Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Pictorial World of the ChildEllen Handler SpitzThe Pictorial World of the Child, by Maureen Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 357 pp., paper.Scholarly, informative, and impartial are adjectives that spring to mind with respect to Maureen Cox's book, The Pictorial World of the Child, a text principally but not exclusively devoted to the subject of children's drawings and to ways in which children seem to understand pictorial representations as well as create them. Because of its clarity and comprehensiveness, this book seems well-suited for classroom use. Effectively organized into a cogent selection of significant subtopics, it summarizes and presents a vast array of contributions by colleagues whose work Cox surely respects and treats in an admirably evenhanded way. Since, as she states at the beginning of her book, a serious scholarly interest in children's pictures has been with us for over a century, her task is prodigious, and she accomplishes it with grace and precision. It is perhaps to her credit that Cox does not argue passionately on one side or another of a host of thorny issues in her field about which many scholars, teachers, and theorists seem to exhibit strong one-sided views. How should art be taught to young children, for example? Should they be given total freedom or required to perform an ordered set of tasks? In every case, Cox offers her readers a panoply of perspectives and invites them to entertain the spectrum of opinion and then decide for themselves or not.The book is written, therefore, as far as I can tell, to promulgate no particular thesis of any kind. It simply is what it purports to be, namely, an overview of the field by someone who has a deep knowledge of it. It informs and educates through its systematic citation of experimental situations, test results, evaluations, neurological research, art historical material, and the like, and, while acknowledging disagreements right and left, it does not enter into philosophical debate. If one were inclined to fault the book at all, one might criticize it for this—that is, for lacking sufficient skepticism and deep questioning. But surely that would be niggardly, for nowhere does Cox state philosophizing to be her purpose in these pages. I would argue, in fact, to the contrary—that Cox underestimates herself when she states as her principal aim merely the furthering of interest in and appreciation of children's drawings (7). To my mind, she goes far beyond that modest goal to enlighten and educate her readers.Let me give some examples of Cox's treatment of controversial topics. It is arguable, for example, as to whether or not young children understand representational duality and can tell the difference between a pictured representation and the object pictured. A broad spectrum of research, claims, and beliefs are citable on both sides here, with the most up-to-date [End Page 110] scholars being persuaded that young children are far more sophisticated than we had previously thought. But conjure up, if you will, on the other side that well-known photograph in which a baby holds a picture of a clock to his ear and tries to hear it ticking. (This image, subtitled "How they read it," was printed on the jacket of Mary Calderone and Edward Steichen's The First Picture Book of 1930, which was reissued by the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1991.) After citing numerous sources and experiments, Cox equivocates as follows: "It seems that young children may know the difference between a picture and the real object it represents, but their behaviour is often confusing" (25); to me, this seems exactly right. We simply cannot accept a blanket statement meant to cover all cases, and, as with many or even most of the topics under consideration in this book, there are no definitive answers. Thus, the fact that Cox chooses to present intriguing research but leave the conclusions open seems preferable to joining sides in a spurious debate and one, perforce, with huge cultural and historical contingencies, contingencies to which indeed she pays heed from time to time...