Art and Data: Children’s Mark-Making and Modernity

Spare and careful, or lush and jumbled, the children’s drawing seems to speak without fear or discrimination. Its beauty stems in part from the immediacy of its communication strategy—its raw energy—and in part from its minimalism. Arcs that can be both hill and the hump of a letter “b” rise and roll, repetitions and improvisations crowding one another. Lines that may one day form the spines of t’s and r’s wobble then straighten as the artist presses harder, colors billowing about the arcs and lines like summer clouds. Broken, dull crayons testify to elemental and often unremarked lessons artists learn about the relationship between pressure and uniformity, the many ways marking tools meet surface. What meaning the marks may serve is held, at least briefly, in abeyance. For now it is enough, for both viewer and maker, to see forms emerge.

While broad-based cultural critiques have sought to reconnect the institutional organization of knowledge with the mechanics of cultural production overall, little direct correlation has been made between the emergence of drawing as a common occupation of childhood, the scientific study of children’s drawing, and the use of so-called “naïf” motifs—including imitations of children’s script and figures—in twentieth-century children’s picture books. As part of that larger project, in this essay I explore the mutating role of children’s mark-making in scientific and cultural discourses in industrialized Europe and America, focusing on competing conceptions of mark-making: first, drawing as a complex middle-class attainment and second, drawing as an artless impulse—one that reveals the inner life of beings whose verbal abilities are uncertain. The iconography of children’s mark-making becomes common in twentieth-century children’s picture books because modern philosophers and scientists focus upon it and interpret it with frequency and persistence. In their introduction to The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley write that “literary representations of children and childhood are not isolated aesthetic artifacts but cultural productions that in turn affect social climates” (6). We can also say that scientific studies of childhood are not isolated utilitarian artifacts; they too leave marks on culture.

Children’s literature critics frequently encounter interpretive problems related to history and cultural studies because the objects they study— stories, essays, and poems—interact with toys, clothes, and parenting manuals in processes of childhood identity formation. Such individual development processes, as I will prove in this essay, bear directly and indirectly on civilizational identity formation. Books, toys, and educational tools are artificial, mass-produced objects that often seem at odds with the Romantic ideals of childhood, belief in children’s innocence and the spontaneous beauty they create when they are freed from adult constraints. Because of that Romantic definition of childhood, many are inclined to view children’s artifacts as unmediated by cultural forces.

This perception also owes much to the adult tendency to view visual texts in general as lesser forms of expression than verbal texts. In Words about Pictures, Perry Nodelman explains that throughout most of the twentieth century, critics viewed the illustrations in children’s book as random, simplistic, or “purely educational,” and therefore not subject to aesthetic principles (2–5). Yet just as children’s literature is not as simple or unmediated as it seems to some audiences, children’s artifacts are not simple or unmediated. Historicizing children’s artifacts provides a means of understanding many visual features of children’s literature. This analysis allows viewers to appreciate more fully the depictions of children as artist-creators in works that span decades such as Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1948) and G. Brian Karas’ The Class Artist (2001). It makes intelligible the increasing reliance on crayon-textured images and scripts by artists like Marc Simont in The Big World and the Little House (Krauss 1949), Chris Van Allsburg in Bad Day at Riverbend (1995), David Shannon in his David series (1998, 1999, and 2002) or Peter Holwitz in Scribbleville (2005). This line of inquiry even adds a...