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The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the Modern Artist, by Jonathon
Fineberg, Princeton University Press, 1997. 249 Pages.
ABSTRACT:
divine child that 20th century depth psychology traced into the collective
being in myth and dream announces to the adult searcher the advent of a
children whose art Jonathon Fineberg reproduces in The Innocent Eye are of
flesh and blood, but the images they produce evoke--at least for the artists
Fineberg does not mention the divine child, but the latter has been
millenarian Ellen Karolina Sofia Key dubbed "the century of the child." "The
time will come," she wrote in her best selling book of that name in 1909, "in
which the child will be looked upon as holy."2 The Innocent Eye surveys the
century from its other end. If we follow Fineberg's implicit account of the
sacralization of childhood in our time, it might appear that Key chose the
right word but the wrong sense. Her holy child represented an odd mixture
(23)
Even as Key's manifesto went to print, the veils which the European
bourgeoisie had thrown over the instinctual abyss were being rent by what
Max Weber called "the revenge of the animalic."3 Rather than a prophet of
genetic purity, innocence and social solidarity, the child came, as the
repressed. She shared this dubious privilege with the madman and the
"primitive"--the very genetic riffraff Key was wondering aloud how to breed
out of the race. This child is an enemy within the gates of a civilization
one point as "the rigor mortis of its cultural hierarchies." (11) A pyrrhic
enemy in a sense, for unlike the psychotic, she will be conquered gradually,
that as one child falls to the onset of adulthood, another is born. Fineberg
Although Fineberg doesn’t mention it, the child has a long history of
is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. It's bones are soft, its
muscles are weak, but its grip is powerful."4 In ancient Athens, a child was
chosen every year to act as intermediary between the initiates and the
which so privileges him, for the gods are marginal too. He represents a limit
condition of the "human," sharing place with other elementals. Thus, the
putti which swarm through Hellenistic and Renaissance art emerge at the
electrically charged intersection of earth and heaven, spirit and flesh,
whether riding dolphins, wrestling with phallic geese, or rolling back the sky,
the numen is not far behind, whether in the form of the Virgin, the naked
goddess or the robed and bearded Father. The doctrine of the liminal child
are not quite human. In Aristotle, they share with women and slaves the
fate of being monsters of a sort, in that they possess the requisite parts of
the soul, but in the wrong proportion. The part in question is the
in the slave; the female has it but without authority; and the child has it but
in incomplete form."7
universal visual language, and Klee compared favorably to his own work—
has a background which he doesn’t reference. The chilid had already been
reborn in the modern imagination during the previous fin de siecle, out of a
1796, at the height of Revolution, as Blake was railing against "Single vision
& Newton's sleep," Schiller identified the child as a prototype of "genius,"
said, "we see eternally that which escapes us, but for which we are
challenged to strive, and which, even if we never attain it, we may still hope
childhood. Only a few years later, it was provided its grand philosophical
The artists Fineberg identifies most centrally with children's art are
the Russian Primitivists, Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter and the Blaue Reiter
circle, Klee, Miro, Picasso, Dubuffet, COBRA (the group of artists from
the extent they cared to talk about it, they could be said to have shared the
quest to be "at home with themselves in their otherness." But one hundred
years later, the stakes had risen. The sublime genius-child of the Romantics
Western life world--calling for something "to set against this machinery, in
Eleusinian mysteries--sent the child ahead of them to meet the gods of the
featured here. But the theme of the return of the repressed--not just to an
Michaux (163). And the artist described as "the pompier of infantile art,"
futurists and Russians of the avant-garde, artists hung children's art next to
their own. Kandinsky and Munter, Klee, Appel and Dubuffet developed
their journal, and collaborated with their own children in certain works.
Klee's iconographic explorations drew, not only on work from his own
childhood, but that of his son Felix, which he mounted and preserved.
Picasso painted and drew with his four children. What attracted them to this
preoccupation with children's art, "both among its defenders and its
children) are still around, and they usually couch their outrage in the
the suspicion of a hoax, but doesn't a priesthood always run that risk? Klee,
Fineberg reports, took up the challenge directly, remarking once that he had
smears. That's fine!" adding "the pictures my little Felix paints are better
than mine" (100). Then there is Picasso's famous mot to Sir Herbert Read,
"When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael. It took me
convey. They seem to trivialize the artist's difficult, life-long struggle for
technical mastery, and propose a notion of artistic development as a
process of letting go, and of rejecting the historical logic of a tradition. The
"our pact with the world" (23). Art begins to resemble spiritual practice,
with all its paradoxes, reversals, and uncommunicable truths. Of the Russian
poets around him were deeply involved with infantilism not merely as a
lexicon of formal devices but for its ability to undermine fixed ideas about
Child art broke into and broke up European artistic convention with a
power equivalent to that with which primitive art did, but it was a slow,
dangerous other, but from the "domesticated noble savage" in the nursery,
in the heart of the culture itself. I would suggest that it was meeting the
Other in post-colonial Europe that prepared adults to meet the Other in their
own children; whatever the case, the time was right. One had only to really
Karel Appel :
started raining down from the sky. On these leaves were children's
drawings, which he gathered up as best he could. He searched for a school
bus or a group of children, but there was no one in sight, and he never did
figure out where they came from. Appel made recourse to this collection of
thereafter. (201)
The pieces of children's art Fineberg has included in this volume, set
alongside the adult art they inspired, have something like the same effect--
the more apparently random, the more meaningful--on the reader who
lingers over them awhile. The "deconditioned" eye allows the image, so
depths of signification which are "surreal" in the sense that their origins are
of the random and the stereotypic, one sees the image in synchronicity:
each item, each color, each apparent deformation is exactly where it should
makes it easier to gaze into the deeper form it is referencing. This is the
way of seeing are wider, according to Fineberg, than just looking at art.
inspired by child and primitive art, drew its further conclusions in his notion
of art brut:
If we came to realize that any object in the world may fascinate and
think, enrich our lives more than the Greek notion of beauty. . . . Art
addresses the mind and not the eyes. That is how it has always been
draw and paint like adults charmed and influenced by the iconography,
coloring, and formal devices of children's art. They work its syntax into their
own style and it transforms it, but something like the way folk melodies
transformed Dvorak. It has not yet caused them to try to forget what they
know. For Larionov and his circle, for example, the symbolic language of
children's art was placed alongside painted shop signs, religious icons,
and entering its spirit "in order to release revelations of the transrational
self" (33), but one need only put a Larionov next to a Miro or a late Picasso
or a Pollock, to see that the deconstructive impulse had not yet fully taken
Kandinsky uses child art as a model and a stimulus for emergent purposes
of his own, for example to reclaim at another level of abstraction the "naive"
narrative iconography of medieval art. In Klee, Picasso, Miro and the COBRA
artists, the dialogue with child art deepens. What began as a new element
The transition point of this shift from integrating elements of child art,
to drawing and painting like (but not as) a child is visible in Klee. Fineberg
reproduces several of his early drawings, from ages four to ten, which the
artist came upon in 1902 while rummaging through his parents' storage,
shortly after his return from four years of artistic "finishing" in Rome. He
wrote his fiancée that he valued these drawings over anything he had done
so far, and at that point his life-long preoccupation with children's art began.
Yet I would suggest that, like Kandinsky, Klee begins by integrating the
30's, nearer the end of his life, that, as Finberg puts it, "his whole style
veers towards childlike directness" (84). And here the almost ominous
which become so insistent in late Picasso and Miro are first sensed.
The adult art Fineberg reproduces from the 30's and 40's begins to
impress on the reader the sense that the innocent eye is uncovering and
jealousy and fascination at the primal scene, or Melanie Klein's infant at the
breast, splitting off the "bad mother" in rage and hatred. This emerging
and his idea of the "childman" who ushers the "revolutionary forces of
spontaneity of the child's style is not just referenced, but entered. It doesn't
the child looking at the face of its mother and seeing only what it sees, i.e.,
not completing the whole face from prior knowledge, the way we learn to.
Picasso, she says, was like the child: "when he saw an eye, the other did not
Miro shows us in yet a different way what it's like for an adult to see
like a child. He was described by a friend in 1929 as walking the street wide-
eyed, like an "amazed child." Later, he prophesied over himself: "I think that
at the end of my life I will recover all the force of my childhood." Actually he
seems to have done even more--he immerses himself in the child's way of
seeing to the point that his work has all the characteristics of child art
images, the use of color with maximum intensity, the use of simultaneous
which Fineberg uses again and again is stripping away, revealing, breaking
the world the way a four-year old sees it? Child art is a function of physical
experience with the materials of art, the symbolic universe of a being who is
and psychological transition, etc. In fact neither Picasso nor Miro draw or
paint "like children" at all--only someone completely unfamiliar with child art
1948. "I start a canvas without a thought of what it may eventually become.
. . . then I take it out and work at it coldly like an artisan, guided strictly by
rules of composition after the first shock of suggestion has cooled" (149). So
doing art like a child seems to have to do with entering what Fineberg calls
boasted, "I have managed to escape into the absolute of nature" (143).
Does he mean the "absolute" of the unity of perception and action, nature
itself acting unmediated? If so, Miro means he has escaped into the
associated pushed beyond the artistic and into the personal and the
and the COBRA group of artists which he quotes. It begins with Dubuffet's
but as oppressive in the classical political sense of that word. What culture
asphyxiates is the vital energy available to the "common people" not just for
art but for life. Because we are intimidated by what a self-serving cadre of
are alienated from our own creativity, which also means the creativity
through which we are creators of our own lives. Fineberg quotes COBRA
"the brakes that cultural norms apply to the natural expression of the forces
of life." What unified the COBRA artists, according to Fineberg, "was their
because it is about what Tillich called "ultimate concern." Art is its vanguard,
artists and psychoanalysts its sacred priesthood, and works of art its icons.
Every child is an honorary prophet of this revolutionary movement, for she
embodies its ideals, and prefigures its goals. The bourgeoisie represents,
like the Pharisees did for Christianity, the enemy of this revolution. By the
turn of the 20th century Nietzsche, Freud and Weber had, at least
symbolically, smashed the idols of the bourgeoisie, and thus set the stage
for the second wave, which surfaced in the first decade. I think it is
significant that it hits its stride, in Fineberg's narrative anyway, in the late
1930's, just when Klee, Picasso and Miro were moving over the dangerous
edge from experimenting with the motifs and conventions of child art to
would "liberate the individual from conventional thinking," and "arouse the
180).
20th century moment which, in retrospect, signaled the end of any real
prospects for the Communist Revolution, and the end of the French
had been dashed--in one by Napoleon, in the other by Hitler and Stalin--and
"Art's most important task," wrote the COBRA artist Constant, is "the
activation of the urge to create" (182). After the revolution, everyone will be
an artist, the artist of his own life. It is through art as a vehicle for
experimentation and discovery that the human species will be able to come
to terms with the world. This human birthright has been robbed from the
sees the "real function" of art as "changing mental patterns, making new
thought possible" (153). In 1947 he and his friends opened the Home for the
the world of the "second innocence," in which the Fall into division is
the end of history. "The rise from history to mystery," says N.O. Brown, a
the body here and now, as an eternal reality; to experience the parousia,
the presence in the present, which is the spirit."13 As M.H. Abrams, one of
its preeminent chroniclers, described it, this new earth and new heaven is
which accomplishes nothing less than the "creation" of a new world. The
grounds his account--the 20th century has proven to be the century of the
child after all, but of Freud's, not Ellen Key's child. Key's child was holy as
repression. The 20th century child of art and psychoanalysis stands for the
polymorphous perverse, for oceanic feeling, for what Blake called the "One
Man," who lives in an expanded mode of vision. This child lives before
either Single Vision or Newton's Sleep, and before morality. She prefigures
desire. In ancient Athens, the child went before the people in the Eleusinian
mysteries to meet the goddess. In the modern West, she goes before the
adult to meet the next dialectical moment in the grand Romantic narrative
the book appears subtly to collapse. Could it be that the specter of what
Marcuse, in 1959, called "repressive desublimation" was already becoming
Obscene? Indeed, what does happen when the lid is lifted from the
sure, delves further yet into primary process, into free childlike scribbling;
he even begins to put on the paint with his hands. I would suggest that he
represents the furthest point of regression for the adult in search of the
wasn't even necessary to talk about it. On its face, this would appear to
signal a victory for the revolution. But then an odd self-consciousness enters
perception) (221-223).
But the innocent eye is before culture, before language, before the
Father; it is the vision of the erotic (and "thanatosic") sense of reality, of
culture which has abandoned nature as a reference point, for which there is
no "raw art." This is perhaps after all not such a giant step, at least for those
conventions of child art make them vehicles for transcendence, so they help
the artist to see through form into the "unspeakable revelation." For the
postmodernists, they are all that's visible; they have no reference except to
what Johns calls "the richness and uncertainty of all visual experience"
(224). Richness perhaps, uncertainty for sure; in this visual universe, surface
perhaps even more ironic--the faintest of suggestions that, at the end of the
century of the child, the child has disappeared. Fineberg mentions the
boom, and "the now common knowledge that childhood perseveres in every
became a part of the visual experience which artists since the 1950's have
taken for granted. The influence of children and their aesthetic sensibilities
in the erosion of the dividing line between adult and child. Does this
represent the success of the Romantic revolution, the shift in the instinctual
economy that will mean the end of history; or does it mean the rise of that
ever was, perhaps further. Perhaps it recedes infinitely. On the other hand,
ENDNOTES
2. Ellen Karolina Sophia Key, The Century of the Child (New York: Arno
3. Quoted in Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage (New York: Grosset &
4. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, trans. (New York: Harper &
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House,
1966), p. 214.