THEY STILL DRAW PICTURES
CHILDREN'S ART IN WARTIME FROM THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR TO KOSOVO

"A drawing or a painting is a soul's message," Robert Coles observes. "The point is to demonstrate what has been imagined or, yes, witnessed … [and] for us to be shown something by certain boys and girls who become our teachers." They Still Draw Pictures collects and comments on a cross-section of children's art produced in wartime, with particular focus on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Franco's tyranny, more than 200,000 were children. Spain's Republican government responded by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies), often in country estates that had been abandoned by fascist sympathizers. In these colonies, young refugees-many of them orphaned or sent by their parents to safety-received schooling and medical care, kept each other company, and produced thousands of drawings that provide a collective testimony of their experiences.

Born of the trauma of separation and exile, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies, preserve the children's memories of life before war, and suggest their future hopes.

Children's art from more recent conflicts, drawn from many different sources and spanning the rest of the twentieth century, follows the narrative line traced by the Spanish pictures. They reveal both the specificity of particular historical circumstances and the universality of a child's response to the conditions of war and displacement.

"Once I drew like Raphael," Picasso said, "but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child." Deceptively transparent, these drawings speak with an immediacy of war's consequences for its youngest victims.