Does the U in the U-Curve also Stand for Universal? Reflections on Provisional Doubts (1997)

In commenting on Pariser's and van den Berg's attempt (1996) to replicate my u-curve study (1991), I begin by providing some context for my remarks. Specifically, I focus on history of my interest in notion of a u-curve as well as some thoughts on underpinnings of modernist interest in children's art. This context should help to acknowledge that recognition of young children's artistry transcends boundaries of both contemporary psychology and modern art. Against this backdrop, I begin addressing several of points raised by Pariser and van den Berg in their preliminary work and end with some suggestions for future research into cross-cultural implications of u-shaped development in graphic symbolization: future considerations of whether u of u-curve might indeed also stand for universal. I first noticed similarities between drawings of young children and artists in early '60s when I was teaching art at a summer day camp and taking drawing classes at Art Students' League in New York City. In my life drawing classes, my instructor, Thomas Fogarty, was encouraging me to loosen up-to transcend schema I had developed for recording human figures and instead keep my eye glued only to model. My arm was to be busy replicating gestalt of what I saw and experienced in my vision: gesture of human form that I encountered. The venerable artist and teacher Kimon Nicolaides, identifies gesture as the function of action, life, or expression, and writes of gesture drawings in his classic treatise, The Natural Way to Draw: They are like scribbling rather than like printing or writing carefully, as if one were trying to write very fast and were thinking more of meaning than of way thing looks, paying no attention to penmanship or spelling, punctuation or grammar... (1941, p.18) Perhaps it was my own struggle with challenge of capturing gesture that made me particularly aware of fluency that my youngest students demonstrated in their achievement of that objective. During a week-long project in which all children (ages 5-12) focused on topic of people, I was impressed that it was drawings and paintings of youngest of my students that would have most pleased Mr. Fogarty and most closely resembled work of more expert artists in his class. A concomitant recognition was that older children's drawings were more restrained and schematic. Indeed I could predict among a group of ten-year-olds that their drawings would contain replicas of same yellow suns, same straighttrunked, bubble-headed trees, and same clean line of green grass dotted with three petaled flowers. Variations included schematized representations of other themes such as bunnies, boats, and oval-bodied bees, or rocket ships. In sharing my discoveries, I claim no ownership of recognition of obvious and enviable fluency of young children's artistry and tightening constraints that come with development. I have never encountered an art teacher who does not celebrate early gift and ponder challenge of development. Interested parents are equally aware. In collection of data for study described in Drawing's Demise, several subjects' parents took me aside to commiserate about what they saw as their children's loss of early proficiency and productivity in drawing. As an art teacher, I designed exercises for children in literal stageactivities like drawing the child sitting opposite you at a table without looking at paper or drawing anything with your eyes closed. As a researcher three decades later (Davis et. al., 1993), these recollections resonated as I observed a drawing class for pre-adolescents at Children's Art Carnival in New York. The teacher called out as she walked among her 10- and 11-year-old artists at work: Only abstract drawings allowed in this class! Considering familiarity of this phenomenon, I was not surprised to learn that cognitive psychologists were aware of and intriqued by similarities between young children's drawings and those of adult artists, as well as possible loss of early gifts as a casualty of development (Gardner, 1980; Gardner & Winner, 1982). …