SECOND THOUGHTS ON AN ART EXHIBITION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 266, 28 July 1944, Page 8

SECOND THOUGHTS ON AN ART EXHIBITION

(Written for "The Listener’ by

JANET

WILKINSON

WENT away from the Exhibition of Children’s Drawings feeling vaguely cheerful. It seemed that even children of 15 or 16 could avoid the corruption of sentimentality, second hand emotion, and derivative style which are generally the hall-marks of adolescent art whether in secondary schools, art schools, or the shows of the local art societies. One even hoped that these children might elude the procrustean efficiency of an education system, retain their spontaneity, and survive to become adults, aware and _ curious. Here were children who were allowedand better still, taught — to give free movement to their imaginations; to record with colour and brush on paper their real life — that life which, compounding observation and emotion, welds actual impressions with the unreal, the unsubstantial, the non-rational. It was a pleasant fantasy to imagine the exhibition unlabelled and its interpretation left to the traditional criticthe sort of man who could write of Whistler's etching Lobster Pots "so little in them," that type of foolish person who likes to docket, assign, and explain. Imagine him going round and placing the drawings into "periods" and "influences." Here a Teaparty that re- minds him of Matisse, not mature, of course, colour certainly not so subtle, but the way of looking at it-yes. Here a Panel of stiff geometric flowers, colourful in yellows, reds and purples, gay and decorative like a Persian tile. Or over on the far wall The Ferry Boat, a row of large-headed, solemn figures standing in a little boat, the sort of thing Le Douanier Rousseau might have painted, And on the same wall two skilful ink drawings Doctor’s Waiting Room and Hyde Park; are they Ardizzone perhaps? Certainly Daumier would not have been ashamed to own their acute observation. Near them was Tea Garden, with sombre olive greens, dark blues and russets, very reminiscent of Derain. Again the bold Statue in the Park, says the critic, undoubtedly shows the influence of McKnight Kauffer’s posters. But this is a game he could play for hours. He could push connections with Cézanne, Van Gogh, John and Paul Nash, John Farleigh, Stanley Spencer and Henry Moore. A fruitless game, admittedly, but you can see some reason for its being played. Some Theories What are the reasons for these elusive. similarities? Perhaps the children made a careful study of contem- porary European art before setting to work; perhaps the most _ respected artists haunt the schools, engrave on their palettes the motto "unless you become as little children" and sneak ideas from the impressionable and unspoilt young. Both theories are a little (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) untenable; let’s try another. No two people, we know, habitually write or talk or paint or laugh exactly alike unless consciously plagiarist, but we do know that numbers of people can look at experience in relatively similar ways. One group of people, the realists, when they paint try to record what they see exactly; while others turn inwards from their visual experience and give their work the evanescent clarity of dreams, If differing temperaments account for differing styles, they also explain similarity in style. Background Influences In this exhibition it was interesting to speculate on the background influences, Herbert Read postulates in his introduction to the catalogue "what is before all necessary is to create an atmosphere which will induce the child to exteriorise the rich and varied imagery in its mind." And again "the child is an imitative animal, and picks up with incredible ease, not only any idiosyncrasies which the teacher, as an artist, may possess, but also the more widely distributed sophistications of books, magazines and films." It seemed that the children responsible for this exhibition had absorbed a great deal from the work of their adult contemporaries. It would be hard to imagine any of them looking at a Picasso with the supercilious hostility which he and lester artists can still excite in many people of an older generation. I should say that these children had been taken to art galleries, had seen prints‘ of the work of modern artists, whose work they must have again seen on posters for Shell-Mex or the Underground, on book jackets ai illustrations, in advertisements, and in designs for china or fabrics; and that these influences, inter-acting with their nature as children, had helped to form the freedom, simplicity and gay courage of their pictures. As twentieth-century children they could not avoid seeing a great deal that is tawdry, ill-propor-tioned, insipid and vulgar, too; that they have. not absorbed the vicious seems to argue that the instinctive taste.of children is good, and also that their teaching has been very gobd indeed. Wise Teaching That the teaching behind those paintings was wise, sympathetic, and extremely intelligent seemed to me to be constantly emphasised. The teachers have preserved and fostered the creative ability of the very young children so ably that unsophisticated work like the four-year-olds’ Stars, or Kitty in the Sun, Being Photographed, Landscape, or Pattern ate among the most interesting and delightful in the whole exhibition. In the later age-groups _ you can notice an increase in manipulative ability, an elaboration of the simple symbols which thé younger children use so happily, and a considerable increase in other technical skills. These children have’ been taught unobtrusively the grammar of painting. Just as the labours, both massive and precise, behind the playing of a Schnabel are forgotten, and forgotten is the tedium of innumerable revisions behind the finished peeet of Virginia Woolf, or unnoticed the mastered syntax in a fine poem, so behind a forge painting must lie — absorbed apparently forgotten — a age of design and colour. In the same way, although the (continued on next page)

CHILDREN’S ART (continued from previous page) knowledge of grammar was there in these pictures, yet one felt that the children were not hampered or canalised by their acquired abilities. They seem to have been allowed to expand as they wished and then given more knowledge when the need for that knowledge was felt. In the older methods of art teaching detailed observation was forced; from cubes, to boxes and houses and diminishing lamp posts, perspective was rammed home until drawing became odious to all but the exceptionally biddable or the exceptionally gifted. In these drawings perspective was carried easily as in, say, Air Raid Shelter, Procession or The Farm, and more often was as usefully ignored. Colour was conspicuously good in these pictures, from the bold strength in Harbour From Imagination, to the varied and delicate subtleties of Horses in Field, Hens, or The Deluge. New Zealand’s Effort Here one is tempted to make a comparison with the New Zealand contributions (while admittedly it would be quite unfair to generalise, as the New Zealand drawings were very few and taken almost without exception from cne district): colour in the New Zealand work was crude without being effective (the river painting of a Maori boy from Selwyn was notably an exception, but the interesting angle of The Cenotaph, for instance, was almost obscured by its violent red and green); in design they were far less spontane-ous-behind the neat haystacks and the picture postcard yacht one sensed the teacher, and black board, coloured chalks and 45 more or les§ facile copies. And that again may be unfair. In the British drawings the personality of a teacher was sometimes noticeable, There were two called Snowballing, both from Weybridge, ages 14 and 15; although in composition the two paintings were very different, the general design of the figures, the same short-hand for depicting movement, ahd the identical colours used, all pointed to the character, as artist, of the same teacher. Conspiracy By Candlelight, from the Bath School of Art was a similar exampie. But one could keep on analysing and moralising for a long while and that would serve no very useful purpose. One thing certainly is clear-that in some English schools, at least, art is being taught with understanding and intelligence.