Jonathan Fineberg here explores the importance of children's art to the work of key modernists from Matisse to Jackson Pollock. Fineberg's inquiry unfolds in this handsome book, which juxtaposes modern masterpieces with the drawings by children that directly influenced them.

Fineberg discusses the effect of primitivism and Freudian thought on some of these artists, and demonstrates how they valued children's art for many reasons, including its naive spontaneity and celebration of the moment, imaginative use of visual language, universality and candor. For each of the masters who collected child art the reasons for doing so were as varied as his or her unique style.

Fineberg himself is responsible for uncovering most of these major collections of child art assembled by numerous celebrated modernists. Many examples from these collections are reproduced here for the first time, together with explanations as to why expressionists, cubists, futurists and other artists displayed the art of children alongside their own work in exhibitions of the early twentieth century.

In chapters devoted to Larionov, Kandinsky and Munter, Klee, Picasso, Miro, Dubuffet, the Cobra artists and artists after World War II, Fineberg examines how each artist exploited aspects of child art not merely to defy convention but more importantly to formulate his or her own artistic breakthroughs.