Children as Artists

It is often claimed that children are naturally gifted as artists and that their work is free, spontaneous, and creative. R. R. Tomlinson, Senior Inspector of Art to the London County Council, began his book Children as Artists (1944) with these words:

As Wilson (1992) has pointed out, child art now seems to have lost some of its status as art. It is less often seen to have an affinity with what adult artists do and is less often displayed in the galleries of museums. Nevertheless, the almost obligatory display of children’s drawings in doctors’ consulting rooms and the thousands of children’s drawings attached to refrigerators in kitchens attests to the enduring belief that children’s drawings are in some sense works of art. How did this belief come about? In the passage quoted previously Tomlinson (1944) gave two reasons: the efforts of pioneer teachers and the shift in ideas about art on the part of the general public. An addi-

tional reason, however, was that many artists at the beginning of the 20th century became interested in children’s pictures and hailed them as works of art. One important factor in this recognition was that children’s drawings and paintings and the work of the avant-garde often looked remarkably alike, and in this chapter I concentrate on describing the formal similarities between the art of the avant-garde in the early and middle 20th century and children’s drawings and paintings. That these similarities exist is undeniable, but the inference that young children are therefore artists in the way that Klee, Matisse, and Picasso were artists is, I believe, mistaken.