Shopping bag.

Everyone applies themselves to their drawing, or rather their “trace” as Arno calls it, without restrain themselves and with the certainty that no one else will comment on it. No document will leave the Closlieu, thus protecting its authors from unwelcome regard the works are stored on site, protected from judgment. Michèle Stern also says that they bought the large house in which they live today to store the 500,000 archives. This is what distinguishes “Le jeu de peindre” (“The game of painting”), as he called it, from the conception of a work of art”.

Le Closlieu does not place the child in the process of an artist who must have a goal and establish communication with an audience. They stay in the pure act of creation and observation. They let go of all possible expectations and value judgments. It is a laying bare, a gentle but direct connection with the present moment which helps us return to the essence of what inhabits us and moves us. “People give vent to something special because they know there is no after. People’s motivations are the most varied, each one will leave the signs, the labels, the handicaps, the judgments, the discriminations at the door, to plunge into a new world.” Explains André.

To understand his approach to childhood, we must go back to his own. Born on June 23, 1924 in Kassel, Germany, the thinker came from a Jewish family. In 1933, he and his parents fled Nazi persecution. Arno remembers in the book of interviews with his son published at Marabout Editions: Poser sur nos enfants les yeux de la confi ance. “Putting the eyes of trust on our children”, the day when everything changed: he wanted to park his little red pedal car with which he was playing, when his mother called him. They had to leave. They got into a car, and never came back. They emigrated to France, where they experienced long years of wandering and poverty.

Threatened by Vichy authority, they escaped, but found themselves at the Swiss border. Arno spent his adolescence interned in a work camp. “Arno’s childhood is absolutely metaphorical and loaded with meaning.” explains his son André. “He lived twelve years in the middle of war, in the worst conditions imaginable: the escape, the threat of cannons, the need to hide in the straw when there was a German tank, under the red sky of bombings, and then there was hunger, fear, misery, this feeling of being nothing, and of being able to be denounced by friends or comrades at any time… There is nothing worse. And yet, when Arno is asked what his childhood was like, he says: it was wonderful.”

Arno’s childhood was great, he explained to his son, because he had the necessary “attachment.” He was in material precariousness but had a home base, an incredible safety net: the love of his family, and that was enough for his happiness.

Well before the advances we are familiar with today in child psychiatry, Arno advocated a completely unique approach. The era insisted on punishment and constraint as the main educational values, while Michèle and Arno decided to teach Eléonore and André themselves. They placed listening and respect at the center of education. “Since the 1950s Arno has been the initiator and pioneer of all of today’s thinking. This is why it takes its place alongside the sacred scholar of the field” adds his son.