Arno Stern
Arno Stern (23 june 1924, Kassel) is the creator of The Playing-of-Painting; he was born a jewish German whose family fled to France in 1933.
He began developing the Playing-of-Painting approach when he was invited to serve at the age of 22 an institution for war orphans in Fontenay-Aux-Roses(just outside Paris) and it became his life’s work – rigorously researched and honed over the 74 years between 1946 and the present day.
When Stern left the orphanage, he set up a studio “The Thursday Academy” in Paris where he could continue his career as “servant” of children’s painting. In his new atelier he added the element of kraft paper covering the walls, for practical purposes. Over time, the surface became covered in a shimmering multitude of criss-crossing vertical and horizontal lines, as paint escaped the edges of the papers attached to the walls. This has become a trademark of the Closlieu space.
In 1951 he was designated an expert on art education and presented on an equal footing with Henri Matisse and Jean Piaget at the first UNESCO Symposium on Art Education (UNESCO, 1954).
The Formulation
Despite their very different contexts and life experiences – a small town orphanage and a bourgeois Paris studio, Stern noticed a surprising correlation between the children’s spontaneous, free paintings. The children newest to painting all exhibited very similar gestures and forms along a limited range of developmental trajectories. The children exhibited a range of figures and object-images, which could be categorised as a limited set of forms. Fortunately Stern had kept, dated and named thousand of his charges’ paintings and was able to go back and study them in detail. He discovered that all the paintings could be distilled to a set of figures, which he eventually named “La Formulation”.
His passion and curiosity led him to seek more research on children’s drawing. There was a developing interest in the concept of “children’s art” and expression. So in the 1960s and 70s, he travelled all over the world to observing the innate drawing and painting patterns of unschooled children from Afghanistan, Canada, Ethiopia, Guatemala, New Guinea, Niger, Mauritania, Mexico, Peru and the United States.
He discovered that all the children from all the countries did the same traces and symbols, proof that th Formulation is a universal phenomenon that does not depend on any conditioning.
His monumental body of documentation now encompasses around 500,000 archived and catalogued paintings and drawings created under strict conditions by people of all ages, and it is unique.
Stern’s archive seems to confirm the existence of a universally shared visual “language”. Stern has hypothesized in collaboration with the maternologist Jean-Marie Delassus and the neurobiologist Gerald Hüther that this primal and universal language is epigenetically pre-programmed and evidence of foetal learning (Dellasus and Hüther in Frantz and Stern, 2018, p28-29).
However, La Formulation and the sense of self-knowledge, balance and wellbeing it derives may only be accessible when spontaneous, uninhibited self-expression is allowed to occur. He suggests that given society’s expectations in most every day settings (home, school, work), there are few opportunities for true spontaneity. The Closlieu is a safe space which feels different and separate from everywhere else and it provides the ideal conditions for La Formulation to arise.
Stern claims that La Formulation has been paradoxically endangered by the ascendance of art education, visual overstimulation and consumerism in today’s society.
Stern refers to “parasites” he observes in participants’ paintings. Techniques such as perspective, shading or cartooning may have been learned in formal art classes, online tutorials or elsewhere, but they are distinct from the spontaneous self-expression. After some practice, these “parasites” tend to disappear in Le Closlieu because participants begin fully tuning in to their natural mode of expression, free of interference.
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