Assessment • 127Studies of Artistic Development
In the area of developmental psychology, interest in children’s drawings waxed and waned in
the course of the 20th century. During the child study movement at the turn of the century,
drawing studies tended to be either collections of work done by large numbers of young-
sters, or detailed longitudinal observations of an individual child, sometimes including the
drawing process as well as the products. (See Rubin, 2005a for references.)
However, during the last quarter of the 20th century, developmental psychologists were
busy once again studying children’s spontaneous art expression. This is due not to a fascina-
tion with art, but to an interest in the growth of cognition—and an awareness that draw-
ing behavior is a useful index. That focus on the study of children’s drawing behavior was
inspired in part by the work of psychologist Rudolf Arnheim (1954), an early supporter of
art therapy.
One of Arnheim’s students, Claire Golomb, did some of the best research on the develop-
ment of children’s art. In 1974 she published inventive studies of young children’s develop-
ment in both sculpture and drawing. In 1992 she summarized further research, including
two chapters of particular interest to art therapists: “Color, Affect, & Expression” and “Art,
Personality, & Diagnostics.” Though critical of poorly designed studies and skeptical about
finding group differences, Golomb is a believer in the overall diagnostic and therapeutic
potential of art. Her recent work (Golomb, 2002) is an attempt to put children’s art in a
cultural context.
Some of the best investigations using naturalistic observation of creative behavior came
from an interdisciplinary series of studies done at Harvard called Project Zero, which began
in 1967 (www.pz.harvard.edu/index.cfm). That project was the basis for Howard Gardner’s
work (1980, 1982), and for Ellen Winner’s (1982) book on the psychology of the arts—which
included chapters on drawing development, brain damage, and mental illness.
There is also a fine chapter by Wolf in Gardner’s 1982 book about stylistic differences
among preschoolers, which is reminiscent of what Viktor Lowenfeld (1952, 1957) discov-
ered about perceptual styles (visual and haptic) in his work with blind and partially sighted
youngsters. The presence of such normal stylistic differences, and of intra-individual vari-
ability (Rubin, 2005b), make the diagnostic use of any single artwork or group of products
exceedingly complicated. There are also a great many uncontrollable variables, like culture
or hairstyle, making most diagnostic generalizations about art extremely uncertain.
Other observers of normal art activity and products included Rhoda Kellogg (1959, 1969),
who found patterns in her large collection of art by normal preschoolers. Understanding
Children’s Play (Hartley, Frank, & Goldenson, 1952) described not only normal behavior,
but also the therapeutic benefits of clay, graphic materials, and finger paints. One of the
authors was Lawrence Frank, who had written the first book called Projective Methods
(Frank, 1948).
Art therapists working with children were greatly influenced by such careful observa-
tional studies, including the classic investigation by Alschuler and Hattwick (1947/1969)
of the relationship between Painting & Personality in normal preschool youngsters. The
psychologist who invited me to do art therapy with schizophrenic children in 1963, Dr.
Margaret McFarland, was one of the teachers participating in that study, no doubt contrib-
uting to her interest.
The hope of finding useful information in children’s artwork was high during this period,
resulting in rating scales for spontaneous drawings and paintings, like those developed by
child psychologists Paula Elkisch^5 and Trude Schmidl-Waehner.^6 Peter Napoli’s^7 diagnostic