Child Art in Context: A Cultural and Comparative Perspective

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Child Art in Context: A Cultural and Comparative Perspective examines the process of creative expression in child art. More than 100 drawings and sculptures illustrate the genesis and development of representational skill and its progression in the visual arts as well as theories on how this course can best be understood. The author addresses the question of whether children's primitive forms reflect immature cognitive and emotional development, a theory supported by the view that optical realism is the endpoint of artistic development. Golomb disagrees with this notion and shows the intelligence of children's endeavors to invent symbol systems that represent their ideas in drawing and sculpture, emphasizing the vitality that modern artists have admired in childish or "primitive" forms. Of particular interest are chapters including new information on the developmental progression in sculpture in which the author systematically compares children's representation in drawing and modeling to demonstrate the significance of medium in understanding child art. This volume will be of interest to developmental psychologists, clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, clinical psychologists who use drawings for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes, anthropologists interested in the arts, art historians, and art educators, as well as to undergraduate and graduate students in these fields.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Starting with the premise that child art ought to be studied within an ecologically meaningful context, Golumb (psychology, U. of Massachusetts-Boston) reports studies that address fundamental questions regarding the meaning and intellectual status of the childish forms; the role of internal models or mental images, the significance of the medium; motivation; and the language of child art. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

John M. Kennedy, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto, Ontario, CanadaTwentieth-Century children's drawings were a puzzle in themselves and a window into the developing mind. In this clearly written and delightfully illustrated book, Claire Golomb raises the stakes by asking how children master the third dimension in their crafting of solid models. Her work on pictures and sculpture tells us a great deal about cognition, motivation, and talent in young people.

To think is to represent, and the making of models, as Golomb shows, is a way to think and use a medium. In controlling simple media like clay and sticks, children come to master goals and tools of representational thought.

Golomb describes children's strategies for representation. Systems of symbols open to children's invention are discovered and portrayed convincingly. Children use several routes to artistic skill. Her findings about selective use of features refute ideas about children's minds as primitive or deficient. What a features denotes follows from children's purposes and a medium's flexibility. She knows that an insistence or pictorial realism misses many of the problem-solving skills of young children. What becomes clear from her research is how skillfully children select features from a medium for special uses. — John M. Kennedy

Ellen Winner, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA Senior Research Associate, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA
This fascinating study of child art from one of the world's leading experts, Claire Golomb, reviews the latest and best research on how children learn to represent through both the two-dimensional medium of drawing and the three-dimentional medium of sculpture. She addresses key questions,such as the roles of intelligence, motivation, and culture. She introduces the art of typical children, as well as that of children with mental retardation or autism and of those who are artistically talented. She compares child art to that of nonhuman primates and the earliest humans. And she takes on the controversial question of the relationship between child art and modernism.

This book makes a powerful case for viewing child art as a form of inventive problem solving rather than as a reflection of conceptual immaturity. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what research has shown about how children learn to represent through art; how culture affects the art that children produce; and the relationship of child art to animal, primitive, and modernist art. — Winner

Anna M. Kindler, PhD, Professor and Dean, School of Creative Arts, Sciences and Technology, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po Claire Golomb takes readers on a journey through pictorial worlds of children, adolescents, and adults, across time and in diverse cultural settings. She knows how universal factors in the evolution of pictorial language found a basic level of representation and eloquently argues the importance of a cultural milieu in creation and selection of representational systems that lead to the development of pictorial competence.