Artsy coffee-table books never taught me the stuff that I learned from a few eight- and nine-year-old children during a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Take a close look, for example, at the painting called BIRTHDAY by Marc Chagall. Come near enough so that Matt Doyle, age nine, of Rye, New York, can use the oldest of pointers, his right index finger, to show you what's going on. Everyone in our little group, four kids, two parents and Joyce Raimondo, the museum's family programs coordinator, can tell that the guy in the 80-year-old painting is in love. He's floating in air, his neck pretzeled around so he can kiss the girl, levitating in a slightly lower plane.
But we need young Doyle to explain what will happen next. "So the woman falls and hurts her face on these two plates, and then the man goes crashing through the window." The interpretation is consistent with Matt's current interest in collecting artworks depicting "sports, and cars blowing up." His friend Max O'Neill, also nine, points out that the scene is clearly not realistic. Just look at that lady's right eye.
"It's sort of impossible to have eyes on the side of your head," he says, "unless you're a cow or some other vegetarian animal that eats grass and leaves."
"Did everyone hear what Max said?" Raimondo asks. "Because that was a really good idea. The eye is on the side of her head. Now what do you think it's doing there?" Hint: there is no right or wrong answer. The only thing Raimondo requests during an hour-long tour is that wherever our eyes roam, we keep them as wide as the love-struck lady's eye in the painting.
America's art museums are seeing more children than ever before. And the kids are looking harder at paintings and having more imaginative fun than they used to. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art today welcomes 25,000 schoolkids a year, 5,000 more than it did three years ago. The grand old Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City accommodates about 160,000 a year, an increase of more than 40 percent over the past five years. The increase results from a change in educational philosophy: five years ago, tour guides switched from lecturing kids in museums to listening to them.
Raimondo and other museum educators say parents can do what she does whenever they visit a museum, even if the family uses coffee-table art books back home as coasters. Her job is mainly to ask questions loudly enough so that all of us can hear, and so that some other visitors in the jammed rooms seem to think the kids are as intriguing as the classic paintings on the wall. The children themselves become a small traveling exhibition--Matt and Max, Elizabeth Buckley, nine, and Megan Hannigan, eight. Before the tour, Raimondo tells Megan's mom, Betty Jo, and me to speak up, too. "You'll let them talk, right?" she asks the four young friends. Fat chance.
As soon as we get to Van Gogh's STARRY NIGHT, it's the kids' day to take on the grand masters. "Look for a minute at the whole picture," Raimondo says, "and then let's just talk about what we see." This group doesn't need a minute. They see a windy night--you can tell because there are swirls in the sky--and a town beneath that is so small you feel as if you're in an airplane looking down at it. Elizabeth says the town looks quiet, and Megan says she'd like to live there because "it's all peaceful and it wouldn't be so noisy," and Matt says if he lived there he would ride his bike into the forest and maybe go swimming in the river. Wait a minute, what river? I wonder. Never mind. Matt and Max are off on an expedition to follow it, snaking from the hills on the right to the rapids on the left. What rapids?
As we drive home, I've got a few more concerns. What about art history? What about all the lessons I tried to teach my three kids when we visited museums? How about telling kids about the artists? Is anything wrong with this picture? In an interview later, Raimondo explains gently that school-age children are actually much more likely to learn about art and artists if in their museum visits they simply look closely at a few paintings and skip Mom and Dad's remembrances of Renoirs we have seen.
"When children look at art, they often bring their own experiences to pictures, like 'That reminds me of the time we went to the beach' or 'That looks like my grandma's house,'" Raimondo says. "They're not likely to say, 'Gee, I wonder when that picture was made.' Or, 'I'm totally interested in Cubism,' unless they are trying to please an adult." The point for parents to see, according to Raimondo and other art educators, is that art history lectures can actually limit your child's understanding of art by boring them.
Most of us adults are far more impressed with a painting's pedigree than what it means to us, according to Rika Burnham, a museum educator for the past 15 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Burnham says she was sitting in a gallery in Rochester, New York, recently when a mother led her daughter, about nine, from canvas to canvas.
"Mom was looking at labels," Burnham says. "She paused at one and said, 'Oh, look! A Rembrandt!' And then she glanced at the painting and moved on. Her daughter spent a long time squinting at the picture. Then she said, 'Mom, it's too dark to see anything.' And she was absolutely right. But her mother didn't even stop to listen to her. She was on to the next label."
The lesson is hard to learn for someone like me who grew up thinking that museums were places you did, in their entirety, usually fast--accelerating past paintings as if they were mile markers on a turnpike, just time enough to read a couple of sentences from the guidebook and murmur appreciation. But as I talked to art educators, I began to realize that my mostly grown children and I had missed something: seeing art through their eyes.
Even experts acknowledge they have had the same problem. Philip Yenawine is a partner in Development Through Art, an educational research company based in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, that trains teachers to use art to foster critical and creative thinking in their students. In the 1970s, he was one of the pioneers in devising the deceptively simple strategies Raimondo and other museum guides across the country use today.
Yenawine says he refined the techniques after making mistakes with his two children, Tad, now 26, and Rebecca, now 23. "My own enthusiasm for art drove me to drag my children to museums constantly when they were young," he says, "sometimes without complete regard for their interests. "Particularly when it came to how long they were willing to stick it out with him in the gallery. "I'd say, 'Wait a minute, we're going to do one more thing,'" he says. "And they'd say,'No, Dad, we're not going.'" Tad and Rebecca turned out all right (they're both artists), but Yenawine says that since then he's learned better ways to put kids in touch with painting. "The key is doing it for them, not for yourself," he says. Even if you're not an art expert, you can help kids feel like one from the moment they spot something that interests them.
Yenawine says that great visits to museums begin with a clear sense of how children tend to approach works of art. Research by Yenawine's partner, developmental psychologist Abigail Housen, shows that children look for stories in paintings. It's as if they enter the world of the picture and become part of an unfolding, emotional drama, Housen says.
At some point in their experience with art, people enter a second stage. Still searching for stories, they begin to judge works of art by their knowledge of the world. If a tree trunk is orange, for example, they may consider the painting weird. It isn't until a third stage, "often not until college," Yenawine says, that people begin taking an interest in art history.
Art history is a drag for most grade school kids, Yenawine says. So don't try to teach it to them. Instead, your goal on any museum trip is to encourage them to make up stories from what they see--it comes naturally to them--so they can grow at their own pace into more advanced stages of artistic understanding. Eventually, if they enjoy a rich and regular diet of good art, they'll want to learn more about who made it and when.
"History lessons go in one ear and out the other for most kids," Yenawine says. Some young students take the first steps toward their later enrollments in Art History 101 by reading biographies of the artists. In the meantime, there's no reason to hustle your kids along. "There are joys at every stage," Yenawine says.
Try to enjoy--and learn from--their reactions, says Stacy M. Miller, associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. "Parents often discover that it's much more fun to go to a museum with a kid than with adults only," she says. "Children speak from their hearts, and often go right to the core of a piece of work. Some of them can tell right away that a Van Gogh painting, for example, reveals a lot of sadness. Adults often have a much harder time seeing the emotional side of a painting."
Gurney Williams III is a freelance writer and lecturer who lives in Westchester, New York.
Photography By Jake Wyman
