Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> This book (and the exhibition it became in Munich and Bern in 1995) began more than a decade ago when the Detroit Institute of Arts asked my teacher and friend Rudolf Arnheim who by then had retired from Harvard to Ann Arbor to curate an exhibition comparing children’s art with great works of modern art. He sent them to me and they eventually dropped out of the project. But after getting over my initial skepticism I was hooked. Indeed following out Arnheim’s intuitive lead proved to be the most exciting journey into art history I have ever undertaken. I went first to the prewar works of Kandinsky on which I had written my doctoral dissertation. Looking at Kandinsky’s first abstractions of 1909-14 with this question in mind I recognized a range of reference to child styles of render- ing that made me certain the artist must have studied children’s art in detail. He simply knew too much about it! There were of course passages in his art theory that pointed to this but like everyone else I hadn’t taken them seriously enough. (MP)