During the Spanish Civil War, Spanish schoolchildren were encouraged to use art to express their feelings about the violence and devastation wrought by the conflict. The Spanish Board of Education and the Carnegie Institute of Spain collected and exhibited these works with the intent of raising awareness and funds for the children. They Still Draw Pictures, first published in the U.S. in 1938, is a black and white catalog of sixty of these drawings. The introduction by Aldous Huxley notes: "It is a pleasure to consider these children's drawings as works of art; but it is also our duty to remember that they are signs of the times, symptoms of our contemporary civilization."
UC San Diego's Mandeville Special Collections Library's online exhibit has made available a digital reproduction of the original catalog as well as scans of original drawings from their collection, which, at over 600 images, is the largest in the world. Copies of the catalog are rare, but the University of Illinois Press published a revised edition in 2002.
Further Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment