Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915 by Marilynn Strasser Olson (review)

Contemporary art instruction, production, and criticism take place in a global context, enabling artists to learn from each other and to share techniques, philosophies, and materials, often within a digital environment and at a rapid pace. The cultural and technological forces that have combined to bring about such an international, interdependent, and fluid art scene have their origin in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the hegemony of the major art academies in London and Paris, long the guardians of a highly nationalistic and technically rigid set of practices, faced challenges from every quarter. Conquest in Africa and the "opening" of Japan led to the importation of artifacts, many of which eschewed the sort of realism current at the time within European art circles. The flood of scientific discovery called into question assumptions regarding the natural world, and exploration into human psychology encouraged artists to turn inward for inspiration. The rise of various artistic schools, grouped under the umbrella term "avant-garde," was propelled by artists, writers, and thinkers who embraced these new influences.

Marilynn Strasser Olson's Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde focuses on the literary and visual production of artists whose careers unfolded during or just after La Belle Époque, and whose work is characterized by an interest in childhood. Beginning with the populist and culturally inflected Golliwog picture books produced for a child audience by Florence and Bertha Upton, and concluding with an examination of Marc Chagall's use of his own childhood memories as the foundation for such masterpieces as I and the Village, Olson demonstrates that child culture played a significant role in the aesthetic and intellectual development of artists affiliated with the Parisian avant-garde.

Olson's introduction provides an effective history of the avant-garde in Paris, as well as a delineation of prevailing fin-de-siècle attitudes toward childhood and children. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's privileging of childhood innocence as an antidote to the perceived evils of industrialization, John Ruskin's theory that an art movement's finest period "belonged to its childhood," and the widely held belief that primitive art emerged from the supposedly childlike mind of the subaltern subject point to the manner in which European artists apprehended and processed childhood and children's culture into their philosophies and practices (13-14). By featuring the work of both French nationals and artists of other nationalities who studied in Paris, Olson represents "some of the diversity of class, gender, and nationality resident in the city during its fin-de-siècle years of preeminence," underscoring the idea that the "avant-garde had a richness of invention and idiosyncrasy at the turn of the century that, in itself, is worthy of celebration" (15).

In the chapters that follow her introduction, Olson considers both the manner in which the avant-garde sensibility entered the realm of children's book illustration via the work of Florence Upton and William Nicholson, and how child culture intersected with the realm of avant-garde paintings produced by Henri Rousseau, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall. Her approach underscores the interrelatedness of the two categories; however, her choice of chapter arrangement, presented without a specified rationale, compels the reader to decipher many of the connections without overt guidance. The use of an organizational structure grouping the children's illustrators together to demonstrate their collective impact on twentieth-century children's literature, or one grouping artists together through their philosophical commonalities, might have been helpful, but this criticism is a minor one regarding a study that otherwise reflects Olson's extensive knowledge of both art history and child culture.

Olson's discussion of Upton highlights a strain of early twentieth-century children's literature illustration that tapped into an avant-garde fascination with the so-called primitive and the grotesque, elements that had appeared before in Carroll and Tenniel's Alice books but were...