This book brings together thirteen distinguished critics and scholars to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented influence on the evolution of modern art. It shows that children's art and childhood have inspired major works of art, served as central metaphors for artistic spontaneity and honesty, and provided a window into the fundamental human qualities explored by modern artists. The volume complements editor Jonathan Fineberg's groundbreaking new book, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, 1997), in which he showed how many of the greatest masters of modern art collected and were directly influenced by children's drawings. Contributors here both expand on Fineberg's themes and take the study of children's art in new directions. They examine, for example, the influence of child art on such artists as Kandinsky, Klee, Larionov, and Miró; the diverse styles of children's art; the influence of Romantic ideas on perceptions of children's art; the conception of giftedness versus education in children's drawings; and the relationship between children's art and primitivism. The book offers unique glimpses into the working processes of great modern artists, presenting, for example, Dora Vallier's personal recollections of Miró and his creative process, and new documentation about the works of the Russian avant-garde. The essays draw on art theory, psychology, and the close study of individual works of art and written texts. Discovering Child Art will appeal to a wide range of readers, including art historians, psychologists, and art educators. Contributors to the book are Troels Andersen, Rudolf Arnheim, John Carlin, Marcel Franciscono, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Green, Josef Helfenstein, Werner Hofmann, Yuri Molok, G. G. Pospelov, Richard Shiff, Dora Vallier, and Barbara Würwag.

This book brings together thirteen distinguished critics and scholars to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented influence on the evolution of modern art. It shows that children's art and childhood have inspired major works of art, served as central metaphors for artistic spontaneity and honesty, and provided a window into the fundamental human qualities explored by modern artists. The volume complements editor Jonathan Fineberg's groundbreaking new book, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, 1997), in which he showed how many of the greatest masters of modern art collected and were directly influenced by children's drawings. Contributors here both expand on Fineberg's themes and take the study of children's art in new directions. They examine, for example, the influence of child art on such artists as Kandinsky, Klee, Larionov, and Miró; the diverse styles of children's art; the influence of Romantic ideas on perceptions of children's art; the conception of giftedness versus education in children's drawings; and the relationship between children's art and primitivism. The book offers unique glimpses into the working processes of great modern artists, presenting, for example, Dora Vallier's personal recollections of Miró and his creative process, and new documentation about the works of the Russian avant-garde. The essays draw on art theory, psychology, and the close study of individual works of art and written texts. Discovering Child Art will appeal to a wide range of readers, including art historians, psychologists, and art educators. Contributors to the book are Troels Andersen, Rudolf Arnheim, John Carlin, Marcel Franciscono, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Green, Josef Helfenstein, Werner Hofmann, Yuri Molok, G. G. Pospelov, Richard Shiff, Dora Vallier, and Barbara Würwag.

The representation of children in modern European visual culture has often been marginalized by Art History as sentimental and trivial. For this reason the subject of childhood in relation to art and its production has largely been ignored. Confronting this dismissal, this unique collection of essays raises new and unexpected issues about the formation of childhood identity in the nineteenth century and makes a significant contribution to the development of inter-disciplinary studies within this area. Through a range of stimulating and insightful case studies, the book charts the development of the Romantic ideal of childhood, starting with Rousseau?s Emile, and attends to its visual, social and psychological transformations during the historical period from which Freud?s psychoanalytic theories eventually emerged. Foremost scholars such as Anne Higonnet, Carol Mavor, Susan Casteras and Linda A. Pollock uncover the means by which children became an important conduit for prevailing social anxieties and demonstrate that the apparently ?timeless? images of them that proliferated at the time should be understood as complex cultural documents. Over 50 illustrations enhance this rich and fascinating volume.

How should we understand children’s creativity? This fascinating collection of international research offers fresh perspectives on children’s creative processes and the expression of their creative imagination through dramatic play, stories, artwork, dance, music and conversation. Drawing on a range of research evidence from innovative educational initiatives in a wide variety of countries, Exploring Children’s Creative Narratives develops new theoretical and practical insights that challenge traditional thinking about children’s creativity. The chapters, written by well-respected international contributors: offer new conceptual and interpretive frameworks for understanding children’s creativity contest conventional discourses about the origins and nature of creativity challenge the view that young children’s creativity can only be judged in terms of their creative output explore the significance children themselves attribute to their creative activity argue the need for a radical reappraisal of the influence of the sociocultural context on children’s creative expression discuss the implications of this research in relation to teacher education and curriculum design. This broad yet coherent compilation of research on creativity in childhood is essential reading for students, researchers and policy makers in early childhood as well as for Early Years professionals with a particular interest in creativity.

A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artist?s career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics. Kurczynski engages with issues of interest to twenty-first-century artists and scholars, highlighting Jorn's proposition that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social impact. Perhaps most significantly, this study foregrounds Jorn's assertion that creativity is crucial to subjectivity itself in our increasingly mediated 'Society of the Spectacle.'

This volume starts from an interdisciplinary expertise of the contributors, and chooses to work on the very origins of conscious qualitative states in perception. The leading research paradigm can be synthesized in ‘phenomenology to neurons to stimuli, and backwards’, since as a starting point it has taken the phenomenal appearances in the visual field. Specifically, the leading theme of the volume is the co-presence and interaction of diverse types of spaces in vision, like the optical space of psychophysics and of neural elaboration, the qualitative space of phenomenal appearances, and its relation with the pictorial space of art. The contributors to the volume agree in arguing that those spaces follow different rules of organization, whose specific singularity and reciprocal dependence have to be individuated, as a preliminary step to understand the architecture of the conscious awareness of our environment and to conceive its potential implementation in constructing any kind of embodied intentional agents. (Series B)

A full-color trip through the treasures of American Childhood from 1650 to today. Remember the toys you played with when you were growing up? Each of those objects has a story to tell about the history of American childhood and play. Construction toys like Lincoln Logs and Erector Set offer insight into America’s booming urban infrastructure in the early 1910s and 20s, and the important role toys played in preparing children for future careers in engineering and architecture. A stuffed toy monkey from Germany tells the story of young Jewish refugees to the United States during World War II. The board game Candyland has its origins in the dreaded polio epidemic of 1950s. Exploring Childhood and Play Through 50 Historic Treasures brings together a collection of beloved toys and games from the last two centuries to guide readers on a journey through the history of American childhood and play, 1840-2000. Through color photographs and short essays on each object, this book examines childhood against the backdrop of culture, politics, religion, technology, gender, parenting philosophies, and more. The book features ten categories of objects including board and electronic games, dolls, action figures, art toys, optical toys, animal toys, construction sets, and sports. Each essay tells the story of the individual object its historic context, and each passage builds upon one another to create a fascinating survey of how childhood and play changed over the course of two centuries.