Childhood and Modern Art

This exhibition shows five hundred works that were aimed at the world of children and made by leading artists of the European avant-garde, especially during the period between the two World Wars. These pieces, which present a very special facet of twentieth-century art, arose from a desire to harmonise artistic concerns with new social ideas and with reformist theories of education. One might say that these artists wanted their ideas to pervade everyday activities and originate a new lifestyle, and they decided to bring children into contact with the forms and concepts of modern art so that they would become the creators of the desired transformation. The exhibition focuses on how artists approached this aim by conveying the ideas of the new art to children through the objects that were closest to them and that they trusted most: books and toys and furniture for the school and home. In general terms, the works that avant-garde artists created for children were characterised by their anti-war attitude, the introduction of areas seldom explored previously—connected with the equality of human beings, the environment, food and new forms of communication and transport—and the use of innovative artistic formulas derived from Futurism, Neo-Plasticism and Constructivism and from research into popular art and new technologies, in an attempt to achieve a language not confined to a minority, through which it would be possible to make closer contact with children. The exhibition includes items made in Italy, Holland, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Russia, countries in which the contribution of the avant-garde was seen more clearly. There are also items made in Spain during the first thirty years of the century, and work by artists such as Joan Miró, Otto Dix, Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, who occasionally impinged on the world of childhood. The exhibition is completed by a selection of examples of school architecture that more specifically reflect a collaboration between art and teaching that aimed to find the space that education required, creating—in the words of the educational theorist Maria Montessori—“a school environment and decoration that are in proportion to the child and respond to his or her need to act intelligently”.