Childhood Work of Artists

Abstract

Childhood Work of Artists Gordon, A. (2015). Childhood Work of Artists. Ramat Gan, Israel: Chanan Rozen Museum of Israeli Art. 233 pp. No ISBN.This book is a revised version of the catalog that accompanied an exhibition of Israeli artists' childhood work at the Israel Museum Youth Wing in 1978. It has been updated with extensive artist interviews and references to scholarship that have appeared since the original exhibition. The book is in three sections. The first is an introduction to the new version of the catalog. The second is a generously illustrated section devoted to the juvenile and mature artwork of 5 Israeli women and 14 men. Among these are a number of highly regarded Israeli artists: Avigdor Arikha, Yosl Bergner, Dan Reisinger, David Sharir, Jacob Steinhardt, Aviva Uri, and Yocheved Weinfeld. In the third section, Gordon synthesizes the material and compares it with the juvenile work of Pablo Picasso and Klee.The catalog and the exhibition it accompanied complement existing studies of talented and gifted children. Authors such as Andrews (1989), Carroll (1994), and Milbrath (1998) studied children's graphic development from various angles. Like Gordon, some examine the relationship between juvenilia and mature artistic performance. Her catalog is of value to educational psychologists, art educators, and social historians. It contains diverse material that illustrates not only the individual graphic development of selected Israeli artists, but inevitably references key moments in the epic history of the Jewish people. In the collected childhood works of these artists, we can trace the reverberations of the Holocaust and the struggles of modern Israel.Gordon states that one of her primary aims is to unravel the mystery of how early childhood work relates to later adult success. I have long been interested in this question, having looked at the juvenilia of Lautrec, Klee, Picasso, Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and the work of the Chinese wunderkind Wang Yani (Pariser, 1992-1993,1995). The promise is tantalizing, but as Gordon admits in her modest introduction, Many questions remain unanswered (p. 11). Nevertheless, the journey is most rewarding.In terms of gender balance, Gordon is to be congratulated for collecting a sample where almost a third of the artists are women. In my research on artists' juvenilia, I found that archives of juvenile work by noted female artists were almost non-existent. This dearth of female artists' juvenilia is not hard to understand as systematic gender bias has long mitigated against the emergence and recognition of women artists.In her consistently generous discussion, Gordon underplays the way in which contemporary audiences and Israeli artists themselves viewed child art. Although she does mention Fineberg's work (1997), which explores the connections between Modern artists and child art, she does not engage with Fineberg's (1997) interesting suggestion that we appreciate child art because we have absorbed a Modernist aesthetic. Feinberg's suggestion is borne out by our research (Pariser, Kindler, van den Berg, Liu, & Dias, 2007).Via anecdotes, Gordon identifies Modernist trends among Israeli artists: There is the famous artist Yosl Bergner who kept his childhood work and revisited it at the age of 80. Throughout his career Paul Klee also used the spatial grammar and simplified forms of his childhood. The parents of the twins, Eli and Shir Shvaron, kept much of their early childhood work beginning when the twins were 11. This in itself is an interesting social fact. As I have found (Pariser, 2014), one of the key factors in the emergence of childhood artistry is the culture embraced by the artist's family.Gordon presents us with a range of family engagement with the young artist. …