Parentology: the childhood of art

Chronic. Even if it is never very good to make dichotomies, we can still argue that the adult world is divided into two very distinct categories: on the one hand, those who stick children’s drawings in a drawer ( worse, in the trash); on the other, those who choose to exhibit them, a sign that they consider these works, in which the houses often have a pointed roof and the fingers of false tunes of sticks, as works worthy of interest. These divergent attitudes towards the drawings, paintings and installations of the youngest are indicative of the relationship with the child himself, considered in the first case as a being still far from fulfillment (individual, aesthetic); in the other as a full-fledged person, distinguished by different ways of thinking and expression, but just as valid as those of the grown-ups.

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A proud representative of the second category, a woman of good taste of my acquaintance even devoted an entire wall of her apartment to exhibiting children’s works, carefully framed, and presented alongside drawings of adults. The effect produced is striking, placing on a statutory equality footing productions often considered according to a hierarchical principle, absurdly conditioned by the age of the author. Far from constituting an exaggerated sentimentalism with regard to dreadful scribbles, this scenography on the contrary highlights the incredible quality of some of these childish works, the originality of their form, their composition, their colors, their trait, their thematic audacity too, where we usually look at these achievements with a rather inattentive or condescending eye – “Well yes, she’s super your potato. Ah, sorry, I hadn’t seen that he was a guy! “.

Small indoor theater

“It took me a lifetime to learn to draw as a child”, confessed to his friend Brassaï the painter Pablo Picasso, he who, despite being such a young virtuoso, knew the full value of this formal freedom, the quintessence of which he had not succeeded in embracing until belatedly. What is true for drawing can be just as true for sculpture, or even for any object that the child takes hold of and that he integrates, in a real performance, into his little interior theater. Recently, without anyone really knowing where this idea came from, my youngest son recovered the head of a trout from which we had made our meal and, spontaneously, studded it with sparkling nails, a neo-surrealist achievement that would not have denoted at the Palais de Tokyo. “This facility to satisfy his imagination testifies to the spirituality of childhood in his artistic conceptions”, wrote Charles Baudelaire in The Spleen of Paris.

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