JUVENILE ARTISTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 February 1939, Page 8

JUVENILE ARTISTS

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. OLD METHOD DISCARDED. “Art colours life as the sun colours the flowers.” So firmly does he believe this that Professor Franz Cizek has devoted his life to the development of art in. the child. As a youth of nineteen he lodged at a carpenter’s home while attending the Academy of Art in Vienna, and out of pure good-heartedness let the children come to his room and “draw and paint.” Begun in a spirit of fun, Cizek was amazed at the creative energy displayed by the children and the results of his method, which he had planned so as to interfere as little as possible with his own work. “Art is creation —not skill,” he says; and of the expert—“A man who has learned about some one thing and does not understand it.” Cizek learnt that each child was a law unto himself, and produced pictures from his inner experience, needing only sympathetic encouragement — never ridicule —to give of his best.' Other little children came and asked if they might join, and thus began the famous Juvenile Art Class, known throughout the world as the source of the new method. All this happened in 1897. After battling for years against the antagonism that every new idea has to face; being accused as “a corrupter of youth”—petitions were even sent to the Minister of Education to stop him —Professor Franz Cizek has at last seen his method adopted and his attack on the old system of teaching art by “copy” justified.