Zorach and his ilk our role is that of spectator, never anything more. But the inexcusable and spontaneous scribblings which children make on sidewalks, walls, anywhere, preferably with coloured chalk, cannot be grasped until we have accomplished the thorough destruction of the world. By this destruction alone we cease to be spectators of a ludicrous and ineffectual striving and, involving ourselves in a new and fundamental kinesis, become protagonists of the child's vision.
To analyze child art in a sentence is to say that houses, trees, smoke, people, etc., are depicted not as nouns but as verbs. The more genuine child art is, the more it is, contrary to the belief of those incapable persons who are content merely to admire it, purely depictive. In denying that the child "represents" and substituting for "representation" some desperately overworked word like "expression," these people are only showing their hostility to the academies, just as when they tell us (which is true) that the bad artist is the representational artist. But, as has been sometimes pointed out, the artist who represents is bad not because he represents: he is bad because he represents something which a camera can represent better. This means that he is depicting something that is second, or rather nth, hand, which a child most distinctly is not. Consequently to appreciate child art we are compelled to undress one by one the soggy nouns whose agglomeration constitutes the mechanism of Normality, and finally to liberate the actual crisp organic squirm—the IS.
Academies are when everything included in the abstract and therefore peculiarly soggy noun Nature is accepted superficially or as a noun, and as such declined. In this case "art" is technically nothing but an important prepositional connective—Mr. Sargent's portrait OF Some One, Mr. French's statue OF Something (to take the worst painter and the worst sculptor in America)—between two nouns: an artist and a sitter (if we may make so bold as to say that Grief is it sat for Mr. French). But painting had its Cézanne, whose incredulous and otherwise energetic intelligence resented the doctrine that walking in the wake of some one who is smoking a cigar is vastly superior to smoking the cigar yourself, and by whom the academies, and. their important fattish remarks about facts by means of colours, were significantly undermined with minute sculptural shocks of chromatic truth. Insofar as to understand something is, not completely to taste or smell or hear or see or otherwise
