Teaching Art to the Young
Paul quoted me someone famous (probably himself) as having said that, with children, all you can hope to do is praise art in front of them and cross your fingers that, eventually, it all sinks in. I’m sure there’s plenty more written about this, as five seconds on Google already reveals such impossibly tedious pedagogical advice as this. At any rate, here’s Proust weighing in with support to the patient approach:
I liked finding [the moon’s] image again in paintings and books, but these works of art were quite different - at least during the early years, before Bloch accustomed my eyes and my mind to subtler harmonies - from those in which the moon would seem beautiful to me today and in which I would have recognized it then. It might be, for example, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre in which it stands out distinctly against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works which were naively incomplete, like my own impressions, and which it angered my grandmother’s sisters to see me enjoy. They thought that one ought to present to children, and that children showed good taste in enjoying right from the start, those works of art which, once one has reached maturity, one will admire forever after. The fact is that they probably regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one’s needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one’s own heart.
- SW, Davis trans., p. 150.
And here’s a painting by Gleyre with a moon in it (like an actress in plainclothes, watching incognito from the audience?). Poor Gleyre; so naive. And just as another note, my current approach to reading this goddam book, which involves having to stop every other paragraph and blog about it before my heart explodes, is really slow-going.
-db-
