Fritz's Children

Indiscriminate encouragement of the artistic impulse in children is an evil almost as lamentable as indiscriminate repression. In Vienna, Dr. Frank Cizek (TIME, Nov. 26, 1923) has a school for juvenile artists, whose work has been exhibited in the U. S. In Manhattan, Dr. H. E. Fritz, Art Director of Stuyvesant High School, conduct. a similar class. Like Dr. Cizek, Dr. Fritz has set himself to sift the authentic from the mediocre. Several hundred children, from 6 to 16, are recommended, each month, by their teachers. They are admitted to his class on trial; none but those whose abilities are exceptional are invited to continue. Those so invited are given, not instruction, but opportunity. They have their choice of media --water color, oil, crayon, charcoal, clay or soap (for sculpture). Last week, an exhibition of their work was held at the Metropolitan Museum, Manhattan.

Stale patterns of the kindergarten executed in raw colors by pudgy little fingers that might better have been occupied in making mud-pies; humpty-dumpty farmyard animals with four toothpicks and a chunk of modeling clay; naive nursery etchings--graphs of the thought-rhythms of potentially delinquent minds--these, the charivari of most children's exhibitions were notably absent. Instead, one child, 6, a musician and a draughtsman who had already given a public concert, reproduced the impression made by the auditorium upon the mind of a performing pianist--vast, silent gulfs of listening space in which the black instrument buzzed like a fly in a funnel. Another virtuoso had painted from memory his conception of a pterodactyl seen in the Natural History Museum. Hardly a drawing, a painting, a piece of sculpture, failed to reveal the record of personal experience, procured by observation, executed with sensitiveness.