Seeing poor children: Three artists' views

This essay explores representations of poverty in art. In so doing, the visual arts are offered as a supplement to traditional textual studies of poverty. The depiction of poor children in particular is rare before the modern period, and reasons for this are explored. Significant literary and artistic treatments of children in poverty, which begin to appear in the 19th century, are considered in the context of philosophical, political, and economic developments of the time. The New York painter of street children J. G. Brown represents Victorian era painters of poor children in that he distanced himself and his images from reality. More involved in the lives of the poor was the early 20th-century German printmaker Ka¨the Kollwitz, who steered away from the impetus to abstraction of that period in favor of an emotionally charged, politicized, activist approach which focused on the topic of children in misery. Finally, the use of photographs to document poor children is briefly summarized to set the stage for a consideration of the work of Wendy Ewald. This artist's novel approach of giving poor children the means to depict themselves and their own world breaks down the barrier between artist and subject and unifies them in a common purpose.