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Teaching art versus teaching taste: What art teachers can

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Article  in  Poetics · December 2001

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 Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350
www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic

Teaching art versus teaching taste: what art

teachers can learn from looking at a cross-
cultural evaluation of children’s art§
David Parisera,*, Axel van den Bergb
a
Concordia University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1MG
b
McGill University, Canada

Abstract
In this article we extend our work on the limitations of the Gardner and Winner U-curved
artistic development hypothesis [Gardner, Howard, Winner, Ellen, 1982. First intimations of
artistry. In: Strauss, S. (Ed.), U-shaped Development. Academic Press, New York, pp. 147–
168]. In our previous work we have cast serious doubt on the supposed universal validity of
that thesis by showing that non-Western judges do not necessarily assess the aesthetic merits
of a given set of drawings in the same way as do the Western judges used in the research
allegedly supporting the U-curve hypothesis. While we were able almost perfectly to replicate
the characteristic U-curve using Western judges—with drawings made by very young children
ranked almost as highly as those of mature artists—Chinese-educated judges assessing the
same sample of drawings produced an upward-sloping curve in which the drawings of the
youngest children ranked lowest. In this article we begin to explore the reasons behind this
apparent inter-cultural difference in aesthetic judgement. On the basis of hints from a recent
pilot study as well as from what is known about characteristic differences between Western
and Chinese cultural standards, we hypothesize that the difference between the Western and
Chinese judges’ evaluations in our earlier study might be due to differences in their apprecia-
tion of the degree of graphic skill displayed in the drawings they were asked to assess.
Whereas Westerners with an art-education background are likely to be steeped in a Modernist
aesthetic which values unspoilt originality above all else and which tends to downgrade

§
Acknowledgement. Support for some of the research was provided in part by the Concordia Uni-
versity Faculty Research Development Program. Support was also provided by the Spencer Foundation
Small Grants Program. We are grateful for a number of helpful comments and suggestions made on ear-
lier versions of this paper by participants in the First International Conference on Cultural Policy
Research, Bergen, Norway, November 10–12, 1999 and by the anonymous referees of this journal. The
data presented, the statements made and the views expressed in this article are solely the responsibility of
the authors.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Pariser).

0304-422X/01/$ - see front matter # 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0304-422X(01)00032-8
332 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

technical skill, Chinese culture reputedly values skill and technique as necessary pre-condi-
tions for artistic expression. In order to test this hypothesis we had independent judges score
each drawing in the sample according to the relative amount of graphic skill it displayed. We
then correlated the skill scores with the aesthetic evaluations of our initial Western and Chi-
nese-educated judges. The results provide moderate support for our hypothesis. The Chinese-
educated judges’ assessments are consistently more strongly correlated with level of graphic
skill than those of the Western judges. While the Western judges did appear to appreciate skill
as a part of the aesthetic value of a drawing, they did so only for the drawings produced by
adolescent and adult artists. Their assessment of the work of non-artists did not appear to
have anything to do with the skill level shown. The Chinese-educated judges, by contrast,
seemed to hold skill in higher esteem than the Western judges and did so across all age/skill
groups. # 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: The theory of U-curved Aesthetic development

In the West, a number of high-profile Modernist artists and art teachers early in
this century began to look favorably at the work of young children, and in many
cases to use it as a model for their own works (see Fineberg, 1997). At some level, it
was assumed that the connections made by the Modernist artists were ‘‘true’’ and
‘‘natural’’. In fact, admirers of children’s imaginative life as far back as Baudelaire
had noted the kinship between childhood and genius. Such views could not fail to
have an impact on art teaching practice (see Malvern, 1988). Not only were children
admired as original visual artists who owed nothing to threadbare and stifling tra-
dition, children’s graphics were perceived by such major figures as New York
abstract artist Motherwell (1970) as displaying a universal visual language: ‘‘In
painting, the small children of the world have a language even more universal than
sexuality...a language of rudimentary but beautiful signs...with which they construct
a completely adequate...picture of the universe...’’ (25). Motherwell goes on to make
an explicit case for the ‘‘universal’’ applicability of abstract and child art: ‘‘Part of
the enterprise of modern art is to strip away from painting the costumes, the mas-
querades, the status symbols of church and state and politics—hence its so-called
abstraction, which is actually a ...universalism. This universalism is not unparallel to
that of small children, as when the French Fauves and German Expressionists began
to paint more and more directly, colorfully, immediately and expressively...’’ (26–
27).
Not surprisingly, art educators (Lowenfeld, 1947) and art historians (Fineberg,
1997), too, have come to encourage and to note aesthetic correspondences between
young children’s art work and that of adult artists (Malvern, 1988). In fact, the
earliest mention of such a connection occurs in the 19th Century. The Romantic
artist and art educator Rudolf Topfer (1848, cited in Fineberg, 1997), claims that
‘‘[t]here is less difference between Michelangelo the child scribbler (gamin griffoneur)
and Michelangelo the immortal artist, than between Michelangelo after having
become an immortal artist and Michelangelo while still an apprentice’’ (6). That is
to say, the Renaissance giant at the height of his powers has more in common with
 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 333

himself as a child than he does with himself as an adolescent apprentice. In other

words, there is something about mature artistry that transcends mere skill and dex-
terity, a ‘‘something’’ that is also apparent in early childhood art work that is still
unadulterated by technique.
It was, however, not until Gardner and Winner (1982) formulated the relationship
between child art and adult art as a testable hypothesis, that it became possible to
examine this claim a little more objectively. Gardner and Winner (1982) proposed
that over the course of children’s graphic development, there was a period in late
infancy when most children produced visual art works with many of the aesthetic
merits of great Modernist art. By late childhood (8–9 years), however, these same
children’s graphic works became crabbed, conventional and, in a word, lifeless. A
decade earlier, Motherwell (1970) had sadly made the same observation: ‘‘One of the
most baffling problems in art education is what we grown-ups do, or what children
do to themselves, so that their universal language disappears at a later age even
more rapidly than it begins...’’ (25). According to Gardner and Winner, this trajec-
tory from initial aesthetic flowering to early demise, describes the case of most
‘‘ordinary’’ children.
But for some few children, say Gardner and Winner, those destined in some cases
for adult artistic careers, the work regains aesthetic vigor. The whole pattern, from
the initial flowering of aesthetic qualities to the occasional resurgence of the same
qualities in the work of a few older children, Gardner dubs the U-curved trajectory in
graphic development, similar to U-curved development observed in other cognitive
domains (Strauss, 1982). There has been empirical research which appears to con-
firm the existence of the U-curved aesthetic trajectory (Davis, 1991). As well, there
has been some cautious speculation that this U-shaped phenomenon may occur
wherever children explore the visual arts, that is, that it is a cross-cultural phenom-
enon (Davis, 1997a).
The Gardner/Winner theory has not gone unchallenged. A number of art educa-
tors, most notably Duncum (1986), Korzenik (1995), Wilson (1997) and Wilson and
Wilson (1981), suggest that the U-curve is largely due to the Modernist tastes (as
expressed by Motherwell for example) of the psychologists who designed the
experimental research into aesthetic development. The putative decline in aesthetic
quality is a crucial issue from the point of view of educational practice. If it is the
case that the works of young children and mature artists do in fact share many
important traits, then there will most certainly be implications for teaching art. And
if this artistic kinship between adult and child is true of development in the arts in all
cultures, then such a universal phenomenon will have major implications for teach-
ing art everywhere. If, on the other hand, the relationship is purely a function of
time, place and mores (what we refer to as ‘‘taste’’), then art teachers will have to
look elsewhere for universal pedagogical guidelines.
To date, the critics of Gardner and Winner have limited themselves to arguments and
theoretical considerations, not empirical counter-evidence. We have begun, in work
reported elsewhere (Pariser and van den Berg, 1997a,b) to present some empirical evi-
dence directly addressing this issue. In this paper, we take a further step in assessing
the theory by providing an empirically based explanation for our earlier findings.
334 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

2. Our findings thus far

Davis (1991, 1997a) set about showing the plausibility of Gardner and Winner’s
hypothesis. Using drawings made by 140 Boston-area children and adults—artists as
well as non-artists—and using judges with training in the Fine Arts, Davis attempted a
direct test of the existence of the U-curve in aesthetic development. Subjects were
asked to perform an open-ended drawing task. The judges were trained to use a scor-
ing protocol specifically designed for this purpose. It turned out that the scores awar-
ded to the drawings by the two judges indicated significant aesthetic parallels between
the drawing responses of the group of 5-year old children and the drawings of artistic
adolescents and adult artists. The drawings of the intermediate age-groups, on the
other hand, scored on average significantly lower on Davis’ scale than did those of the

Fig. 1. Davis’ original U-curve.

 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 335

5-year olds and the artists. Thus, Davis (1991) was able to present a direct empirical
demonstration for the existence of a U-curve in aesthetic development (see Fig. 1).1
But for all its initial persuasiveness, Davis’ demonstration did not directly address
the major objection raised by the critics of the U-curve theory mentioned earlier.
After all, since her test was conducted with North American subjects and judges
trained in the current North American Fine Arts tradition, there remains the distinct
possibility that her results were due as much to the North American judges’ Moder-
nist proclivities as to anything intrinsic in the nature of the drawings they were asked
to assess. To really address this issue, one would have to try and replicate her find-
ings in a non-North American cultural milieu. Only such a replication, or its failure,
might provide empirical evidence for or against the critical charge of Modernist bias.
With these considerations in mind, we decided to try to replicate Davis’ results
with drawings and judges taken from the Montreal Chinese community. We chose
Chinese culture and artistic training as a test case because it is reputed to be mark-
edly different from contemporary Western art training and supposedly embodies
aesthetic and social values other than those inculcated in the West (Gardner, 1989;
Winner, 1989; Reed, 1993). Of particular interest for our purposes is the fact that
among the allegedly overriding Chinese values are notions about children, their role,
and the role that parents and teachers should play in education. These views con-
trast markedly with recent Western traditions. As Kinney (1995), for instance, puts
it in her introduction to an art historical examination of Chinese views of childhood,
‘‘...we find not only the prevailing notion that childhood is a phase of human
development which is not valued for its own merits, but also, simultaneously, a deep
reverence for the intellectual and moral potential of the child, which required
development through education.... Our sources also suggest a general tendency to
place a high premium on juvenile precocity, self-control and studiousness and a
correspondingly dim view of play and unrestrained activity...’’ (12). Given such dif-
ferences in attitude towards children and their education, comparing Chinese to
Western judges’ assessments of children’s as compared to artists’ drawings would
provide a good test of the universality of the aesthetic criteria proposed by Gardner
and Winner and operationalized by Davis.
We should hasten to add that we are in no way assuming any perfect homogeneity
of either Chinese or Western values in matters of aesthetics or education, much less
any hermetically sealed contrast between them. As Andrews (1998a) no doubt
rightly notes, ‘‘[t]he actuality of China’s 20th century cultural history is that in the
second half of the 20th century and particularly in the People’s Republic in the Post-
Mao period, modernism, socialist realism, postmodernism, and various forms of
traditionalism coexist, competing and interacting in ways that bear little relationship
to the history of Western art. The pluralism of Chinese art today in which compet-
ing trends of the first half of the 20th Century have met the fragmentation of the
contemporary art world, make it injudicious to predict the appearance of any unify-

1
‘‘Mean scores’’ are simply the average scores for each judge-pair. These are expressed as a percentage
of the maximum score possible so as to standardize the Figures.
336 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

ing trend’’ (9). Nevertheless, as we understand it, the dominant influence on Chinese
art is still an awareness of an ancient pedigree and of the values and mores of the
culture at large. Which is to say that although aesthetic streams may presently be
muddied and turbulent thanks to the crosscurrents mentioned by Andrews, the lar-
ger culture with its pervasive values remains an important unifying force (see, e.g.,
Solomon, 1993).
Thus, in consultation with Davis we conducted a pilot project in Montreal to
examine the cross-cultural robustness of the Gardner/Winner U-curve (Pariser and
van den Berg, 1997a). We solicited drawings from 55 members of the Montreal
Chinese community: children of various ages (5, 8 and 11 years), and artistically
inclined and disinclined adolescents and adults. The subjects were given the same
drawing task as that designed by Davis for her Boston-area subjects. In total we
collected 165 drawings which were judged by two pairs of expert (i.e., Fine Arts
educated) judges. The Boston-based judges were trained by Davis, the others, a pair
of Montreal Chinese judges, were trained by Pariser. In addition to using the origi-
nal Davis score protocol for evaluating the drawings, we also asked the judges sim-
ply to sort the drawings into three piles: good (highly aesthetic), bad (low aesthetic
value) and intermediate. This three-way sort exercise was intended to provide us
with a simple and more direct expression of the judge’s own aesthetic preferences.
(It turned out that the rankings of drawings based on the three-way sort were very
similar to the rankings based on the Davis scoring protocol-so much so, that in
our present work we have dispensed with the Davis protocol entirely (Kindler et al.,
2000).
Our main findings were as follows. First, the Boston judges reproduced the origi-
nal Davis curve with uncanny accuracy (see Fig. 2). Thus, when presented to the
Western judges, the drawings from the Montreal Chinese population were ranked in
exactly the same U-curve as drawings made in the Boston area for Davis’ original
study. However, the Montreal Chinese judges did not rank the same set of 165
drawings in a U-curved pattern.
When we compared the rankings of the two judge pairs on the Davis scoring task
(see Fig. 2) and the three-way sorting task (see Fig. 3), an obvious and consistent
trend emerged. The North American judges produced a clear U-curved ranking of
the set of drawings while the Montreal Chinese judges did not. If anything, the
Montreal Chinese judges produced an upwardly sloping linear pattern indicating
that as the age of the artists increased so too did the aesthetic merit of their work.
But what is crucial from our perspective is the dramatic difference in the relative
position assigned to the drawings by the 5-year-old children. Where the North
American judges ranked the 5-year-olds’ drawings as better than or only slightly
inferior to the drawings of the adolescent and adult artists, the Montreal Chinese
judges invariably ranked the same drawings as inferior to that of all the other groups
in the sample.
In sum, we found that when we asked Montreal-based artists trained in China to
order our cross-sectional sample of 165 drawings, their rankings were very different
from the rankings of the Boston-based Western art-trained judges. We argued that
this difference in the ranking patterns of the Montreal and Boston judges cast doubt
 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 337

on the universal validity of Davis’ original U-curve, (Pariser and van den Berg,
1997a). Our initial report resulted in a spirited debate with Davis in the pages of
Studies in Art Education about the validity and meaning of our findings (Davis,
1997a,b; Pariser and van den Berg, 1997b). While Davis took the replication of the
U-curve by the Boston judges as confirmation of the possible universality of the
curve, she suggested that the quite different results that we reported for the Montreal
Chinese judges was perhaps due to problems with their training in the use of her
scoring protocol, or that these judges had perhaps failed to understand the real
nature of their task . We found neither of Davis’ objections tenable.
Of course, the debate was about much more than merely the technical questions of
the validity of our findings. There are more basic questions lurking underneath the

Fig. 2. Chinese vs. US judges’ Davis protocol scores.

338 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

surface. One is the role of Modernist aesthetics as a possible explanation for the
different responses of the judges. The other is the even more fundamental question
of whether the Modernist aesthetic can legitimately be considered as the basis for
panhuman aesthetic judgment. On this difficult issue Davis (1997b) appears to be
somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand she asserts that the universality of the U-
curve was ‘‘...never a premise on which my study relied.’’ (180), but only a few lines
further on she states that’’[n]otwithstanding, I am open to the possibility of cross-
cultural connections. ...I suspect they will hold in terms of such broadly framed
underlying notions as gestural expression or embodiment of universals (however
they are culturally mediated)’’ (181). While we do not wish to take any position on
the possibility of some aesthetic universals, it seems to us that our findings strongly
suggest that no such universals underlie the U-curve originally found by Davis.

Fig. 3. Chinese vs US judges’ three-way sort scores.

 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 339

In short, after our debate with Davis we felt no reason to be less confident about
the validity of our initial findings than we had been before.2 Certainly, more and
larger studies, especially involving larger numbers and a greater variety of judges,
would be necessary to settle many of the issues raised once and for all. But until such
work is done, it seems to us that our results stand and cannot be circumvented. The
fact that the Montreal Chinese judges ranked the drawings so differently from their
counterparts in Boston cannot be explained away as an artifact of mishandled
method, or simple misunderstanding. So we require a substantive explanation for
the differences noted in Figs. 2 and 3.
The obvious place to start looking for such an explanation is in those aesthetic
tenets of Modernism to which people not primarily educated in that tradition pre-
sumably do not subscribe. The remainder of this paper is a first attempt to come up
with such an explanation. But before we can proceed to doing that we need to look
a little more closely at a couple of background issues such as the foundational features
of Modernist art theory and our knowledge about contemporary Chinese attitudes
towards artistic education, especially the singular importance of skill training.

3. Early Modernism: ‘‘and a little child shall lead them’’

As we have already seen, Modernist artists such as Motherwell (1970) expressed

disdain for a number of features of the art practices of their predecessors. Take the
obiter dicta of some other great artists who are considered spokesmen for Modernity
in Western art. Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), a key figure, formulated some of the
Modernist platform. He took aim at two artistic shibboleths: Tradition and the
quest for realistic rendering. For Mondrian, ‘‘...all dogma, all preconceived ideas
must be harmful to art...’’ (1937, 121). And in defense of ‘‘abstract art’’ he says,
‘‘[p]recisely by its existence, nonfigurative art shows that ‘art’ is not the expression of
the appearance of reality such as we see it, nor of the life which we live, but that it is
the expression of true reality and true life...’’ (127). In other words, the search for
‘‘realistic’’ or naturalistic imagery is a Philistine quest, a false idol. Artists with higher
aims seek resemblances on the basis of essential similarities not superficial ones.
Another theoretician of Modernism, the artist and teacher Paul Klee (1879–1940),
was quite clear on his position on realistic rendering and the skillful use of the
medium. He championed the formal properties (design, balance etc.) of an image in
contrast to its merely photographic merits. As Klee boldly proclaims, ‘‘[w]hile the
artist is still exerting all of his efforts to group the formal elements purely and logi-
cally so that each in its place is right...a layman watching from behind, pronounces
the devastating words, ‘But that isn’t a bit like uncle’. The artist, if his nerve is
2
We might note in passing that we have made some very strong assumptions about the degree to
which the aesthetic values of those reared in Chinese culture, even Chinese judges living in North Amer-
ica, are different from Modernist sensibilities. Consequently, it is reasonable to infer that if the differences
we found hold, they are likely to hold a fortiori for judges who are culturally even less likely to have been
exposed to Modernist values than our judges were. Some suggestive findings along these lines are reported
in Durante et al. (1996) and Pirollet (1996).
340 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

disciplined thinks to himself, ‘To hell with uncle! I must get on with my building’...’’
(1924; 82–83). In other words, the artist must not allow the fondness of the great
unwashed public for realism to deter him from the quest for formal ‘‘purity’’.
Quite significantly for our purposes, Klee more than any other single Modern
artist has forged links between his own mature work and that of children (Fineberg,
1997). And this linkage is based on his preference for unrefined technique and
directness of approach, features which Klee readily acknowledges. ‘‘The legend of
the childishness of my drawing must have originated from those linear compositions
of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete image, say that of a man, with the
pure representation of the linear element’’ (1924:90. The artist, says Klee, ‘‘...does
not attach such intense importance to natural forms as do so many realist critics,
because for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural
creation. For he places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the
final forms themselves’’ (87). It bears mentioning that Klee was not only a prolific
and highly respected artist, he was also a dedicated art teacher and thus had the
opportunity of inculcating his values and heartfelt beliefs to a whole generation of
artist students.
For our purposes, we extract from this cursory glance at some key Modernist
artists’ writings two common elements: mistrust of past representational practices
(tradition/realism), and an equal mistrust for technique and skill as artistic raisons
d’être. Realism and skill are devalued. These then, are two of the Modernists’ ‘‘least
favorite things’’. These features of the Modernist program point in the direction of
yet another feature that is quintessentially Modern: the special status of child art.
Probably the most comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Moder-
nist artists and the art of children is contained in the recent catalogue and exhibition
organized by Fineberg (1997). Fineberg shows the degree to which a number of
leading Modernist artists, in the pursuit of artistic statements that were fresh,
authentic and expressive, held large collections of children’s artwork and appro-
priated copiously and freely from their collections. As Feinberg says, ’’...many of the
greatest artists of the 20th century avidly collected children’s art and took, in some
instances quite specific cues from them: Michael Larionov, Gabrielle Munter, and
Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Jean Dubuffet and the
Cobra artists are the leading examples ...since substantial portions of their collec-
tions still survive’’ (14). Fineberg goes on to suggest that this connection is some-
thing of a skeleton in the Modernist closet: ‘‘The influence of child art on Modern
artists has barely been mentioned as a possibility in the scholarship on Modern art
and not even the artists have been eager to discuss it’’ (23). So it is no surprise that
the Modernist movement, should have a strong unspoken predilection for the work
of children and ‘‘naive’’ artists.

4. Skill and aesthetics in Chinese art and teaching

As noted, Andrews (1998a) observes that Modernism and other contemporary

movements are well known in Chinese artistic circles. However, she also reports that
 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 341

the mix of competing artistic movements, archaic and contemporary, has created an
artistic climate quite unlike that in the West. One key element that distinguishes the
Western attitude towards the arts from the Eastern is the attitude towards skill and
mastery of the medium. To the best of our knowledge, children’s work has never
been used as a model for a mature Chinese artist’s practice in the way that it was by
western artists as documented by Fineberg.
It must be emphasized that Western art is no stranger to China. Ever since the
turn of the century, Western academic drawing and painting approaches have been
widely practiced in Chinese schools and art academies. As early as 1912, schools of
Western-style painting existed in China and the drill of European academic drawing
was a common feature of Chinese art education (Duan 1995; Kao, 1998). The
Western ‘‘academic’’ approach, most often associated with European ‘‘ateliers,’’ was
very compatible with the traditional Chinese view of learning. According to this
view, discipline and practice are the prerequisites for ‘‘expression’’. Thus, it would
be an error to believe that conventional Western approaches to the arts are things
exotic and unknown in China. To the contrary, Western Academic art has taken such a
hold in China precisely because this European import, like traditional Chinese painting,
is rooted in mastery of the medium and the paramount importance of graphic skills. It
must also be acknowledged that alongside the Western academic tradition, Chinese
artists also practice and develop the most avant-garde of Western approaches-every-
thing from Impressionism to Post-Modernism (see e.g., Solomon, 1993).
There is evidence that even today, in the teaching of the arts in China, skill is
viewed as the indispensable basis for the development of artistic ability and expres-
sion. We have for instance seen videotapes of art classes in the Children’s Palaces of
Culture where the young pupils are involved with tasks (meticulous drawing from
plaster casts etc.) that would not be out of place in a French academy of the last
century (Boime, 1970). Similarly, when Gardner (1989) went to China to look at art
programs and teaching methods he found that most Chinese teachers ‘‘...resisted the
notion that one can be creative, or even begin to explore, before one has developed
considerable skill. From their point of view we (Westerners) were simply and stub-
bornly attempting to put the cart before the horse’’ (252). In a recent research article
on drawing instruction in China we find the following observation: ‘‘In the Chinese
weekend art schools a high level of drawing skill is considered essential: teachers
argue that we cannot be creative without first becoming technically skilled, other-
wise we have no way of expressing that creativity’’ (Cox et al., 1998 p.181).
To be sure, there is a considerable literature of (neo-)Piagetian inspiration show-
ing that there are many cross-cultural similarities in the developmental trajectories
of children’s graphic abilities. This holds true in particular for such highly general
aspects as the developmental sequence in representing space (see, e.g., Hoffman and
Trepannier, 1982; Harvey et al., 1986; Stratford and Au, 1988; Case et al., 1990;
Chan and Lobo, 1993). At the same time, even these, avowedly ‘‘universalizing’’
studies have come across significant differences between Western and Chinese chil-
dren’s aesthetic capacities. These differences seem to be due to the greater emphasis
on detail and technical skill in Chinese education, as well as the early discipline
imposed by the need to master the complexities of ideographic writing and reading
342 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

(see e.g., Jolley et al.,1996). Certainly, the emphasis on skill, training and discipline
fits well with the emphasis on compliance which is reported to be a key component
of the Chinese socialization process (see e.g., Reed, 1992).

5. Summary: Western Modernism versus Chinese skill

On the question of ‘‘tradition’’ there is less of a significant difference between East

and West. One of the perennial issues in the recent history of Chinese art is the oft
repeated comment that Chinese artists have suffered too long from carrying the
baggage of their artistic antecedents. The Communist revolution made it de rigueur
to reject the aesthetic traditions linked to the reactionary past. But even under Mao
and even during the Cultural revolution ‘‘traditional’’ art forms were rehabilitated
and pressed into service for revolutionary ends. By the same token, Western style oil
painting was ‘‘sinified’’ in order to commemorate the heroes of the Revolution.
Thus, even under the guise of revolutionary art, traditional forms from East and
West remained viable as long as the message was deemed acceptable (Andrews,
1998b). At the present moment it is possible for a Chinese artist to revisit historical
artistic traditions without fearing the political consequences.
However, on the issue of mastering graphic skills, matters are quite clear. Cer-
tainly the issue of skill seems to be a key point of divergence. Western Modernists
see it as a stumbling block to authentic artistic expression, Chinese educators see it
as the sine qua non for articulate art. In the West skill-training is mostly seen as a
reactionary pedagogical practice, in China it is not. Skill and especially conventions
are perceived by the Great Moderns as stifling the expression of authentic, sponta-
neous creativity, the artist’s true ‘‘voice.’’ As a result there is more than a hint of a
possibility that those influenced by the Modernist view of aesthetic accomplishment
might be affected by this negative view of graphic mastery. Our next step was to
investigate this possibility.

6. Skill, Modernism and aesthetics: a provisional accounting for differential judgment

Our hunch, then, is that at least some of the differences we found between the
Montreal Chinese and the Boston judges’ assessments of our sample of 165 drawings
might be accounted for by their differing appreciation for the amount of technical
skill displayed in the drawings. The Boston judges, so we reasoned, steeped as they
are in Modernist disdain for ‘‘mere’’ technical ability, should either not be affected
in their aesthetic evaluations by the artists’ apparent technical skill or else they
might even be negatively influenced by evidence of technical skill, at least where the
drawings of the intermediate non-artist groups are concerned. The Montreal Chi-
nese judges, on the other hand, would, in keeping with their cultural traditions,
consider technical skill as an integral component of aesthetic merit and consequently
their assessments should be positively influenced by the level of technical skill that is
in evidence. If our hunch is correct, then this might go a long way towards explaining
 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 343

why our Boston judges’ assessments generated the perfect U-curve as well as why
the Montreal Chinese judges did not, as shown in Figs. 2 and 3.
In order to test this hunch we simply need to establish to what extent skill level
displayed in the drawings correlates with the judges’ aesthetic assessments and
whether the effect is negative or positive. But in order to be able to do this one must,
of course, first assign some score for the level of technical skill to each drawing.
Keeping Milbrath’s (1998) scoring protocol for the developmental level of the
representation of form and space in mind, we devised a task that would enable us to
assess the skill level exhibited in the drawings without broaching the thorny issues of
‘‘expression’’ and ‘‘creativity’’. For the purposes of this intervention, we defined
‘‘graphic skill’’ as a composite set of features that encompassed realistic rendering,
nuanced and controlled use of the drawing medium, demonstrable mastery of ana-
tomical information, and/or the mastery of a popular comic book style. Any and all
of these features of a drawing would indicate the presence of a skilled hand.
Having thus operationalized technical skill, we had two independent art-educated
judges apply these criteria. The two judges were a High School art teacher and an art
historian with special expertise in ethnographic art.3 They were asked to sort the 165
drawings by technical skill level into three piles: those exhibiting a high level of skill,
those exhibiting intermediate skill and those showing low levels of technical skill. No
restrictions were imposed on the size of the piles, except that there could not be a
pile with zero drawings. All drawings were to be judged according to a single stan-
dard of skillful performance.
After comparing the two skill judges’ piles of drawings, we eliminated the 2
drawings from our analysis on which there was maximum disagreement (i.e., one
judge gave the highest and the other the lowest skill scores) on the grounds that the
skill levels were not clear or were at least debatable. This left us with 163 drawings
for our statistical analysis. On 76% of the 163 drawings the two judges were in
perfect agreement as to how they assessed the drawings.4 We calculated an overall
skill score for each drawing by simply adding our two judges’ individual scores
together. Thus the skill scores could range from 2 (when both judges felt that the
drawing belonged in the least skilled pile) to 6 (when they agreed that it belonged in
the high-skilled pile).
In order to assess the strength and sign of the association between skill level and
aesthetic assessment we calculated the correlation coefficients (Pearson’s r) of the
3
As an anonymous referee has pointed out, both of these were Western judges with a background in
the arts. It is conceivable that non-Western judges might have assessed the amount of technical skill dis-
played in our drawings differently. But given the way we explicitly operationalized skill here (see the pre-
ceding paragraph) and the informal conversations we conducted with our Chinese judges on issues such as
graphic skill, we doubt this very much. At any rate, what is at issue here is whether the Chinese judges’
aesthetic assessments were differently related to the apparent graphic skill exhibited in the drawings than
those of the Western judges. Whether the skill score used rests on Western or non-Western notions of
‘‘skill’’ (whatever the latter might mean) is not really relevant at this point. Still, for a deeper under-
standing and explanation of the differences we report in this paper, possible differences in what Western
and non-Western judges mean by graphic ‘‘skill’’ are certainly worth exploring further at some future
point.
4
The standard measure of agreement, Kappa, was calculated to be 0.62, with a p<000.
344 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

drawings’ skill scores with the aesthetic scores of each of the judge pairs used in our
previous work. The results are reported in Table 1.
Before we proceed to present and interpret our findings, let us briefly recall our
hypotheses and their implications for the original U-curve theory. First we would
expect there to be a strong and robust (i.e., across different measures and categories)
positive correlation between the Montreal Chinese judges’ aesthetic merit assess-
ments and our newly constructed technical skill level scores. If we were to find no
correlation, let alone a negative one, we would have to look elsewhere for an expla-
nation of the differences between our Montreal Chinese and our Boston judges’
aesthetic merit assessments — or perhaps reconsider the possibility of the spurious-
ness of the initial results. On the other hand, we would expect either no significant
correlation between the skill scores and the Boston judges’ aesthetic evaluations or
possibly a negative correlation, although the latter should only hold for the non-
artist groups since it is to them only that the idea that technique stifles spontaneous
creativity presumably applies. A strong, positive correlation, by contrast, would
require us once again to rethink our theory or else reconsider the validity of our
initial findings.5
Finally, a combination of a strong positive correlation for the Montreal Chinese
judges and no correlation or a negative one (for the non-artists only) for the Boston
judges, would constitute quite strong prima facie evidence for the theory that the
differences between the two judge pairs’ aesthetic assessments is to some consider-
able degree attributable to differences over the contribution of technical skill to
artistic expression. Moreover, such a finding would encourage our belief that the
differences we originally found reflect something quite real.
In Table 1, the rightmost column presents results for our Boston judges’ aesthetic
merit evaluations and the column to its left those for the Montreal Chinese judges.

Table 1
Correlations (Pearson’s r) between skill level and aesthetic evaluations

Montreal Chinese Boston judges

judges

Entire Sample (N=163)

Skill level/Davis scores 0.54** 0.45**
Skill level/3-way sort scores 0.69** 0.26**
Non-artists only (groups 1–5; N=130)
Skill level/Davis scores 0.37** 0.21*
Skill level/3-way sort scores 0.56** -0.03
Artists (groups 6 and 7; N=33)
Skill level/Davis scores 0.52** 0.59**
Skill level/3-way sort scores 0.69** 0.52**

5
Having to choose between these two alternatives when faced with unanticipated results without any
straightforward algorithm for choosing one rather than the other is, as many have noted (e.g., Diesing,
1991; Boudon, 1994), a perfectly unavoidable and even routine aspect of scientific practice.
 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 345

The top panel of the table displays the results for the entire sample of 163 drawings.
It contains four correlation coefficients, one for each of our two evaluation methods
(the Davis scores and the 3-way sort scores) and for each of the two judge pairs. As
can be seen, the coefficients for the Montreal Chinese judges in this panel are both
quite high, 0.54 and 0.69 respectively. Clearly, the Chinese judges’ aesthetic judg-
ments are strongly correlated with our independently arrived at measure of the
degree of technical skill in the drawings. The higher of the two coefficients is parti-
cularly impressive as it refers to what we showed, in our previous article (Pariser and
van den Berg, 1997a), to be the more authentic of the two measures of the judges’
own aesthetic sensibilities, namely the three-way sorting exercise. In fact, one could
say that up to 48% of the variance (R2=0.48) in these judges’ evaluations might be
‘‘explained’’ by the skill level of the artists. By contrast, while the correlations for the
Western judges are positive and significant as well, they are significantly smaller,
particularly for the 3-way sorting scores.
Our first set of findings, then, support only half of our hypotheses. There does
appear to be some difference in the degree to which skill levels are correlated with
the two judge pairs’ evaluations. And the differences are roughly what one would
expect from our theory: The Montreal Chinese judges’ evaluations are more strongly
and positively correlated with skill level than the Boston judges’ assessments. Thus,
even though we recognize full well that correlation does not demonstrate causation,
we adhere to our hunch that some part of the differences we found between the
evaluation patterns of the two sets of judges in our earlier work is attributable to
fundamental differences in their attitudes towards technical skills.
Recall, that the ‘‘modernist’’ aesthetic that we have outlined above (Motherwell,
Klee et al.) refers to the deadening impact of rote technique acquisition upon the
creative expression of young, non-artist subjects only. Those who have, for whatever
reason, managed to withstand the creativity-destroying onslaught and have gone on
to become bonafide artists have been able to nurture or recapture their original
creativity and acquired the technical skills to express it in ‘‘real’’ mature art. In other
words, as we already suggested, a true Modernist might view technical skill quite
differently in young non-artists’ drawings than in the work of mature artists. In
order to examine this possibility we calculated the same correlations again, but this
time separately for the two sub-samples of non-artists of various ages on the one
hand and adolescent and adult artists on the other. The results are shown in the
bottom two panels of Table 1. The middle panel shows the results for the non-artists
only. As can be seen in the column for the Montreal Chinese judges, the correlation
coefficients remain positive and fairly strong. That is to say, technical skill appears
to be almost as important a determinant for the Chinese judges’ evaluation of the
non-artists’ drawings as it is for their assessment of the entire sample, although the
effects look slightly weaker than those for the sample as a whole.
But for the Boston judges we find a very interesting change here. Their judgments
of non-artists’ drawings appears to correlate only weakly or not at all with skill
level. Using their Davis scores we obtain a low correlation coefficient of 0.21 which
is also not very highly statistically significant (p < 0.05 only), while the correlation
for their three-way sort scores is close to zero and, at any rate, not statistically
346 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

significant. In other words, the Boston judges’ assessments of the non-artists’ does
not seem to have been affected much by the technical skill displayed in the drawings.
While these findings do not demonstrate a directly negative attitude towards skill on
the part of the Boston judges it certainly suggests an attitude that is less positive
than that of our Montreal Chinese judges.
Now look at the bottom panel of the table. The left column shows that the Chi-
nese judges appeared to be at least as influenced by skill level in their evaluations of
the artists’ drawings as they were in assessing those of the non-artists. In fact, when
left to use their own criteria of aesthetic assessment (the 3-way sort), the same very
high proportion (R2=0.48) of the variance in their assessments as we found earlier
may well be accounted for by technical skill level alone! But perhaps even more
striking, when it comes to the artists’ drawings, even the apparently ‘‘modernist’’
Boston judges were quite positively influenced by the skill levels on display. Here
their correlation coefficients are practically on a par with those for the Montreal
Chinese judges. At the very least, then, this constitutes tentative evidence for the
proposition that these judges treat skill differently when they evaluate what are
patently drawings made by more or less accomplished artists and when they assess
amateurs’ drawings.6 While our findings do not provide us with the unequivocal
results we might have liked, their over all tendency certainly does not justify aban-
doning our initial hypotheses.7
We have some additional corroborative evidence in support of our interpretation
that between the two judge-pairs there is a significant difference in attitudes towards
technical skill. As noted before, as part of our initial study we interviewed the
Montreal Chinese judges, as well as several other local experts on Chinese art and
aesthetics. We asked them how exactly they went about assessing the aesthetic merit
of a drawing. These interviews, too, confirmed our hunch that when visually literate
Chinese judges are asked to rank children’s artwork, one of the basic approaches to
such a ranking task was to seek evidence of material skills. The higher the skill levels
manifest in a drawing the higher it is likely to score in terms of aesthetic value. The
Montreal Chinese judges freely admitted that they knew perfectly well which draw-
ings had been drawn by children and which were by adults. It was, in their eyes, self-
evident that a child’s drawing just could not be as skillful or as aesthetically
accomplished as an adult’s, and the rankings reflected this viewpoint.
Mr. Ming, a local artist interviewed as part of our effort to understand the Chi-
nese approach to aesthetics, declared that children’s artwork occupied the same
6
Whether or not these judges more or less consciously distinguish between artists and amateurs in this
way, and then effectively proceed to apply the Modernist credo that technique destroys spontaneous
creativity in amateurs’ work only, remains to be further investigated. We do, however, have some evidence
that the judges were perfectly capable of distinguishing drawings made by artists from those made by non-
artists (see below).
7
In an earlier version of this paper we obtained slightly different results using a skill score partly based
on the skill assessments by one of us. While the differences between the correlations of the two judge-pairs
were somewhat greater (most notably, none of the Boston judges’ correlations was statistically significant),
the general pattern was substantially the same. We recognize, however, that this does raise the issue of
construct validity with respect to our skill scores, which will be worth returning to in future research. See
also footnote 3 above on this.
 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350 347

ontological ground as natural objects such as rocks, clouds etc. These objects are
undoubtedly aesthetic, he said, but they are so because of the action of unreflective
natural forces. Children’s work is frequently aesthetic, but these effects are often
unintended. As such, Mr. Ming does not consider that children’s art is in the same
category as the work of adult artists. As he put it, ‘‘children are not artists, they
don’t know what they are doing. But adults do know. So child art comes from the
child’s nature. The important difference between child art and adult art is that any-
one can come up with something beautiful, everyone can, once in a while. But the
children cannot go further with this, they do not develop it. The difference between
adult artists and children is that the adult artist can produce something natural and
beautiful at will’’ (Pariser, 1995).

7. Conclusion

Mr. Ming’s views appear closely to reflect the traditional Chinese conception of
artistic development and education. According to Winner (1989), the emphasis in
Chinese art education is on skill and training to start with. In this tradition, the
apprentice endures long years acquiring conventional forms and skills and observing
his artistic superiors at work. Eventually, he earns the privilege of making some
subtle innovation, some subtle addition to the canon of Great Art. But change is
slight and comes during the artist’s maturity, not in the flush of youth.
By contrast, the contemporary Western view accords no special privilege to artists
in their later years and it is quite possible to have a stripling genius like Picasso. As
Winner (1989) notes, art teaching in most western schools is based on the idea that
visual creativity is something that can be found at the beginning of life as well as in
later age. Children and adolescents are invited to explore and create without much
concern for mastering traditions or acquiring basic literacy in the arts. Once these
same children become adult artists, it is expected that they will acquire whatever
skills and techniques are needed to give voice to their ideas. Mastery of skills and
traditional forms comes after the child’s initial burst of creativity.
The mystery in all this is, however, that although the approaches traditionally
associated with North American and Chinese art education practice have been
almost diametrically opposed, the art history of both cultures makes it very clear
that genius, originality and productive energy have been nurtured under both edu-
cational regimes. The fact is that whether one wants to grow a full size tree or a
Bonsai/P’enjing, a single criterion must first and foremost be satisfied: the plant must
live. To ignore the plant’s basic needs is to risk the whole project. And it is evident
that the roots of Eastern and Western art making have not withered, and that the
plants, so differently nourished and so differently shaped have continued to flower
over the centuries.
The question of relevance to educational practice that we are left with is this: both
China and the West have a demonstrably rich and highly developed artistic tradi-
tion. Given that the standard pedagogical methods in these two cultures are at pre-
sent dramatically different from each other and that these methods reflect culture
348 D. Pariser, A. van den Berg / Poetics 29 (2001) 331–350

specific social and aesthetic values, what conclusion can we draw concerning any
optimal route to artistic achievement? Is it better to insist on drilling skills and dis-
cipline at the beginning of a person’s artistic journey, or is it better to allow free
exploration before introducing the constriction of discipline and instruction? As we
have seen, at least one group of researchers (Jolley et al, 1996) came to the conclu-
sion that the rigors of Chinese early education may have certain benefits. The fact
that Chinese children did better than their British counterparts on an aesthetic
matching task led Jolley et al. to conclude that ‘‘[w]e are still left with the possibility
however, that the teaching of technique, schema and monitoring detail may not stifle
expression as sometimes voiced within Western art education (circles) but may
actually promote it’’ (4).
What pedagogues might learn from the contrasting art worlds of China and the
West, and from their divergent attitudes towards the inculcation of artistic skills, is
that as long as the parent culture takes the visual arts seriously, and frames learning
about the arts as a rigorous and worthwhile act, then it may not matter which of
several pedagogical routes are chosen, and which features of artistic learning are
emphasized first, as long as the children have a chance to explore the universal
conundrums of visual expression and to assimilate through observation and
instruction the images and the visual syntax that is locally valued. In other words, as
long as the Bonsai/P’enjing or the ‘‘natural’’ Oak is alive, and flourishing, we need
not question the horticultural techniques used to bring them to maturity.
At this point, we leave the last word to Howard Gardner, one of the original
instigators of the idea of a U-curved trajectory of aesthetic development. As noted
earlier, Gardner himself has conducted some research into the differences between
Chinese and Western art education. After having studied Chinese methods of art
education with some care, Gardner (1989) ends up reflecting on the possibility of
multiple pedagogical trajectories towards mature artistry, the Western path empha-
sizing spontaneity and creativity first and mastery later and the Eastern path rever-
sing this sequence, but the end result being substantially equivalent. Given the
current state of our ignorance, this would appear to us to be wise counsel indeed. It
is always tempting to assume that one’s own aesthetic sensibilities somehow reflect
something universal. Nor would we wish to rule out such a possibility altogether.
But surely little can be gained and a lot lost, especially in the design and imple-
mentation of artistic education practice and policy, by prematurely proclaiming one
particular sensibility superior to all others, especially in the face of solid evidence to
the contrary.

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David A. Pariser, is Professor of Art Education in the Faculty of Fine Arts at

Concordia University, Montreal. His research addresses three questions: What is the
relationship between drawing/visual expression and cognitive processes? What can
be learnt about artistic development from looking at the childhood drawings of
great artists and children identified as visually gifted? What is the impact of culture
on aspects of aesthetic development?

Axel van den Berg is Professor of Sociology at McGill University. His recent
research has focused on the sociology of labour markets, the debates about rational
choice theory in the social sciences, contemporary sociological theory, and a cross-
cultural comparison of aesthetic criteria of visual art.

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