Expert: Children's art undeniably influenced modern masters

By Melissa Mitchell

One of the longest-standing jokes about modern art is that much of it
resembles the simplistic finger-paintings and crayon drawings of
pre-schoolers.

That some of the great masters - from Henri Matisse to Pablo Picasso - were
influenced in some way by children's art is evident to the trained as well
as the untrained observer, although art professionals generally have denied
or downplayed it. Thus, the connection rarely has been mentioned in the
scholarship on modern art or even acknowledged by most of the artists
themselves, according to UI art historian Jonathan Fineberg. Until now,
that is.

"Although children's art was not the only source for modern artists, that
it was a source is now undeniable," Fineberg wrote in an article in the
April issue of ARTnews magazine. The art history professor will illustrate
his point and provide "a deeper understanding of modern artists' creative
processes and ambitions" in "The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the
Modern Artist," an exhibition of major masterpieces and source material
that opened May 30 at the Lehnbachhaus in Munich, Germany.

The exhibition, which travels to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, in
August, includes a catalog to be published by Yale University Press in 1996
in which Fineberg chronicles the influences of child art on Wassily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Matisse, Joan Miro, Gabriele MŸnter, Picasso and
others.

Fineberg has spent the past decade researching and documenting the
relationship between the work of modern artists and children's art in their
possession. Typically, the youthful "masterpieces" were created by their
children, friends' children, nieces and nephews. Occasionally, artists even
exhibited these works along with their own work in the early part of the
20th century.

While various artists drew different meanings and inspirations from their
young muses, Fineberg believes many in "the vanguard of the new century
sought in children's art a means of peeling back the layers of an
overcultivated, fin-de-siecle Europe to discover what lay buried beneath
that elaborately rendered facade."

Fineberg's initial investigation of a link between child art and the work
of modern masters focused on the pre-World War I work of Kandinsky, the
subject of his dissertation. "Looking at Kandinsky's first abstractions of
1909 to 1914 with this question in mind, I recognized a range of references
to child styles of rendering that made me certain the artist must have
studied children's art in detail. Once I realized that Kandinsky must have
had an extensive collection of child art, it wasn't hard to figure out
where it would be if it still existed: I went straight to the material
taken from the Murnau house Kandinsky had shared with Gabriele Munter
before World War I," Fineberg said. Indeed, an extensive collection of
children's art was there among Munter's papers.

"This remarkable discovery set me on a systematic course of investigation
that led, over the next 10 or so years, to the astonishing discovery of the
original collections of children's works that belonged to one master after
another," Fineberg said.