Children's drawings have been studied as indicating intellectual development, expressing
emotional life, revealing environmental experience, stressing problem-solving activities, but
more rarely as showing the child's artistic talents.
There are two ways of considering objets d'art: analysing and just enjoying. The present
book offers both, by showing two sets of constrained and free drawings by the same children.
The first part of the book presents a thorough experiment on the development of
constructional praxia which are compared with apraxia, i.e. acquired disability through
brain injury in adults.
The second part shows the free drawings' gallery from the same children who took part in
the first experiment.
It clearly appears that the two skills, the constructional praxic ability and the free artistic
expression, do not evolve in parallel. Very skilled children often are poor artists and the
observer can find aesthetic drawings in young and praxically unskilled children. In other
words, already in the 4 to 7 age bracket, the artisan does not make the artist.
However, the authors avoid any classification in art.