Ellen Handler Spitz recently reviewed the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “The Century of the Child:: Growing by Design 1900-2000” for the online magazine artcritical.
Spitz says that the exhibit “bypasses emotion.” “Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing,” she writes.
Spitz says that through the exhibit, you come to see how children are used to advance adult ideas, and that today’s “child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.”
She concludes that there is “no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked.”
Spitz’s piece, “MoMA and Child: The Century of the Child at the Museum of Modern Art,” appeared on the website on September 24.
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