Arnheim's chapter on "Growth" in Art and Visual Perception was radical in demolishing the intellectualistic theory of children's drawings according to which they "draw what they know" rather than what "they see." According to Arnheim, children slowly differentiate forms as they draw, but they do so through a medium so that what they accomplish in drawing might be different from what they can accomplish in clay. Their artistic products are in no simple way reflections of their intellects. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Pablo Picasso, maquette for Guitar, 1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York]  

 

As a consequence, the "Growth" chapter has less to say about contemporary art or adult art at all. However, its motivating idea does. Arnheim held that percepts are slowly differentiated and therefore cannot be understood retrospectively. As an example, to call after Piaget a child's drawing "syncretic" suggests the viewpoint of the adult, where later differentiated ideas (like head and body in a drawing) are somehow fused together. The idea that any shapes at all can be suggestive of likeness if they are presented at the proper level of abstraction goes a long way toward explaining what the Cubists were doing. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​[Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991-present, oil and wax on lauan plywood, birch plywood, and plywood each panel: 25.4 x 20.32 cm (10 x 8 in.) overall installed: 305.44 x 889.64 cm (120 1/4 x 350 1/4 in.)] photo: http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.142289.html]

 

Arnheim was interested in the figural differentiation that forms undergo but today we might be just as interested in the intentional behavior that surrounds or even precedes the same forms. For example, children first judge resemblance based on intentional connection to a model. If a child draws a form with the intention of portraying an object, those two things are connected in her mind. And even if the resulting drawing is quite like another (depicting something else) the child maintains that the one "looks like" the other. Similarly, we might look to the artistic practices of Byron Kim, who for several years has matched paint colors to individual's skin tones, creating rectangular "portraits." By reducing the person to their skin tone, he both taps into a primitive mechanism of resemblance and thereby shows the strange but tenuous hold that the color of our skin has on our identity. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Keith Haring, Untitled, 1982, ink on two sheets of paper, 72 x 671 1/2" (182.9 x 1705.6cm)] photo: http://www.moma.org/collection/works/37162?locale=en. 

 

Artists using such "substitutes" irrespective of resemblance is consistent in general with the post-pop move toward objectuality, pure presence, and away from mediated communication. While Arnheim was at pains to see the merits of simplified spatial construction in various historical traditions around the world, it is easy to accuse him of generalizing across cultures, or of supporting "primitivizing" styles. Indeed, many international artists reference their own cultures and their figurative styles ironically, to index the colonial expectation the western art market holds toward them (e.g. Yinka Shonibare). Yet other artists read into these traditions more sympathetically if not affirmatively. Certainly, the pop and graffiti-art movements were sympathetic to the simplcity and directness of mass-produced forms. Keith Haring's evolved figure style has much in common with Arnheim's "Egyptian method" in translating forms into a quickly accessible vocabulary of two-dimensional forms.