10,000 Fingers

To an adult who judges art by its intellect, the art of children is necessarily primitive, sometimes amusing. To an adult who looks on art as a floodgate for the imagination, child art has lately become a fascinating affair. Muddlers who hold either view as occasion in Manhattan demands found occasion last week to hold the second. On the walls of the big mezzanine galleries of Rockefeller Center's International Building were posted more than 1,000 crayon, tempera and water color drawings by children in 530 U. S. and Canadian schools, an exhibition sponsored by the public-school art directors of 30 cities.

The all-but-inescapable conclusion from this glorification of juvenilia was that the younger you are, the better child art you are likely to produce. At about junior high-school age, or sixth grade, many of the child painters had turned imitative, muddying the pure well of crudity with inhibited attempts to be artistic. But under this age, the hugely scrawled and brightly colored pictures done by little boys & girls showed a splashing freedom of imagery and sometimes a direct seizure of character. They also showed frequent resemblance to the art of those moderns who distort for the sake of design.

Typical example of this was Portrait (see cut) by 9-year-old Rudy Reni of Roslyn Heights, N. Y., who had the Duchess of Windsor in mind. A vivid twister in yellow, black and purple it was a dead ringer for a simple Matisse. This picture, incidentally, was an exception to the general rule that young children paint in the horizontal plane, older children in the vertical. The paintings which as a group undoubtedly stole the show were almost all horizontal--193 "finger paintings" by children from three to ten years old.

Evolved by burly, kindly Ruth Faison Shaw at her experimental school in Rome (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933), finger painting has rapidly become a custom in progressive schools. It is done with earth pigments, invented by Miss Shaw, which come like jelly in little jars and can be licked or even eaten with impunity. A big sheet of glazed paper is dipped in water, spread smooth on a table, and gobs of color are dropped on it. The child then swirls the mixture over the paper with both hands, fingers, even forearms, continually creating new designs. Having no crayon or brush to cramp his fingers the child relaxes. Out of his tactile reverie emerge elaborate, rhythmic designs and fantastic forms, which artists admire and psychologists value as a medium of release from nightmares and other oppressions.

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