Peck's Boys & Girls

Manhattanites who visited the Whitney Museum of American Art were surprised last week by an exhibition of children's art in which there was no cooing or babbling. It came from a Progressive schoolteacher who strangely enough believes in discipline.

The show consisted of 44 serious, professional-looking oils, gouaches and water-colors done by an assorted group of New York youngsters (aged 10 to 15) who had studied in the Saturday art classes of Greenwich Village's pioneering Little Red School House. Chosen for outstanding talent from New York's public and parochial schools, these children were sons and daughters of taxi drivers, shoemakers, waiters, ranged in race and nationality from Chinese, Polish and Syrian to Harlem Negro and plain U.S. Anglo-Saxon. Their pictures crawled and bubbled with youthful gusto. They also showed a keen sense of observation, and the painstaking craftsmanship that results from purposeful intention rather than youthful accident.

Secret behind this original, grammatical juvenile art lay in the black-thatched head of a rangy, bespectacled, 34-year-old Midwestern painter named Augustus Peck who drifted into the Little Red School House a year and a half ago with some new ideas about how child artists should be taught. An ex-newspaperman, Peck had spent three years teaching moppets in the Cleveland Museum of Art how to paint.

A practical man rather than a theorist, Peck laid down no rules, treated his Manhattan pupils as individuals, insisted only that they work as hard as serious adults. He sent them clambering over Manhattan docks and rooftops, told them to draw and paint what they saw, criticized their results with adult solemnity. When one artist insisted on signing each of his landscapes "An Original by Myerson" in large letters, Teacher Peck didn't even crack a smile.

Unlike most enthusiasts about children's art, Peck scoffs at any comparison with adult painting, believes firmly that the work of his moppets should be put in its place. Worried that they might get delusions of grandeur, he avoided telling them about their exhibition, hoped they wouldn't go near it. Said he:

"I do not consider these pictures art. It seems to me that there ought to be early discipline in drawing just the same as early training in table manners. Once you have it, it always sticks by you."

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