When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child

Book Overview

In his last and most overarching essay on the subject, Rudolf Arnheim encourages us to see the range of individuality in children's drawings and to recognize the child's creation of "significant form" as a way of bringing coherence to his or her experience of the world. This groundbreaking book brings together distinguished critics and scholars, including Rudolf Arnheim, to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented history. The contributors address central questions of how children use art to make sense of their experience and what really constitutes visual "giftedness" in children. They also cover such topics as visual thinking, the influence of popular culture on children's drawings, giftedness versus education in children's drawings, process, and social interaction in drawing. Created to accompany an exhibition on children's drawings, When We Were Young features a stunning full-color gallery of drawings both by famous artists such as Ingres, Van Gogh, Picasso, Mir?, and Klee when they were children and by extraordinary "ordinary" children. An annotated chronology, with synopses and more than a thousand scholarly notes, offers a comprehensive survey of the literature and history of child art from the thirteenth century to the present.

Essays by Rudolf Arnheim, Jonathan Fineberg, Misty S. Houston, Olga Ivashkevich, Christine Marm? Thompson, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520250435
• ISBN13: 9780520250437
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.6" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Understanding What Children are Saying

A guide to understanding the art that might be hanging on your refrigerator door. The author is a professor of art history at the University of Illinois. In this volume he looks at childhood art as a medium of expression where by the child is trying to make sense out of an often bewildering world. The book contains articles from a series of well known, well respected writers about art and its meaning to a child. In addition there is a collection of drawings made by now famous people when they were young. Some of these show remarkable talent for a child so young. They show an artistic talent that many of us lack to this day. Some of the early drawings of Picasso (at age 9) show that he was developing a skill to put on paper what he wanted to see. Other drawings are definitely refrigerator door quality and show that the technical ability of the person to have developed later in life. In the first half of the book there is agreat deal of discussion about what the drawings are showing. In the gallery section, there is no commentary beyond the name and age of the artist, with only a brief paragraph about the picture.