Kellogg´s

Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection
Rhoda Kellogg

Digital Reedition: Dieter Maurer, Claudia Riboni, Birute Gujer
Technique and Design: Christian d'Heureuse, Jürgen Ragaller
Image Editing: KarinWälchli
Introduction

In 1967, Rhoda Kellogg published an archive of c. 8000 drawings of children ages 24-40 months. (See Kellogg, R.: Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection. Washington, DC., MicrocardEditions, Inc., 1967; now available at LexisNexis, Reed Elsevier, Inc..) Up to now, as far as we know, no other archive of early graphic expressions was ever published, including a large sample ofpictures and presented according to a classification system. Thus, the archive has a historical status.

Rhoda Kellogg was a psychologist and a nursery school educator. Here investigations focused onthe art of young children, that is, on early graphic expressions. From 1948 to 1966, she collected approximately one million drawings of young children of ages two to eight. More than half a millionof these drawings are filed in the «Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association» in San Francisco, U.S.A.. Of these half-million and more drawings, some 8000 areavailable, in microfiche form (see above). Some 250 paintings and drawings, selected as outstanding examples of children’s work, are reproduced in full color. (See Kellogg, R. and O’Dell, S.: ThePsychology of Children’s Art. Del Mar, California, 1967.)

Kellogg describes the very first development of children’s drawings as a sequence of basic shapes or forms and their configurations: starting fromtwenty «basic scribbles», which can be observed at the age of two, children develop placement patterns, emergent diagram shapes, diagrams, combines, aggregates, mandalas, suns, radials, before humansand early pictorialism appear. Kellogg understands this sequence as a manifestation of «Gestalts», according to the Gestalt theory.

Kellogg is one of the rare authors who emphasizes the role of...