Drawing in Crayon

How embarrassed would you be on a scale of one to ten if your mother sealed drawings you made in primary school into envelopes for posterity and they were then put on display? I think I’m at a solid 8/10. But if someone in the Guardian said they were ‘really accomplished’? Maybe a 6. 

 

The Lucian Freud Archive contains over six hundred drawings by Lucian Freud compiled in forty-seven sketchbooks. Along with correspondence, fan mail, receipts, and art supplies, there is also a whole slew of art created whilst Freud was between the ages of five and ten, which travelled to Britain with the family in 1933 as they fled Nazism. There’s a room in the National Portrait Gallery dedicated to a permanent display showcasing these materials. 

 

I visited the exhibition twice in the last year. Both times, I approached his childhood art with cynicism. I found something deeply comical about the drawings in their current context: flourishes of a child’s mind displayed in pristine glass cases, cave paintings in primary colours. Venerating plaques detailed their relevance to Freud’s later works. Walking amongst the displays in room twenty-six, I sneered, and elbowed my friend as we made snide remarks, all along the lines of ‘a child made that.’ 

 

At the time, I felt that the curation of children’s art was a bit silly. The work depended on a fallacy: that it was possible identify latent, untapped talent in juvenilia. Juvenilia is by definition work of poor(er) quality (than later work). Before me was a collection of doodles made by a child, collected under a false banner of untapped genius.  

 

I left the exhibition, but its contents—ironically unlike the contents of other exhibitions, created by adults, which I was convinced were therefore more meaningful—continued to rattle around in my brain. Usually, we dispose of children’s art or use it as a temporary fridge ornament. Why, then, did these drawings deserve glass cases, which seemed to transform the child’s art into cultural artefact? 

 

When Hollywood wants to signal a family home, they fridge-magnet red, yellow, and blue crayon drawings to a fridge. When Catherine Opie wanted to signal her divorce, she turned her back into a fridge.  

 

Judie Bamber carved into Opie’s flesh with a scalpel to create ‘Self-Portrait/Cutting’ (1993). The photographed result depicts two smiling stick figures in skirts beside a house. A jejune sun peeps out from behind a cloud. Blood dribbles down the wall of the house, clouding the straight lines. In an interview with Tank Magazine, Opie says she liked the ‘kindergarten awkwardness’ of ‘somebody who has never cut anybody before.’  

 

There’s a rugged, puerile delight in the piece. The juxtaposition of flesh, blood and pain against the juvenile family portrait emphasises the innocence of the image and the violence of its creation. That Opie gave a scalpel to an adult in order to imitate a child with a pencil seemed pivotal. It suggested the power of the child to create boldly, a power that was nostalgic and moving.  

 

My resistance to children’s art, to the child as artist, began to thaw. I felt I’d missed something vital in failing to recognise the same childish charm of Opie’s piece in the Freud archive. Surely there must be a far more authentic type of ‘kindergarten awkwardness’, one created by an actual child? 

 

On a whim of sheer curiosity, and as eager penance for my earlier dismissal, I decided to spend a day studying materials from the Lucian Freud Archive, located inside the Heinz Archive and Library on Orange Street. On arrival, I was shown to a trolley full of white folders—facsimiles of Freud’s sketchbooks—and one grey box.   

 

Inside the box the childhood drawings lay between plastic wallets. There were quite a lot of absent drawings, chosen for new exhibitions, their absence marked by white postcards. I went chronologically, or as chronologically as I could, wondering about the absent drawings and what made them more valuable to be selected than the drawings I was currently looking at. I pictured a curator sifting through these folders, looking for something specific.  

 

Before I visited, I’d read online that the childhood drawings are ‘accomplished’. I had thought that was a bit hyperbolic until I saw the drawings, most of which had none of the ‘kindergarten awkwardness’ I was expecting. 

 

I’d never seen a child draw with such confidence, filling up the whole page. There were detailed portraits of battleships in almost militaristic detail. City landscapes with little Lowry-esque blob-humans going about their daily lives. Around the age of ten, it seems Freud got really into flowers and leaves, even these are imbued with an architectural edge. If there was a sky, there was a bird flying in it. Over and over, Freud signs his name as ‘LUX’. Each letter is stark, made with possessive pencil strokes. 

 

On the back of many childhood drawings appears the hand of Freud’s mother, Lucie Freud. She dates Lucian’s drawings and adds details about their composition in ornate letters. These additions were immensely endearing, so thoughtfully and attentively made. Tenderness bled through the page. It’s often said that Lucian dedicated four thousand hours to painting Lucie. I’ve yet to see anyone mention that Lucie too dedicated four thousand hours to sitting for Lucian. 

 

Freud’s diaristic writing in the adult sketchbooks is chaotic and unbalanced compared to his mother’s careful labels. In a square-paper sketchbook, Freud records what appears to be the oscillations of romantic love: ‘I love you enough but the way you are to me how can I believe in you?’ and ‘it gets me down and down what emerges is this: you don’t much love me.’ It makes me want to cry. Freud also frequently uses his adult sketchbooks to draft letters. He writes: ‘I read your letter and its much too clear in the way feelings are not. (and can never be.).’ Freud’s thoughts, side by side with his mother’s captions on the childhood drawings, create a stark contrast between the ease and lightness of childhood and the complexity of adult life and emotions.  

 

Closing the last of the twenty folders, I realise that I’d mistaken the purpose of curating children’s art entirely. Who cares whether these drawings were able to locate future genius, when they achieved something so much more worthwhile: unfiltered emotion, unfettered imagination, nostalgia bubbling up from the pages, as fierce as the stamp of LUX’s name.  

 

Earlier, I asked what makes children’s art worthy of curation. I described how the glass display case transforms children’s art into a cultural artefact. I’m still critical of the veneration of children’s art, but having now spent time with Freud’s childhood art, I can see that my questions completely misunderstood the point of curating children’s art. Which not only recaptures the innocence of childhood and creates a vehicle to experience our own nostalgia, but also, in the case of Freud’s childhood drawings, allows unparalleled access to an immensely endearing mother-child relationship, reconstructed across the span of hundreds of drawings in coloured pencil.