Sparks That Fire the Imagination : Arts: Cultural interests begin early. Some say knowledge can be condensed; others fight for the word and the picture.

Early childhood as the crucial time to form lasting views of the world has been agreed upon since before the days of child-labor laws: “Give me the child until he is 7 and I shall give you the man” is no mere Jesuitic boast. Just how that child takes in that world, let alone what that world should encompass, is becoming more of a battleground than ever, as any parent can tell you.

Childhood is culture’s richest seedbed, where lifelong interests are germinated. The fine artists and writers on exhibit at the gallery-bookstore Every Picture Tells a Story see childhood as unfettered, exhilarating, a free fall of the imagination.

Culture know-it-all E. D. Hirsch thinks it can be codified and that every picture needs less than 1,000 words and that classic words aren’t that important anyway.

The cornerstone of young children’s awareness, on a deeper level even than television, has always been the books they pored over, especially picture books from “Good Night Moon” and the splendid irreverence of Dr. Seuss onward. Reading aloud is the lasting cement between parents and children. Now, however, it seems that the glorious plunder of a well-stocked (and unexpurgated) library by kids and their parents is going to have to shape up early on. The same unsure parents who need a yardstick by which to measure their kids’ progress at every step, now have Hirsch’s ground rules for What Every First Grader Should Know.

Hirsch is the maven who took a deep breath and with “Cultural Literacy” in 1987, determined what it was that any literate adult should have learned. Even if, inevitably, one came up short, it was sort of fun to check oneself against Hirsch’s 5,000-item list, everything from the hypothalamus to the FDIC.

The first two volumes of what Hirsch calls “core knowledge” are just out, a first- and second-grader’s survey covering language arts; geography, world and American civilization; fine arts; mathematics and the natural sciences. And even though the books suggest that their watered-down versions of fairy tales, myths, or history may whet children’s appetites for the real thing, you can bet that in some quarters, this Culture in 20 Minutes Per Day text will be enough.

There’s no argument that a generalized body of knowledge is important to every grade-school education and that’s what Hirsch, spearheading a group of 100-odd experts and 2,000 consulting parents and teachers, has attempted to create. But judging from these first two books, they do more to squash curiosity than spark it. In compressing and making the richness of fairy tales and myths “accessible,” for example, they have taken away their wonder, as well as the power of their original color illustrations. This approach allows a child to “know” everything and feel nothing. It’s like Dylan Thomas’ Christmas book from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which told everything about the wasp except why.

The first-grader’s language-arts section has snippets from stories and fables, condensed disastrously: “Pinocchio” in a page and a half, “The Ugly Duckling” in less. Beatrix Potter’s luminous watercolors for “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” are represented by three tiny black and white drawings and they’ve even dared to muck with her text. Those words, so full of alliteration and English irony, have been cut and squeezed into a scant page and a quarter.

The art is by some of the field’s masters--Howard Pyle, John Tenniel, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham--but they’re miniaturized to the size of a Post-It. The history section’s photographs are as bad, while their grab-bag facts are arbitrary and prosciutto deep. There is the sense of every element flattened by editing, by consensus and by “correctness” into this cultural minute waltz. You might wish that Hirsch et al. had confined themselves to a bibliography; this hobbling earnestness almost consciously dampens enthusiasm, young and adult.

After a morning with Hirsch’s two volumes, a stroll through the art and the intelligence on display at Every Picture Tells a Story is like a reward. The La Brea gallery-bookstore, which, since late 1989, has specialized in original art from children’s books, also has a hand-picked selection of books whose magnificent illustrations make them irresistible, provably to every age.

“The Art of the Fairy Tale” is its current show. It bears out one of co-owners Abbie Phillips and Lois Sarkisian fervent tenets: that the best of illustrative art widens, rather than limits the text, that it encourages other explanations and other scenarios.

It’s not surprising that half the collectors Phillips and Sarkisian deal with have no children. The potency of the art doesn’t come from being about children, but being about childhood ; it’s electrifying to see how different artists tap into that feeling.

Some use a “little” or a “powerless” point of view: the world seen either from kneecap height or from the palm of a giant. The subject of an extraordinary egg tempera by Richard Jesse Watson may be Tom Thumb, but no youngster can miss the reference to a world that constantly looms above him.

In the show is one of Phillips’ earliest acquisitions, one she’d now be hard-pressed to part with. It’s the pivotal scene from Don and Audrey Wood’s 1987 “Heckedy Peg”, which stands a chance of becoming that dream of every publisher, a classic fairy tale.

It’s also a lesson in the startling difference between the richness and contrast of original art and its life on a page, in an even half-way good reproduction.

Abbie Phillips’ husband, Allan, a developmental psychiatrist, stops by the gallery as we’re talking about the relatively early age at which picture books stop.

“Too early,” he says, smiling gravely. “It’s because they’ve had picture books that children are able to create their own inner vision when they begin to read. You can’t fantasize about television images, you can’t linger on them, pore over them, go back to them again and again. And it’s over so soon.”

Fortunately, there’s no statute of limitations, here or at libraries, for browsing youngsters who’ve supposedly passed the magical age of picture books. For the rest of us, there’s parenthood. And even grandparenthood. Or simply collecting, with no excuses needed; just shelf space. And money.