by Jan Herman
To extol the virtues of the Internet is to report the obvious: It’s old news. But every day brings a fresh reminder of its value. Have a look at Newsweek.com’s slide show of an exhibition at the AXA Gallery in New York called “They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo,” a survey of more than 60 drawings.
Although Newsweek hasn’t mentioned the exhibition in print, it has done a greater service by
posting the slide show on its Website, with a narrative by exhibition co-curator Peter N. Carroll. (Scroll down and click the photo gallery called “How Children See War.”) The reproductions of 12 of the drawings, in color and in black and white, are magnificent. The exhibition runs through April 3.
“‘They Still Draw Pictures’ collects and comments on a cross-section of the children’s art produced in the colonias infantiles,” an AXA Gallery press release notes, “as well as a selection of drawings from later wars, from the Holocaust to Kosovo, that bear a tragic and uncanny resemblance to their Spanish counterparts.” (Colonias infantiles were colonies established in Republican-controlled territory during the Spanish Civil War for more than 200,000 traumatized children who were either orphaned or separated from their families.)
The drawings are regarded as “invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children’s experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness.” Omitted from the Newsweek slide show, however — and this is a reflection of the gallery exhibition itself — are any children’s drawings from the Vietnam War, the genocides in Cambodia or Rwanda, (see The Rwanda Project: “Through the Eyes of Children”), the first Gulf War or the current war in Iraq.
Pari Stave, director of the AXA Gallery, explained in a telephone interview: “The
exhibition is not meant to be comprehensive. Most of the drawings, about 85 percent of them, are
from the Spanish Civil War. They come from a single collection. The others were added as a
curatorial afterthought, and I’m not sure whether that was a good idea or not.”
A book from the University of Illinois Press — entitled “They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo,” by Carroll and co-curator Anthony L. Geist, with a
foreword by Robert Coles — accompanies the exhibition.
Correction: Peter Carroll writes, “There actually IS a drawing from the Persian Gulf war: the Israeli kid with the gas mask. We were unable to locate a source for the Vietnam War, though we know there are some drawings out there.” The Israeli drawing is not in the slide show, but it is mentioned in the narration. My apology for the error.