DRAWINGS BY CHILDREN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 264, 14 July 1944, Page 8

DRAWINGS BY CHILDREN

Are They Really Good ?

HERE is an exhibition .of paintings now touring New Zealand which is attracting large crowds of noisy and excited visitors, The artists are children, ranging in age from three to 17, and the visitors for the most part, are children, too. The exhibition was arranged by the British Council, and has already been to the United States, Canada, and Australia. Wherever it has been shown, people have been excited by it, and artists themselves have probably had their eyes opened a good deal by what they have seen. Among the works of the very youngsay from three to five-you will find the amusing scrawls that any imaginative child might do without being taught any tricks. Stars and the sun become personified with grotesque limbs, and "Mother" or "Motor Car" or "Playtime" are all there in the manner of painting which knows no national boundaries. Then among the sixes, and sevens you laugh at "Policeman Holding Up Traffic," "Father Christmas," and especially the uproarious drawing of two people "Posing for a Photograph." From the nines on, you begin to realise that the children are on equal terms, regardless of age. There are mature paintings by the young and paintings by older children done in, the style of the infants. The range of subjects begins to widen-from religion to crime, landscape to munitioris factory, the Black Country to the jungle; and it is interesting to note from Herbert Read’s introduction in the catalogue that "the few war pictures in the exhibition come from schools in areas comparatively remote from the war, and their realists is imaginative rather than documentary." The Education Department has added te the exhibition a dozen or so paintings from New Zealand children, and some handcraft. We reproduce one of the New Zealand paintings (Giraffes) on the cpposite page, along with a selection of those from Britain. * * * RECENT issue of "London Calling" contained an article by Herbert Read, the English poet and art critic, in which he spoke of these pictures in particular and of children’s art in general, along the lines of his recent book "Education Through Art." Here are some passages from this article: . VERYWHERE these exhibitions have met with an enthusiastic reception. Perhaps that is because they represent a welcomnie. change from the normal type of war exhibition; but judging from the numerous Press criticisms which have reached Great Britain, it was rather the intrinsic value of the exhibits that moved the foreign visitor to such enthusiasm. Out of a war-distracted world, these drawings seemed to come like emblems of peace and sanity: they

expressed, not the ideology of the warring nations, but something universal, international and creative. Children, before they acquire the intellectual notions and social prejudices of their parents and teachers, are very much the same the whole world over. In art, they speak the same language. . . . Freed from the influence of their elders, children would readily constitute a world-wide republic. That, I think, is the message these exhibitions are carrying to other countries, and people are asking the question why, if the children of the world are united, the parents of the world should be so desperately at war. It seems to point to some fundamental defect in all the educational systems of the world. This lesson has not been obvious before, because it is only recently that a few pioneers have been able to effect a revolution in the teaching of art in a few of our schools; and it is from these few schools that the drawings exhibited abroad have been selected. But such schools are not necessarily what people call "crank" schools. Thanks to the genius and fervour of Marion Richardson, who for some years has been Inspector of Art on the London County Council, many elementary schools have reformed the teaching of art, and they have contributed generously to the British Council exhibitions, But so have famous public schools such as Eton and Charterhouse; and in between these extremes, several private and secondary schools have contributed their share. Artistic Impulse in Every Child While "progressive" schools may be more productive, and deserve every credit for their consistent pursuit of these new ideals, success is not confined to them. The artistic impulse exists in every child: It is independent of heredity and environment, though these are factors which may help or hinder its outlet. The art of children is like the language of children. It is a method of communication, in which the individual first babbles and only gradually learns skill-the skill to enunciate clearly and use words constructively. It is a language which for hundreds of years has been not merely neglected, but ruthlessly suppressed by a logical and grammatical bias in education-a bias in favour of reasoning and memory; faculties which, however valuable, should not have been allowed to supersede feeling, intuition and imagination. Too often, alas, a child’s art receives only indifference or ridicule. Nothing is more crushing to the infant spirit than a parent’s or teacher’s contempt for ie first creative efforts of expression. at is a crime which disgraces the whole of our intellectualist civilisation and which, in my opinion, is the root cause of our. social disintegration. We sow the seeds of disunity in the nursery and the classroom with our superior adult conceit. We divide the sensibility and intelligence of our children, ‘create split-men (schizophrenics, as the psychologists call them) and then discover that we have no social unity.