At the turn of the 19th century, the graphic productions of children started to be looked at as 'art' by modern educators and artists. The category was made possible through the equivalences between the child and the so-called 'primitive' and the child and the artist. The Othering of the child as the Othering of the non-European was an exoticizing gesture of the modernity/coloniality matrix of power (Quijano). Children's drawings started to be collected and put side by side with the works of modern white male artists, such as Picasso, Klee, Kokoschka, Matisse, Dubuffet, etc. Within arts education discourses, the term child art, which is generally attributed to Franz Cizek, appears connected to the principle of free expression.
The book from Wilhelm Viola is about the art education methods of the Austrian Franz Cizek. It starts with the history of ‘child art’ as being the history of the discovery of the child “as a human being with his own personality and his own particular laws”, and the importance of Cizek in perceiving the child’s nature.
