| A decade has passed since the publication of the first edition of The Child's Creation of a Pictorial World, and it seemed time to reassess the status of child art and review studies that were published in the intervening years.
The outcome of this review has been to expand the earlier version and to incorporate new findings in the current book. The basic philosophy that underpins the first edition continues to serve as a productive framework for an assessment of the available literature.
The Child's Creation of a Pictorial World summarizes a large body of research conducted over many years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. This work represents a collaborative effort with many students whose active participation in my representational development course sparked our joint interest and led to thesis and independent study research projects.
For over a hundred years, the drawings of children have enchanted a rather diverse audience of psychologists, educators, art historians, and artists. It is not surprising that over this period of time child art has been examined from a number of different perspectives and significant shifts have occurred in the views of students of child art.
Over the years, two major orientations have come to dominate this field of inquiry. The first one can best be described as the cognitive deficit view of child art. Children's drawings are seen as revealing the child's immature conceptions of the world, as graphic statements that provide the investigator with a kind of cognitive map or "printout" of the child's mental life. The second position emphasizes the projective significance of drawings, which are said to mirror the child's emotional concerns. Within a broadly conceived psychodynamic perspective, the drawings are viewed as reflections of the child's feelings.
Both positions bring to the study of child art ready-made conceptions that derive from other domains of psychology. They merely confirm already well-established views. Jean Piaget is a major representative of this approach to children's drawings. He focused his attention on a limited aspect of children's drawings and interpreted his findings in terms that support his theory of the growth of intelligence and logic in the child. The study of child art per se did not engage Piaget's interest, nor was he concerned with the visual arts as a domain of adult artistic achievement. Much the same may be said about Karen Machover's interpretation of children's drawings. Insights won from psychodynamic psychology led to her analysis of children's drawings as a projective test of the "body image" or the "inner self." In neither case were children's drawings studied with the intention to discover the laws that determine development in the graphic domain; drawings were treated as evidence for an accepted theory of the child's mind. |
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