ABSTRACT
Since the “discovery” of child art in the late nineteenth century, many educators, artists, and art historians have pondered the presumed similarity between children’s drawings and so-called primitive art. In their quest for innovation, the modern artists of the early 20th century turned to child art as an original and unspoiled pictorial language that inspired their experimentation with the simplification of unmodeled forms, the flatness of pictorial space, and the use of primary colors (Fineberg, 1997; Goldwater, 1986; Golomb, 2002). Comparisons of the artwork of preliterate societies and child art seemed to suggest that both are products of an early, cognitively naive but authentic stage in human development. In the domain of psychology, the notion of drawings as culture-free products of the child’s mind, a conception that is quite compatible with this view of primitive art, motivated Florence Goodenough to construct her well-known Draw-a-Man test (1926).
