "children's drawings, when teachers do not stupidly control them, have an importance that we still do not know in all its scope. They bring to our reflection the force of the primitive man [...]. The drawings of mad persons give us the path to find the genesis of the torture that shakes the soul of the insane.

R.R. Tomlinson was a Senior Inspector of Art to the London County Council. The book was published in 1947, and the author starts by saying that the book's title would have been facetious one generation ago. He was referring to how most adults, even art educators, would have received children’s drawings and paints.

The Juvenile Art Classes opened in 1897 in Austria and lasted until the 1930s. The program of the classes was: "Let the children grow, develop and mature". Through William Viola's books on Cizek's methods, we learn about his practices and praise of what he considered the natural creative child. Just for the 'slogan' of the classes, we can see how the gardening practices of education informed his thought. Cizek was a traveling author through the works of art educators like Marion Richardson, R. R. Tomlinson, and Herbert Read.

Edward Wiebé was a German Music teacher that went to the United States to teach at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Wiebé was one of the introducers of Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten theories in the United States. This book was published by Milton Bradley which was a company that produced school material and games. The book was a practical guide through Froebel's Gifts and Occupations.The book was reprinted several times and the 1910 edition Part I comprises a text on the kindergarten of To-day, by Jenny Merrill.