Such experiments had a lasting impact on the picture book, a genre that continues to entice visual artists and remains a forum for innovative graphic design.Ī number of artists working today have extended their practice into the realm of children’s publishing by creating illustrations for books. Artists associated with other reform-minded movements of the early 1900s-for example, the Vienna Secession and Bauhaus-also paid attention to children’s books, using them as venues to explore radical typography, layout, and pictorial representation. In addition to influencing the development of European modernism, children were some of its first consumers: The Soviet painters Aleksandr Deineka, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Lebedev all made picture books for Soviet children as part of a broader effort to revolutionize mass communication, and with it, mass politics, in the wake of 1917. Affinities between the visual language of childhood and that of modern art, paired with the child’s supposed innocence and impressionability, made the young an attractive target audience for artists attempting to disseminate new ideas about art and politics. Seeing with the eyes of a child-rediscovering childlike imagination and facture-provided such artists with an antidote to the mechanization and rationalism of everyday life, offering what Fineberg describes as a “purgative for Western culture’s materialism and the rigor mortis of its cultural hierarchies.”Īvant-garde interest in the child as artist also led to an interest in the child as spectator.
In children’s looping scrawls and lopsided figuration, in their dreamlike colors and disorderly narration, painters like Picasso, as well as Natalia Goncharova, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Jean Dubuffet, and Joan Miró found a fundamentally different way of envisioning and depicting the world around them. How Do Artists Do It? Parsing Their Life Stories
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