Children's Art and Child Art Movement

Summary of Children's Art and Child Art Movement

Art that deals with the subject of children and childhood dates back to the period of classical antiquity. But while representations of children would become less idealized, and increasingly more human, Child Art - that is, art produced by children - only started to attract the serious attention of artists and academics in the late nineteenth century. Newly admired for their open honesty and spontaneity, the artworks of young children and early adolescents provided inspiration for those avant-garde artists seeking out new ways to distance themselves from what they saw as the restrictive standards placed on them by the arts establishment. In the critical/academic sphere, meanwhile, Child Art has become recognized as a bona-fide genre with a steady rise in dedicated Child Art collections and exhibition spaces. The idea, too, that school-aged children should be encouraged to expresses themselves as they see fit, rather than be taught to mimic the art of their elders, has become a cornerstone of progressive primary and secondary school arts education.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• It is generally agreed that the first pioneer of the Child Art movement was the Austrian artist and educator, Franz Cižek. It was he who saw the innate potential within child artists and set about reversing, through his famous Juvenile Art Class (Jugendkunstklasse), the narrow field of aesthetic value credited hitherto to children's art (by adults).
• Children's art can provide unique (and easily forgotten or overlooked) glimpses into history. Art produced by German schoolchildren during World War I lay bare the patriotic fervor passed down to them by their art teachers, while works produced by Jewish children during the Holocaust give us a unique psychological perspective of the terrible conditions they were forced to endure under the Nazis.
• Children's art made a significant impact on a number of modern artists and movements. Individuals such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, and the CoBrA avant-garde movement, have all (to varying degrees of intensity) looked to children's art for inspiration. For these artists, Child Art offered a glimpse of an elementary worldview; that is, a pure outlook unencumbered by intellectual and institutional conditioning.
• The second half of the twentieth century saw the establishment of museums dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of Child Art, such as the Children's Museum of the Arts (CMA) in New York City which is home to a permanent collection of children's art gathered across fifty countries over more than a century. Additionally, museums such as the CMA and other collectors of Child Art are faced with the unique challenge of preserving works made on or with ephemeral materials that were never intended for posterity.

Overview of Children's Art and Child Art Movement

Progression of Art

Beginnings of Children's Art and Child Art Movement

The Juvenile Art Class (Jugendkunstklasse)

While living in Vienna, the painter Franz Cižek rented a room from a local family and invited their children to visit his studio where he encouraged them to take full advantage of his art supplies. The results had a profound impact on the artist. Cižek shared his observations with his colleagues in the German Secessionist movement (including Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, J. M. Olbrick, and Koloman Moser) and with their blessings, he effectively initiated the first Child Art Movement. In 1887, Cižek started teaching a free art class - known as the Juvenile Art Class (Jugendkunstklasse) - to children aged five to fourteen. He urged his young students to create their own visual styles, free, for the best part, from adult interference. As the historian Adam Zucker put it, "[Cižek's] teaching eschewed prior traditional methods of art education focusing on rote learning and drawing from diagrams, as these methods were mimicry of adult artistic conventions".

Cižek's guiding philosophy (to encourage and facilitate his pupils' unbridled creativity) was simple, yet highly influential. Indeed, Cižek's ability to balance a limited and loosely structured instructional program of self-discovery, coupled with his insistence that his pupils' artworks should be afforded a level of respect hitherto reserved only for work of adult artists, would inspire numerous progressive art educational models (many of which are still practiced today). Such was Cižek's vision, his ethos would carry across continental borders. The initial expansion was due in no small part to the efforts of two of his former students, Erika Giovanna Klien and Emmy Lichtwitz Krasso. During the 1930s, Klien introduced Cižek's methodology through her art classes at several New York schools, including Stuyvesant High School, Spence School, Dalton School, and Walt Whitman High School. Krasso, meanwhile, taught art education to children in Mumbai, India and helped embed Cižek's pedagogy into the national curriculum.

Ellen Karolina Sofia Key and The Century of the Child

A dynamic figure in the advancement of child art education was the Swedish writer Ellen Karolina Sofia Key. She was a radical writer whose views on family and cultural life, and on modern morality generally, were hugely influential. Her book The Century of the Child (1900) was translated into many languages and brought her international fame. Historian Carolyn Kay writes, "When Key wrote The Century of the Child [...] she attacked child experts who viewed children as bad creatures, needing reform and excessive discipline; as she put it, such experts 'continue to educate as if they still believed in the natural depravity of man, in original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, and suppressed' and who worked 'to suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant it with another personality'". Key argued that each child should be allowed to develop naturally, at their own pace, and encouraged them to express themselves (through art and other means) only as they themselves saw fit.

Key's ethos on child-driven learning would become part of the orthodoxy of Child Art throughout the whole of the twentieth century. Indeed, a famous educational model, known as Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB), based on Key's original ideas, was launched in Massachusetts during the 1970s by elementary school art educators Katherine Douglas, John Crowe, Diane Jaquith, and Pauline Joseph. They promoted student-initiated learning in traditional classroom settings. Rather than the more pedantic passage of information between the teacher and student, TAB educators set up their classrooms in a way that facilitated independent and collaborative child learning. Children were therefore given the choice in how they wanted to approach a particular project or a preferred subject. TAB educators provide additional scaffolding if students need support or guidance, but the primary goal was for children to lead themselves through explorative and experimental processes. Indeed, in the TAB method, children are already assumed to be artists and are therefore justifiably guided by their personal interests and inquiries.

Children's Art Exhibitions

Confirmation that Child Art was gaining credibility showed itself in the organization of a steady number of prestigious public exhibitions. As early as 1890 the English artist and educator Thomas Robert Ablett helped launch The Royal Drawing Society's Child Art exhibition (an event that would run annually for near on a century). In 1908, Klimt and other members of the Viennese avant-garde organized the Kunstschau Wien art and craft exhibition. One of scores of events to mark the sixty-year reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I, the exhibition promoted the best of Viennese modernity and devoted a whole gallery to works produced by Cižek's Juvenile Art Class. Later, in 1920, the British educator and refugee relief worker Francesca Wilson met Cižek and organized an exhibition of work by the Juvenile Art Class at the British Institute of Industrial Art in Kingsbridge, England. Wilson co-organized the exhibition with Reverend Bertram Hawker who was working with the newly established Save the Children Fund (better known simply as Save the Children). Save the Children would go on to sponsor the exhibition's tour across the United Kingdom and United States.

Meanwhile, the influential artist, critic, and general "tastemaker" Roger Fry was active in promoting the work of English educator and author Marion Richardson. She had been pioneering a teaching method that prompted her pupils to visually interpret objects, places, and experiences in ways that were unique to each child's lived experience. Fry, a key member of the radical Bloomsbury Group (its members promoted utilitarian and socially engaged values in the art and literature), helped organize several London exhibitions in which Richardson's students' work was shown. Richardson was also active in organizing her own students' exhibition. Indeed, her showcase toured throughout Western Europe and Russia to great acclaim between 1923 and 1924. Other developments followed, including the Scholastic Art and Writing Award in the United States, which was established in 1924 and included an annual exhibition of work by awardees aged thirteen and up. One especially notable exhibition was held in 1931 at a gallery owned by a renowned English art patron named Lucy Wertheim. As a consultant to the British Council, and later as the Chair of Society for Education through Art, meanwhile, Nan Youngman developed the "Pictures for Schools" art patronage scheme and organized the inaugural Pictures for Schools exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1947.

Collecting Children's Art

A prominent early collector of children's art was an American nursery school teacher/director and child psychologist, named Rhoda Kellogg. Born at the turn of the century, she amassed a collection of over one million children's drawings during her lifetime. In 1967, she published a collection of some 8,000 drawings by children aged between twenty to forty months. Arts critic Theodora Walsh says of the publication, "Kellogg assembled her collection with scientific fervor. As the director of Phoebe Hearst Preschool from 1966 until her death in 1989, she took home thousands of drawings. She diversified her sample by traveling internationally and soliciting work from other teachers. [...] Where most people might have seen nothing, Kellogg saw a physiognomy of abstraction. She catalogued the 20 or more hand techniques children use to spread paint and create texture, among them 'hand twirl' and 'whole palm spread.' It's a dadaist taxonomy of smudges". Over half of Kellogg's collection is now held at the Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association in San Francisco.

In 1988, an artist named Kathleen Schneider effectively took over Kellogg's legacy when she founded the Children's Museum of the Arts (CMA) in New York City. The museum's mission is to "create and share ambitious works of art with their communities and the world". Exhibitions organized at the CMA typically involve works by children artists and emerging and established adult artists. Professional artists also serve as artists-in-residence at the museum where they engage with children visitors as both educators and collaborators. In addition to a roving program of exhibitions and art classes, the museum is also home to a permanent collection of more than 2,000 children's works of art representing more than fifty countries (the earliest works in the collection dating back nearly a century). In 2020, the museum hired Seth Cameron, an artist who founded the artist collective Bruce High Quality Foundation. Under Cameron's direction the museum launched The Look Make Show, the first digital commons specifically designed for child-artist-centered learning. The importance of museums such as the CMA was stressed by Paul Morrow, Human Rights Fellow and curator, who writes "There are significant challenges to preserving the drawings and paintings young people produce. First, children's art is materially unstable. It is often made on paper, with crayons, markers and other ephemeral media. This makes it dangerous to display originals and demands care in the production of facsimiles".

Child Art and War Propaganda

Carolyn Kay's interest in Ellen Key's book, The Century of the Child, was the starting point for her study of the art of German schoolchildren between the age of ten and fourteen during World War I. Her analysis focused on over 250 school drawings made by children in a school in Wilhelmsburg, near Hamburg. Kay writes, "When the war broke out in 1914, German education was in a state of flux. Child educators in early 20th-century Germany were split into two main camps of traditional disciplinarians and progressive child advocates. This was the era of generational conflict - of the Youth Movement or Wandervogel - which extolled nature and embraced ideas of independence, the spiritual regeneration of German society, and the superiority of youth. New authors on child-rearing urged parents to dispense with physical punishment and to allow their children to develop freely, respecting and nurturing the child's inherent or natural qualities. [...] We can see these emerging ideas in the arts education reform movement, called the Kunsterziehungsbewegung. This pedagogical approach to art was part of the new wave of German education at the fin-de-siècle and it was centered in the cities of Hamburg, Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, Darmstadt, and Jena".

However, Kay observes that in the primary schools of Germany, children of all social classes fell under the influence of passionately patriotic art teachers. This resulted in child drawings that focused exclusively on the "heroic" German war effort. Writes Kay, "boys and girls created drawings of Germany's soldiers, sailors, nurses, and the new wartime technology, celebrating the war as exciting and winnable. The children drew bodies of German soldiers as tough, heroic, on the move, armed with powerful weapons, and part of a superior military movement; their enemies (French, Russian and British soldiers and sailors) embodied disorder, backwardness, ineptitude, and deadly weakness. The artwork by these schoolchildren reveals the intense propaganda of the war years and the children's tendency to see the German military as the most accomplished combatant in the war". These schoolchildren suffered serious hunger and depravation, and more that 600,000 lost their fathers to the war. Yet despite these terrible circumstances, as Kay observes, "there is plenty of evidence to show that German boys and girls were thrilled by what they saw as the adventure of the war and that many continued to support the war cause until the very end of hostilities in 1918".

Children's Art and the Holocaust

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington D.C. is home to a number of surviving artworks (and diaries) that document the experiences of Jewish children who lived under Nazi occupation. USHMM notes that the artifacts are "infused with despair, anger, or more rarely, hope". Some of the artworks had been created by children passing as non-Jews; others by children in hiding who drew or painted from memory or from daily life witnessed secretly while in hiding. But probably the most powerful single corpus of child holocaust art is on display at Prague's Jewish Museum. Theresienstadt was a ghetto/transit camp situated in town of Terezin in northern Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). The camp held an estimated 140,000 Jews, 15,000 of which were children. Adults did everything in their power to shield the children from the realities of this horrific situation. Part of this plan was to run child art classes, many of which were organized by the Austrian artist Frederika "Friedl" Dicker-Brandeis. A former student of Cižek's, Friedl joined the faculty at the Weimar Bauhaus School (in Germany) in 1919 before establishing a successful design studio in Berlin (which ran between 1923-26). Friedl then moved into a career in training Kindergarten teachers, placing heavy stress on the importance of integrating art into the wider curriculum. Friedl's left-leaning political activism led to her arrest in 1934, and after a short period of incarceration, she relocated to Prague, where she lived and worked in relative freedom until the establishment of anti-Jewish laws in 1939.

The persecution of the Jewish community in Prague saw Friedl deported to the Terezin ghetto in 1942. Smuggling scarce art supplies into the ghetto, she taught child art classes in an effort, in her words, "to rouse the desire towards creative work, to make it a habit, and to teach how to [use art to] overcome difficulties". As Elena Makarova of the Jewish Women's Archive explains, "In the summer of 1943, at a teachers' seminar in the camp, she lectured on 'Children's Drawing,' stressing the meaning and the purpose of their art, which she saw as the 'greatest possible freedom for the child.' The children were greatly influenced by her. Survivors say that she was 'the mystery of beauty,' 'the mystery of freedom.' [...] On October 6, 1944, Friedl was deported to Auschwitz together with some of her students (transport EO-167) and gassed". After each of her classes, Friedl would instruct one student to gather up the artworks and hide them (behind painted drapes) in her tiny closet space in the ghetto barracks. After the war, over five thousand of the hidden works were retrieved, with most passed on to the Jewish Museum in Prague. In what would become a most poignant footnote, Friedl had insisted that each child should sign their drawings in order their work wouldn't become anonymous or their names ever forgotten. (The USHMM estimates that ninety percent of the Theresienstadt children would perish in Nazi death camps.)

Concepts and Styles

“Free Arm Drawing”

Before the late 1890s, Child Art tended towards pedantic instruction and consisted of copying pre-existing imagery. While these methods were (and remain) important for children to understand spatial and compositional relationships, and to help them make associations between abstract forms and the natural environment, there was scant understanding of how children develop visual schemata of their own. The benefits of self-expression in the overall educational model were still in a nascent phase. An early innovator in changing these attitudes was the English draughtsman and education reformer, Ebenezer Cooke. A one-time student at John Ruskin's Christian Socialists' Working Men's College drawing classes, Cooke had been schooled in Ruskin's "innocence of the eye" principle that called for a rejection of outline in favor of a more "natural" drawing that could be achieved "by means of shade alone" (espoused by Ruskin in his influential 1857 book, The Elements of Drawing). Cooke, however, proposed a counter argument that he traced back to Child Art through his so-called "J" principle. For Cooke the "J" shape was symbolic of the child's first steps away from infantile scribblings towards distinct (and typically decorative) lines and curves (the outline of the letter "J" succinctly representing the curvature of the line).

Commenting on Cooke's "J" element, art historians Donata Levi and Paul Tucker write, "Several pedagogical principles were at stake. [One] regarded the free and natural action of the hand, swinging, from the shoulder, as opposed to the cramping discipline of passively copying ready-made models of accuracy. [Another] emphasized the importance of encouraging and guiding the natural process of drawing from knowledge and imagination", Indeed, it was Cooke's emphasis on these elements that most diverged from Ruskin's "Innocence of the Eye" ethos. As Levi and Tucker write, "The primal 'J' element further provided the key that brought together under one law of formal development the child's progression [and] the general ovate forms of nature in different stages of growth and evolution". In his thesis, "Neglected Elements" (1888-90), Cooke himself wrote, "The forms of animal and ornament [in] early Greek art, like those in nature, are ovate [in the way they] follow the same order; fish, bird, animal man. The Greek decorator had the child's conception; and free handling; to this, to interest, invention, pliant instrument and plastic material he is indebted for his decoration. He has perfected those scribbles of the 'naughty boy', has shown what is in them, but not exhausted them".

Psychological “Stages” in Child Art

In 1887, the Italian archaeologist and art historian Corrado Ricci released L'arte dei bambini, thought to be the first published study of Child Art. In the book (featuring around fifty illustrations), Ricci explored the psychology of children's drawing, its history, and its connections to folk art and primitive art. Art history professor Tuuli Lähdesmäki (et al), writes "[Ricci] analyzed child art, which he found crude and inaccurate, but [still] striving for a sort of 'literal completeness'". Writing soon after in The Art of Little Children (1895), the American teacher/educator Earl Barnes (who in acknowledging the influence of Ricci's study on his own research feared it might "lay me open to the charge of gross plagiarism"), took Ricci's ideas a step further when he argued that children's art deserved to be treated as a language that expressed many uniquely "childish" attributes. Moving into the early twentieth century, a number of researchers built on these publications and evaluated children's drawings from a holistic - artistic, educational, and psychological - point of view. As Lähdesmäki observes, "Most of these studies instrumentalized children's drawings and saw them as expressions of artistic or cognitive development, or, as a means to discover mental issues".

The concept of "stages" in children's artistic development was advanced around the mid-twentieth century by Viktor Lowenfeld, an Austrian-born professor of art education who had studied at the College of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He had been a student of Cižek's and had observed several sessions of the Juvenile Art Class. Lowenfeld's theories and methodologies for teaching children and adolescents remain highly influential among art educators even today, with his 1947 book Creative and Mental Growth considered a benchmark text for understanding art education and early childhood psychology. In the book, Lowenfeld proposed six stages of artistic development: The Scribbling Stage (ages two - four), The Pre-schematic Stage (ages four to seven), The Schematic Stage (ages seven to nine), The Dawning Realism Stage (ages nine to eleven), The Pseudo-Naturalistic Stage (ages eleven to thirteen), and The Decision Stage (ages fourteen to seventeen). Lowenfeld presented his stages as a linear progression of overlapping technical skills and conceptual, emotional, and intellectual growth. He stated that art education was "not the art itself or the aesthetic product or the aesthetic experience, but rather the child who grows up more creatively and sensitively and applies his experience in the arts to whatever life situations may be applicable".

“Childlike” Art and Modernism

Art critic Alastair Sooke notes that many avant-garde artists would become "interested not only in children but also in the freshness of children's drawings a model for how art could challenge traditional ways of painting - just like African tribal art, which also inspired Modernism". Between 1906 and 1909, for example, Henri Matisse painted several portraits of his young daughter, Marguerite, and son, Pierre, in a "naïve" flat style that echoed the simplified paintings of the untrained child. Meanwhile, in the Blue Rider Almanac (1912), Wassily Kandinsky wrote extensively about, and reproduced images of, children's art, asserting that "The child is indifferent to practical meaning since he looks at everything with fresh eyes, and he still has the natural ability to absorb things as much," whereas the adult, academically-trained artist "produces a 'correct' drawing that is dead." Sooke notes that, "Picasso, too, was obsessed with children's art - so much so that his pictures of children often double as self-portraits. This was the case in 1923, when he painted his own son, Paulo, drawing while sitting at a table. [...] By now, the child - once ignored in art - has become a metaphor for the purity and intensity of the artist's vision". Scholar Linda L. Ferrell adds that, "[the] new evaluation of children's art as a source of inspiration" carried over into the work of Joan Miró and Jean Dubuffet through "the use of various figures, symbols and forms from the repertory of children's art [represented their] desire to return to the child's world - a world filled with excitement and awe". For his part, Picasso once said of his children's art, "When I was their age, I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them".

French artist Jean Dubuffet was at the forefront of Modern Art's celebration of Children's art. He included Children's art alongside the art of mental institution patients, prison inmates, psychic mediums, people from cultures considered "primitive," and other "outsider" artists (that is, artists existing on the margins of society, with little to no exposure to mainstream artistic movements, styles, or teachings) in his development of the category of Art Brut (literally "raw art", called "Outsider art" in English), which he began to elaborate in the mid-1920s. Dubuffet saw in the works of these "untrained artists" (including child artists), "a pure creativity uninhibited by societal expectations," and he sought to emulate a child-like style in much of his own art, for instance with scribbles and crudely-rendered human figures. Publications about and exhibitions of Art Brut (by Dubuffet and others) had an immense impact on countless modern artists, who turned to Children's art for inspiration, including members of the short-lived CoBrA Group, which was formed in the direct aftermath of the World War II. The CoBrA artists (including Asger Jorn, Constant Nieuwenhuijs, Karel Appel, and Corneille) rejected "hollow" Western ideologies and sought to create works of art that were "uncivilized".

Child/Adult Collaboration

Although it might not be considered common practice, an important facet of Child Art is one that sees children working hand-in-hand with established adult artists. Working in the Penta Ventosa neighborhood of Porto, Portugal, for instance, Elvira Leite, an artist whose practice shifted steadily towards teaching and curriculum development, collaborated with local street children on an inquiry-based project that took place on the city's streets, plazas, and other public spaces. The Penna Ventosa initiative happened in the wake of the 1974 Carnation Revolution (a non-violent revolution which brought down the fascist Estado Novo regime that led to the liberation of Portugal's colonial territories) and amid a wave of activism seeking better living conditions and social reforms. Leite prompted the children to express themselves as individuals but also as part of a bigger citizen group. One of the issues that the children had identified was a lack of accessible communal spaces where they could safely engage in child-initiated activities. Leite took the children onto the streets where they utilized art materials, sourced by Leite, and donated by local merchants, as well as found/discarded objects. The streets, buildings, and sidewalks became their canvas and the foundation for a wide variety of self-directed endeavors including drawing, puppetry, and performance. Their work successfully combined the urgency of activism learned from Leite, but with an uninhibited playful flair that belonged solely to the imagination of children.

Moving into the 1980s, the American graffiti artist Keith Haring painted a number of works with an adolescent boy named LA2. Haring then went on to produce his last series (before his death) of etchings together with a nine-year-old boy named Sean Kalish. More recently (since 1999), the Mexico-based Belgian conceptual and performance artist Francis Alÿs has been working on a video series entitled Children's Games. He became interested in the idea that children were able to find joy and playful distraction even in the most difficult circumstances. Shot in locations including Mexico City, Tangier, and the Sharya Refugee Camp in Iraq, Alÿs's short films (now over thirty in number) carry symbolic socio-political undertones. Children's Game #27, for instance, features children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo playing a traditional game called Rubi. Reflecting on the development of the Children's Games project, Alÿs stated, "During the first 10 to 15 years, I was the main protagonist of my videos, and gradually children have taken over as the main protagonists. [...] my natural capacity for dialogue is just better with children than adults. I connect more easily, and I find it much easier to collaborate with them".

Future Developments

Children's art is a generic term rather than a fully mature movement (which would be typically spearheaded by one or more exceptional individuals and capitalized on by the art market). Nevertheless, the growing awareness of the importance of arts education to children's lives is underscored by a number of current child art initiatives designed to inspire young artists, to support and promote their creative development, and to champion the value of arts education in schools and elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Children's Art Week, organized by the National Association for Gallery Education, is an annual showcase that celebrates the creative achievements of children and aims to heighten awareness of "ongoing art-related activities, workshops, and events both in-person and online". Children's Arts Week is supported by schools, galleries and museums, and various community-centered initiatives.

Such schemes are not the sole province of Western institutions. Indeed, The Children's Art Museum International (CAMI) provides a platform for children (aged two to eighteen years old) with the goal of encouraging young children to "express themselves through the medium of art". CAMI, which promotes itself as "the world's very first digital museum dedicated to child art", was founded in India by two children, Krish and Manya (twelve and fifteen years old respectively). The cousins stated: "there are hundreds of museums and art sites, but none dedicated to the works of children. CAMI is our place under the sun- for the children, by the children and of the children! ". Today CAMI's 5000 members are supported by an advisory board comprising professional artists, educationists, professionals, philanthropists, and social leaders. In its mission statement, CAMI claims success "in nurturing budding artists" while promoting Digital Art, including animation and graphic design.