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“Who are you today?” I respond, mock-seriously, gazing down affectionately at a tousled blond three-year-old who had greeted me at the door in answer to my ring, “And who am I?”
Direct links between children's play and art have been presumed by philosophers, praised by poets, and promulgated by psychologists, not least among them Freud (1908), who asks rhetorically: “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer … ?” (143). Indeed, claims about the association of play and art have occurred in such profusion that it would be daunting to make a compendium of all those who have set forth relevant ideas. A brief eclectic list of authors who have done so either explicitly or implicitly from a variety of disciplines might feature philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau, poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Rilke, the cultural historian Huizinga and art historian Gombrich, as well as literary critic Benjamin and psychoanalysts Freud, Erikson, and Winnicott, but such a list would exclude an impressive array of visual artists who have likewise made such claims, albeit often in nonverbal as well as in verbal form. Such claims include the propositions that children's play leads to art, that play is an early form of art, that art itself—in reverse—is a form of play, that art-making is to adults what play is to children, and that art of the highest caliber involves a sort of play. Each of these premises deserves, of course, separate examination and evaluation; yet, in this brief space, I want merely to explore their general relevance for a few salient examples of modern and contemporary art.