Terror Tales, April 1936 by Terror Tales

Many of these pastoral landscapes and scenes of war are composed – all unwittingly, of course, and by instinct – according to the most severely elegant classical principles. To a sense of colour children add a feeling for form and a remarkable capacity for decorative invention. In other drawings, the tones are deep, the contrasts violent. There are combinations of pale pure colours that remind one of the harmonies one meets with in the tinted sketches of the eighteenth century. 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. Ministerio de Instrucción Pública, Colonia no 10, Elda (Alicante).Having spoken of the idea that most people have the art knocked out or bored out of them by adulthood, he praises there use of crayons to colour their work. (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.) He begins by taking on the role of art critic:įrom 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. Captions were written on the drawing verso.Īmerican writer Aldous Huxley was asked to write on the drawings by the Spanish Child Welfare Association of America for the American Friends Service Committee, 1938. We see many images of war, especially drawing of planes dropping bombs.

The originals are held by the UC San Diego Library.

Some were published for the American Friends Service Committee to raise funds for children’s relief efforts in Spain. Made from pencil, crayon, ink, and watercolours, the drawings were collected by the Spanish Board of Education and the Carnegie Institute of Spain. Housed at the Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection are over 600 drawings made during the Spanish Civil War by Spanish school children, both in Spain and in refugee centres in France.

Terror Tales, April 1936 by Terror Tales