Changing Scenes of Childhood

The holiday season is always a time when millions of Americans become doubly aware of the children in their midst. Stores, parks and theaters stage special displays and performances; so do museums and art galleries. In another sense, American children have been present in the realm of art all through 1968. The year has seen the emergence of an unusually large number of youngsters' portraits (see color pages). When taken together, these kaleidoscopic scenes of childhood tell an engrossing tale of the changing place of children in American life.

The Small Adults. In frontier times, every couple hoped for a host of children, both for company's sake in the wilderness and because many hands made light work--in the kitchen and on the farm. By the same token, children themselves were often thought of and treated as small adults. They were expected to milk cows or bake bread along with grown-ups and dress up for church on Sundays. The young Girl in Red, painted around 1838 by the upstate New York primitive portraitist, Ammi Phillips, has every hair and ruffle of her best dress in place, even though she still clings to her favorite white cat like any century's six-year-old.

As factories began to sprout, families migrated in ever-increasing numbers to mill towns and cities. While many impoverished boys and girls had to work in factories, most of middle America shaped itself into the image Mark Twain recorded. Childhood became a life apart. Bored with school, boys searched on the outskirts of town for amusement after hours, dreamed of living like Huck Finn, and this seemingly idyllic existence was celebrated in popular books and parlor paintings. But the more perceptive artists and writers--including Mark Twain--knew that idle hours were not altogether perfect ones.

Winslow Homer, a lonely youngster himself, was very likely remembering his own childhood when he painted Children on the Beach in 1873, by then an established artist of 37 spending the summer at Gloucester, Mass. It projects a mood of drowsy holidays and wistful dreams, but epitomizes in oil Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's notion that the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Silky and Remote. In the sentimental 19th century, motherhood was idealized even more than boyhood, and the reputation of Philadelphia's Mary Cassatt rests largely on the dozens of canvases she did celebrating it. The pictures shine with her own inimitably silken palette, but at the same time they seem to latter-day eyes extraordinarily impersonal, extremely withdrawn and posed. Though Child's Caress portrays a particularly winsome moment, with big sister planting a kiss on baby sister's cheek, the woman in it seems remote. She could almost be the maid, a paid model or a maiden aunt. Perhaps there is a reason: Cassatt had no children of her own. A wealthy spinster, she migrated to France in 1874 and became a member of the Impressionist circle largely through the sponsorship of Edgar Degas. "It has all your qualities and all your faults," said Degas, looking at one of her compositions. "It is the Infant Jesus and his English nanny."

Lyrics Amid Tenements. The 20th century's jungle of big cities has been harsh on children. One of the few painters who found lyricism amid the tenements was Jerome Myers, a Virginian who came to New York in 1886 at the age of 19, and for the next 54 years painted the street festivals, hurdy-gurdies and playgrounds of the Lower East Side. Though a well-known figure in Greenwich Village circles before World War I, Myers is all but forgotten today. His flowerlike slum children deserve to be better remembered. "Curiously enough," he once remarked, "my contemplation of these humble lives opened to me the doors of fancy. The factory clothes, the anxious faces disappear. They come to me in gorgeous raiment of another world--a decorative world of fancy like an abstract vision."

New York has changed a lot from the city Myers knew, but some painters still see abstract visions in its children. Will Barnet, 57, has in the past 18 years established a following for his semicubist abstract compositions. Three years ago, he switched to representational painting. His portrait of his daughter, Ona, playing C.P.E. Bach in the yellow morning sunlight betrays Barnet's years of abstract schooling by the sharp purity of its line and the muscular flatness of the composition.

Alice Neel, 59, on the other hand, is an artist who determinedly forswears the abstract for the particular, not to say the peculiar. She paints neurasthenic portraits of tired-looking hippies, scrunched-up museum curators and tense Park Avenue housewives. Her deliberately crude technique makes each picture a devastating microcosm of all that is both magnificent and maddening about the megalopolis of Manhattan. Yet perhaps, her cosseted, uneasy little children are the most unforgettable. Young Sam Gardner, the son of a New York sugar trader, and incidentally, a grandnephew of the late Ernest Hemingway, would pose for her only while watching TV. His eyes in the portrait are watching still--the eyes of a two-year-old who has seen an awful lot he does not understand.

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