Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism, and Modernism

This book brings together thirteen distinguished critics and scholars to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented influence on the evolution of modern art. The volume complements editor Jonathan Fineberg's groundbreaking book. The Innocent Eye (Princeton, 1997), in which he showed how many of the greatest masters of modern art collected and were directly influenced by children's drawings. Contributors to the book are Troels Andersen, Rudolf Amheim. John Carlin, Marcel Franciscono. E.H. Gombrich, Christopher Green, Josef Helfenstein, Werner Hofmann, Yuri Molok G. G. Pospelov, Richard Shiff, Dora Vallier, and Barbara Worwag.

Table of Contents:
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsForewordThe Art of Unlearning3Beginning with the Child15Viollet-le-Duc's Histoire d'un dessinateur27Larionov and Children's Drawings40Children's Drawing in Russian Futurism55"There Is an Unconscious, Vast Power in the Child": Notes on Kandinsky, Munter and Children's Drawings68Paul Klee and Children's Art95The Issue of Childhood in Klee's Late Work122From Primitivist Phylogeny to Formalist Ontogeny: Roger Fry and Children's Drawings157Miro and Children's Drawings201The Infant in the Adult: Joan Miro and the Infantile Image210Magic Figures: Jorn, Cobra and Children's Drawings235From Wonder to Blunder: The Child Is Mother to the Man242Notes on the Contributors263Index265

About the Author :
Jonathan Fineberg is Professor of Art History and University Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has won the Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing and the Art Critic's Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts. Fineberg has curated major exhibitions in the United States and Europe and has published widely on modern art. His most recent books are The Innocent Eye (Princeton) and Art since 1940: Strategies of Being.

Review :
"The breadth of the contributions, the eminence of the authors, and the new perspectives brought to light help clarify dramatically the seminal role children's art played in paintings, drawing, and aesthetic theories of many of this century's most innovative artists." - Steven Monsbach, Pratt Institute "The premise that many of the great masters of twentieth-century art collected children's drawings in depth, and that these drawings directly influenced some of their most celebrated works, is extended and explored [in Discovering Child Art] by a diverse group of museum directors and curators, art historians, psychologists, philosophers, and critics.... This book is recommended for both art history and art education university resource sheives." - Kent Anderson, School Arts"