NEW YORK.- Nathan A. Bernstein & Co. Ltd. presents Empty Nest: The Changing Face of Childhood in Art, 1880 to the Present, on view November 1, 2007 – January 4, 2008. Where have all the children gone? It’s an inescapable question considering how the prevailing winds of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism all but eliminate the depiction of children. This lament is the origin of “Empty Nest: The Changing Face of Childhood in Art, 1880 to the Present,” a survey of children represented in painting, sculpture, and photography that tracks the subject’s development from the 19th Century.

Children are a staple of the Western canon – a central focus through the Academy, and a major interest to the Impressionists. At the hands of the Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists however, things become less hospitable for this sanctioned tradition. Save for a few critical painters and sculptors who continue to employ the subject such as Balthus, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, Henry Darger, Alice Neel, and Pablo Picasso – and several photographers including Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Aaron Siskind – school is out for an extended summer that lasts almost three quarters of the 20th Century.

The ubiquity of children in today’s art is in sharp contrast with the subject’s long absence during this curious, intervening period. Under the umbrella of Modernism, the hiatus reveals the avant-garde preference for abstraction. Its conspicuous return from third-class status signals a renewed faith in narrative and figuration, coupled by a wholesale rejection of the Victorian dictum: children should be seen – not heard. Compared to current fashion, that idea seems medieval.

Overall, the recent, dramatic revival of representations of children foregrounds a shift in our understanding of childhood, and by extension, how the subject functions differently over the past 140 years. Broadly defined, in the 19th Century, images of children help protect and promote the status quo; in the 21st, they exemplify tumultuous change. Children today are not only both seen and heard, they’re e-mailed and focus-grouped – and making up for lost time.

Childhood exists before the turn of the 20th Century as an enduring symbol of innocence, purity, and beauty. In the 19th Century, children represent a constant, and a perfect vehicle for myth or mirth, allegory or anecdote. Since the Industrial Era, “childhood is the privileged source of the holiday spirit and the indispensable recourse against growing mechanization,” a view expressed in defense of Balthus. Works by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Auguste Renoir, and Maxfield Parrish display that “holiday spirit” in-kind. Frolicking children abound in their art, and a girls-as-sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice and boys-will-be-boys ethic dominates.

Paul Cezanne, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso on one side of the Atlantic, and John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, and the members of The Ashcan School on the other, re-shuffle the deck. Borrowing cues from Manet, as well as from earlier Spanish models for painting, these artists begin to document a new social reality where Old World pieties fade. Above all, they isolate children from fables of leisure and recreation. Their pictures are keenly observed, psychologically charged likenesses where the child’s eyes meet the viewers’ head-on. This cadre of artists opens the conversation of “Empty Nest.”

The art world only returns to this brief but rich chapter roughly 70 years later, when children become a new emphasis again, through the dark reportage of Larry Clark; the intimate if prying record of sensitive, family dynamics by Sally Mann, Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, and Justine Kurland; and the seminal 1983 appropriation by Richard Prince, “Spiritual America.” In retrospect, this photograph of a provocatively-posed, naked, ten year old Brook Shields, and the ensuing legal confrontation, forecast seamlessly a defining condition of the late 20th Century – an obsession with youth, celebrity, controversy, sexual fantasy, and litigation – which today is writ large on what seems every magazine cover, movie-screen, television-set, and web-site.

Children now most efficiently reflect and punctuate these very upheavals and anxieties for the current generation, struggling themselves with a new paradigm. Childhood is now a largely mechanized- and commodified enterprise where each baby step is overseen and scrutinized by doctors, lawyers, advertisers, and now Bloggers. “The back story,” as social critic and historian Benjamin Barber writes, “is that the West has privatized child-raising.” Consequently, children are now a compelling surrogate to record the discontents and changing face of our time.

Change and chance indeed underscore many of the works from “Empty Nest,” and characterize the newfound currency of the subject. The plastic, transient, and arbitrary aspects of youth itself furnish a perfect metaphor for an unstable, vulnerable world. Renieke Djikstra’s young sitters beautifully and awkwardly straddle two spheres in adolescence; and Loretta Lux’s subtly manipulated figures and tableaux are similarly suspended, in ambiguous moments of history and maturity. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s oil-stick figures recall early, naïve drawing, Art Brut, and graffiti, and connect a lineage with Helen Levitt’s photographs of kids’ sidewalk scrawling – raw, fleeting street-art which will be erased by the next rain. Neil Farber’s musings raise doodling to a high art, and riff on childhood dreams, superstitions, and repeated motifs borrowed from Keith Haring’s pictures of children. And Suzanne Caporael’s babies are caught in waling tantrum, which has just begun or will soon pass – a function of perceived or real infraction, or just a plea for milk?

Caught in the middle of out-sourced parenting and today’s violent acrimony about among other touchstones – evolution, abortion, stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage – today’s young are orphans of what Barber posits: “Jihad vs. McWorld.” In the last century, the role of children in the family, society, and marketplace is an unfolding, benign discourse. Globalism’s offspring now face a crisis where the very definitions of “child,” “family,” and “life” are in-play. In the end, the aspirations, fears, and dangerous contradictions of our time are most dramatically revealed in the imagery of children.

The plight of children has garnered a new sense of urgency, and is evidently a recurring, influential subject for artists. Paradoxically, it still remains an obscure topic. With only few exceptions including two exhibitions from the last five years – the Guggenheim’s “Family Pictures” and the Israel Museum’s “Age of Innocence,” not since Lewis Hine's photography about child welfare, has the subject of children been a prioritized theme. And while “Empty Nest” is not a political exhibition, within this broad context it sheds new light on a ripe, contentious subject, one which speaks as eloquently about the past as it does the future.

Overall, "Empty Nest" retells this dynamic, young story, bringing the representations of children full-circle, connecting disparate international artists observing children across three centuries. Arguably over-due, it arrives on the heels of "Kid Nation,” a new reality TV series about children without adult supervision, and “Bratz,” a movie spun from a tricked-out and sexed-up clone of Barbie, among countless new appeals, both high and low, foisted on the young and their parents. The trend is growing daily, f