Seeing genius

When Picasso and Klee Were Very Young: The Art of Childhood

Leslie Camhi in the Times: ... Decades earlier, when [Paul] Klee had just finished his art studies, he discovered a cache of his own childhood drawings. He described them, in a 1902 letter to his fiancée, as "the most significant" ones he had yet made. Three of those drawings are included in "When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child," an exhibition opening this weekend at the Phillips Collection in Washington.

Do childhood works by artists reveal traces of their future genius? What can the drawings of gifted children teach the viewer about the relationship between art and society? These are among the questions posed by this provocative show and its catalog, one of the first contemporary museum exhibitions to approach children's art from an aesthetic perspective.

"I wanted people to ask themselves to what extent the criteria they use to look at children's drawings is the imposition of an adult eye," said Jonathan Fineberg, a scholar of modern and contemporary art who organized the exhibition. "It's not just that Picasso could render well, because you could teach anybody to do that." The catalog has a startlingly lifelike drawing of a dog by the 5-year-old Edwin Landseer; he grew up to become not Picasso, but a maudlin academic painter.

Picasso's childhood drawing "Bullfight and Pigeons," which is in the show, features realistic-looking birds (a specialty of his father, the painter José Ruiz Blasco). But that's not what makes it remarkable, Mr. Fineberg argues; it's the 9-year-old Picasso's confident, playful scribble that defines the crowd in the corrida's background.

"It's not about skill," Mr. Fineberg said. "It's about unique qualities of seeing. That's what makes Picasso a better artist than Andrew Wyeth. Art is about a novel way of looking at the world."

Hmm, does this mean a genius artist would be able to spot his/her peer easier than the rest of us? Or, can seeing be entirely selfish?

If you came across budding genius, would you be able to tell--or would you just wad it up and throw it away?

I guess it depends on whether genius is always present, whether nascent or mature; or, unnurtured by individuals or unappreciated by society, what could be termed genius simply is odd. If our world was colorblind, would anything by George Seurat hang in museums?

To the extent American society circa 2006 definitely has some level of blinders on, what are we missing? What 'childish' scriblings are habitually dismissed out of hand? How much richer would our lives be if we could see things that don't grab us by the throat?

Or is quiet genius an oxymoron, and not worth the effort by the rest of us? Does everyone quail when they first 'get' Shakespeare, overcome by his density? Is there any genius that is not inherently intimidating at least to those who understand it? Isn't that what genius is--a line etched into sand, before and after, murky and clear, less and more, over which at first we fear to step?

Does the world depend on a replenished supply of geniuses, dragging or uplifting humanity along with him/her over previously unassailable (or unseen) peaks--or does a genius just locally distort time, by a few years/decades/centuries?

Are geniuses indictments of the rest of us?

Image of 9-year-old Picasso's 1890 "Bullfight and Pigeons" and 6-year-old Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's "Carriage, Cows and Horses" via the Times. No word on who named the works.