Kid Stuff

Never was art more "modern." Some of the pictures were mere dabs, streaks and splashes of color; others showed impossible animals and people with grinning Balloon heads on stick bodies wobbling up out of knee-high skyscrapers. There were "abstractions" made of pasted scraps and bits of string; portraits of black-mustached papas; princesses sitting between curtains of golden hair; fish flying over ocean liners; a pink & purple Christmas tree, and multicolored cowboys lassoing long-horned swirls of mud. Yet few visitors to the show in Manhattan's Museum of Natural History last week indignantly asserted that their kids could do better. Kids, 6 to 14, had done it.

The 250 pictures had the sort of eye-widening freshness which modern artists are apt to try for and miss (as these same kids would, a few years later). Three Men under Williamsburg Bridge, by ten-year-old Walter Kmeta, looked like a Mondrian abstraction--and had more life in it. Yvonne Grogan's black & white Landscape had a sense of balance that a trapeze artist might envy. Hypo and Little Hypo, by Brooklyn's John Pietrowski, 8, for all its blots and blotches, was a study of mother love. Almost all the pictures, selected from 42 New York City settlement-house art classes, had obviously been painted for fun. The best of them will be sent to Paris in May, for an international festival of children's painting.

One reason the show soared: there was never a message to weigh it down. Children, no matter how solemn, seldom worry about what their paintings mean; they are too busy deciding how the pictures should look. Grownups can bother their heads about the meaning--and some do. In a book published last week (Painting and Personality, University of Chicago; $10), Psychologists Rose Alschuler and La Berta Hattwick read some big meanings into little dabblings. Among them: emotionally well-adjusted little children incline to paint free, open forms, in warm colors. Unhappy ones often choose cold colors (especially black), paint tightly enclosed designs. Easygoing kids draw lots of curves; aggressive ones prefer straight lines. Children seem to connect blue with conscious control (most of them choose it for lettering), and red with their strongest feelings.

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