Can We Understand Children's Understanding of Art?

Empirical studies of "children's theories of art" are not numerous and are barely comparable with each other due to the differences in the subjects' age range, the kind of data collected and, above all, in the definitions of art assumed by operational criteria for data collection (see Butterworth, 1977; Freeman, 1995; Gardner & Winner, 1976; Goodnow et al., 1986; Taunton 1980); and there have been few, if any, attempts to examine children's abilities to modify their drawings according to their ideas on art. In searching for new procedures to approach these problems,we carried out a qualitative study with 16 subjects (ages 9 to 13 years old), who were examined from a variety of points of view: production of drawings with "communicative" vs. "artistic" goals, judgement of conventional and unconventional drawings, in-depth interviews on artistic merit and subjective appreciation of pictures by Miro and Chagall, with different degrees of visual realism. Results show the extreme difficulties in bringing children to transpose their ideas on art into their own pictorial productions (even if tentatively), while their reasoning on selected stimuli, both ordinary drawings and artistic paintings with different degrees of realism, appears as a viable access to their implicit theories about art and possibly their cultural sources.