elektro80
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Joined: Mar 25, 2003
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Location: Norway
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 Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 11:21 am Post subject:
They Still Draw Pictures |
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http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/tsdp/
This is a fantastic website consisting of approx 600 drawing made during the Spanish Civil War by spanish school children.
First published in New York by the Spanish Child Welfare Association of America for the American Friends Service Committee, 1938.
Reissued: New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Excerpt from the introduction written by Aldous Huxley:
| Quote: | This is a collection of children's drawings; it is also and at the same time a collection of drawings made by little boys and girls who have lived through a modern war.
Let us consider the collection in both its aspects - as a purely aesthetic phenomenon and as an expression of contemporary history, through the eyes of the sociologist no less than of the art critic.
From an aesthetic and psychological point of view, the most startling thing about a collection of this kind is the fact that, when they are left to themselves, most children display astonishing artistic talents. (When they are interfered with and given "lessons in art," they display little beyond docility and a chameleon-like power to imitate whatever models are set up for their admiration.) One can put the matter arithmetically and say that, up to the age of fourteen or thereabouts, at least fifty per cent of children are little geniuses in the field of pictorial art. After that, the ratio declines with enormous and accelerating rapidity until, by the time the children have become men and women, the proportion of geniuses is about one in a million. Where artistic sensibility is concerned, the majority of adults have grown, not up, but quite definitley down.
The sensibility of children is many-sided and covers all the aspects of pictorial art. How sure, for example, is their sense of colour! The children whose drawings are shown in this collection have had the use only of crayons. But crayons strong enough to stand up to the pressure imposed on them by impatient childish hands are a most inadequate colour medium. Child colourist are at their best when they use gouache or those non-poisonous, jam-like pigments which are now supplied to nursery schools and with which, using the familiar techniques of playing with mud or food, even the smallest children will produce the most delicately harmonized examples of "finger painting." These Spanish children, I repeat, have had to work under a technical handicap; but in spite of this handicap, how well, on the whole, they have acquitted themselves. There are combinations of pale pure colours that remind one of the harmonies one meets with in the tinted sketches of the eighteenth century. In other drawings, the tones are deep, the contrasts violent. (I remember especially one landscape of a red-roofed house among dark trees and hills that possesses, in its infantile way, all the power and certainty of a Vlaminck). |
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