When we use ‘primitive’, we should use 'primitive' between commas. This means that the 'primitive' is a construction that differentiates between different kinds of humans through a rationale based on a sense of history as past, present, and future, where those that were so-called 'primitive' were situated as the past of humanity and, thus, as less developed. The term was used, in Western modernity, to classify those that were not European and not 'white'. It is a racist and colonial term that was also mobilized in education and the arts, particularly in the equivalence of the 'child as primitive' and the 'primitive as child'. This equivalence was made possible through certain affinities created as evidence between the visual production of children and those depicted in the colonies as 'primitive'. It is also part of the binary system 'primitive or savage' and civilized.
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.
James Sully was an English psychologist of the Child Study Movement. This book results from articles and essays published before 1895 in magazines. Sully starts to recognize his debt to some scholars who put the study of the child on the agenda of psycho-education, like William Preyer. He also thanks General Pitt Rivers and H. Balfour of the Museum of Oxford for making possible "studying the drawings of savages" and to the art educator Ebenezer Cooke for his help on children's modes of drawing.
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.
First published in 1943, Education through Art by Herbert Read is still considered one of the urtexts of arts education today. The text was translated into several languages and influenced arts education practices in many contexts.
