Arno Stern, the Man Who Found the Same Drawing in Children Everywhere on Earth

Arno Stern turned 100 on June 23, 2024. He died a week later, on June 30, in France. He spent more than sixty of those years defending one very specific idea: that asking a child “what did you draw?” is, almost always, a mistake.

It isn’t a minor footnote in his work. According to the academic work that analyzes his thinking, it’s the starting point for everything else.

From a postwar orphanage to a complete theory

Stern was born in 1924 in Kassel, Germany, and emigrated to France. His first contact with children’s painting, according to an analysis published by Comunidad La Latina, happened in a refugee camp after World War II, where he worked with orphaned children. He suggested they paint with no instructions and no correction of any kind. The response, that same source says, was immediate and striking.

From there, without ever having worked inside the school system, Stern spent decades observing how people of every age paint in a space he designed himself: the Closlieu.

The Closlieu: a space built so no one watches you

The Closlieu isn’t a classroom or a conventional art studio. According to an academic paper on his semiology of expression, it’s roughly 20 square meters, holding a maximum of fourteen people, designed to exclude any intrusion, request, or outside distraction.

The furniture includes a shared mixing palette-table for paint, brushes, paper, water, and a shelf of containers. Nothing in the space is there to evaluate the result.

In the Closlieu, whoever runs the session isn’t a teacher. Stern insisted on calling that person a servant (practicien), a word he chose carefully: they don’t direct, evaluate, or correct the figure, the color, or the composition. Their job is to hold the conditions steady so painting can happen with no power relationship involved.

The question he believed does more damage than any correction

The core of Stern’s critique isn’t obvious correction, it’s a question that sounds harmless: “What did you draw?”

An academic paper analyzing his book Del dibujo infantil a la semiología de la expresión quotes his own argument this way: “The adult doesn’t just say ‘Make me a nice drawing!’, they then ask the child to explain their drawing. And this completes the disaster, because it plants in the child’s mind the idea that drawing is meant to communicate something. […] The adult also asks: ‘And there, what were you trying to show?’ And the child reacts: ‘But, can’t you see it? Then I wasn’t able to draw it properly!’”

For Stern, that sequence (praise, question, an implicit demand for recognition) is exactly what installs in the child the idea that a drawing can be done “well” or “badly,” and that its job is to communicate something to an adult. Another source analyzing his work quotes an even more direct line from him: “It’s no surprise they can barely stand to look at me when I say that a child isn’t making art, but obeying an inexhaustible need to express themselves visually.”

The Formulation: the same stroke in deserts, savannas, and jungles

In the mid-1960s, Stern traveled to isolated communities around the world (deserts, savannas, jungles) to observe how children and adults painted with no contact with conventional art education. According to the Comunidad La Latina analysis, he found something he hadn’t expected: the same figures and strokes, reproduced almost identically, in cultures that had never been in contact with each other.

He called that phenomenon the Formulation: a repertoire of figures (round, square, radial, spine-like, among others) that, according to his theory, represent nothing from the outside world. They arise, as an academic paper on the development of children’s drawing describes in detail, from two basic motor gestures: the Whirlwind (an impulsive spin whose closed ends give rise to the Round figure) and Scattering (rapid, repeated tapping that produces the phenomenon of Multiplication).

The Formulation evolves, according to Stern, through three successive stages:

• Primary figures: unreasoned, representing nothing.
• Image-objects: reason steps in, and some primary figures start being used as parts of a house, a tree, or a boat, through resemblance to the surrounding world.
• Essential figures: these appear once a person, already an adult, gives themselves over completely to the Formulation with no need to represent anything, letting resurface the strokes that naturalistic representation had eclipsed.

Stern held that this code is fed by what he called organic memory: a store from prenatal life and the earliest years that, according to his theory, would reveal itself indirectly in the figures of the Formulation. It’s worth being precise here: this is an idea original to Stern, not a finding with the kind of empirical backing that does exist, for instance, for other drawing techniques we cover on this site.

Two kinds of stroke: the one that communicates and the one that only expresses

A master’s thesis focused on sculpture and expressive drawing captures another of Stern’s central distinctions: the difference between communication-stroke and expression-stroke.

The first is the sketch, the preparatory study meant to fix in advance how a finished piece will look. The second is the free construction of forms guided only by inner impulse and attention to the material, with no intention that the result resemble anything recognizable.

That same thesis quotes playwright Friedrich Schiller to describe the attitude expression-stroke requires: “Reason is a troublesome witness during the poetic process.”

A theory that collides head-on with reading content into a drawing

It’s worth stating clearly: Stern’s position is incompatible with any system, including ones grounded in real research, that reads specific features of a drawing (a large eye, a house with no windows) as a signal about the personality of whoever drew it. For Stern, that very question (“what does this represent?”) is the source of the problem, not a legitimate tool of analysis.

That tension is one more reason to treat his theory, precisely, as a theory: a complete and coherent perspective on graphic expression, built on decades of his own observation, but different in kind from a system like the one we cover in what your drawing says, according to the Machover method, which has been put through decades of validity studies.

That said, there’s a curious point of contact: our own Expressive Style quiz doesn’t interpret what you draw, it only measures rhythm and use of space, without making any claim about content. It wasn’t designed based on Stern’s work, but it shares, at least on that one specific point, the same underlying caution: never turning a stroke into a message someone else has to decode.

Sources

• Stern, A. (2018). Del dibujo infantil a la semiología de la expresión: Iniciación a otra mirada sobre el trazo. Samaruc.
• García Corrales, C. El investigador Arno Stern y la educación creadora. Otra mirada hacia el dibujo como expresión de una necesidad. Comunidad La Latina.
• La semiología de la expresión de Arno Stern. La Casa de Mamá Pongo.
• Felipo Llopis, N. (2018). Desde otra perspectiva: Del dibujo infantil a la obra de arte (Bachelor’s Thesis). Facultat de Belles Arts de Sant Carles, Universitat Politècnica de València.
• García Sánchez, M. (2020). La forma emergente: Reflexiones acerca del dibujo expresivo como génesis del modelado cerámico (Master’s Thesis). Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat Politècnica de València.
• Birth and death dates independently verified on Wikipedia (French edition) and on the site of the Institut de Recherche en Sémiologie de l’Expression founded by Stern.