The Modern Masters collected children's art, copied it and used it as inspiration.
Naif is captivated by how modern artists have been impacted by children’s artwork. By recognizing the depth of their appreciation, we have developed a fresh curiosity about what our own children do and how we understand it.
The following artists reflect a sample of the lasting effect that children’s artwork has left on the artistic canon. Click on each name to learn more.
Pablo Picasso
Wassily Kandinsky
Gabriele Münter
Henri Matisse
Mark Rothko
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jasper Johns
“I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child.”
-Pablo Picasso
Picasso’s sketches for Guernica were very childlike and led to one of his most important pieces. In The Study of a Horse, one can see that Picasso imitated the approach of a six year old. Picasso explored the creativity of children in an effort to comprehend, and stimulate, his own creativity.
Without exception, in each child's drawing the inner sound of the subject is revealed automatically.
-Wassily Kandinsky
Kandinsky began collecting children’s drawings with Gabriele Münter and amassed roughly 250 drawings and paintings on paper. Children’s drawings appeared often in the collective exhibitions in which Kandinsky participated.
Some particularly striking examples of the seriousness with which Gabriele Münter studied child’s artwork are the copies she made of paintings of houses.
“…[t]he artist… has to look at life as he did when he was a child and if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, personal way.”
- Henri Matisse
With Marguerite, Matisse deliberately emulated a child’s style, titling his retrospective “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child”.
Rothko’s interest in children’s art was recognized by the critics, “The artist has taught children for many years, and one feels that they in turn have helped to make him see and feel with their own simplicity and instinct for truth.”
“I like kids' work better than real artists' work any day."
-Jean-Michel Basquiat
To Jean-Michel Basquiat it seemed natural to collaborate with children and, at one point, he even hired an eight year old, at twenty dollars a drawing, to sketch motifs such as a fishing pole in The Revised Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta (1983) and the Empire State Building in his painting Empire (1980).
One of the most intriguing examples of the ongoing interest among artists today in the art of children is the use Jasper Johns has made of a drawing by a child.