Snooksology

Fanny Brice, radio's famed brattish Baby Snooks, is also an ardent collector of artistic "Snooksology" -drawings and paintings by children. Like paintings by the insane, paintings by children, she believes, are often inspired by a freshness of visual impact and a perception of significant detail which other artists lose by remaining sane and growing up. Last week young & old Baltimoreans could see what Miss Brice means, at an exhibit of 41 drawings and paintings selected from more than 100 "masterpieces" by children, which for 20-odd years she has been assembling in Europe and the U.S.

The walls of the Baltimore Museum's Junior Gallery were covered by an iconography of the familiar world, seen by the children in very unfamiliar focus. Most of the pictures kept well within the bounds of childhood experience (animals, vehicles, houses, rooms) But some were well outside. One surrealist moppet had painted a huge cactus tree containing a human face, and surrounded by sunflowers surmounted by chickens and peacocks. There were three pictures of lovers on park benches. Art experts and child psychologists who were queried said that children paint such scenes because of unsatisfied curiosity: they do not understand what their subjects are doing.

The charm of many of Miss Brice's pictures was due to the children's intense observation of minutiae--the weave of fabrics, the crisp precision of leaves against the sky. Strangely enough, only one of the pictures showed an airplane, perhaps because most of the collection was assembled so long before the war.

Favorite picture with adults: an outsize rooster crowing against a farm background (see cut). Children seemed to prefer a brilliant pair of fish, one red, one blue. "Mighty fine fish," said one nine-year-old gallerygoer, "but they don't seem to be in no water."

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