Child in War No Child in War Art Galler

Annal

February 24, 2005

Children of war: Visions of conflict, seen through innocent eyes

Tony Geist was on other concern when he first saw the drawings, but he knew immediately they needed to come up to the world's attending.

"The Spanish Ceremonious War has been a passion of mine for years," said Geist, a UW professor who heads the Spanish and Portuguese Studies sectionalisation. The disharmonize, he said, marked a sort of nighttime milestone in the evolution of warfare: "Information technology was the offset mechanized war, and the first one in which the civilian population was systematically targeted."

Geist said he was a visiting professor at the University of California-San Diego in 1998, teaching a form on the art and literature of the Spanish Civil War, when he toured the academy's print annal. His professional life changed that twenty-four hour period, when the archive's manager of special collections showed him a certificate example containing about 600 drawings from the era of that state of war.

"I was just stunned by these things," Geist said with emotion.

The images were of mayhem wreaked on neighborhoods by war — filled with carnage and fume, the horror of aerial assail and the rubble of destroyed homes — merely they were not created past professional artists. The scenes were fatigued by children, forced to witness events of state of war that no child should ever have to see.

The drawings were done by youth living in colonias infantiles, or children'southward colonies, in Spain during the civil war, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. Virtually 600,000 refugees fled to eastern Espana to escape the fascist government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco during that war, almost 200,000 of them children. They were housed and educated in such colonies, which often occupied estates and country houses abandoned by their fascist owners. Geist, the father of two daughters, was deeply moved.

Filomena Torroella, age 14, Centro Español Cerbére (France). "This drawing shows i of the houses diddled upward past the Fascists in Port-Bou."

"I said to the librarian, 'This is extraordinary, and you should do something with it,'" Geist explained. "And she said, 'Go ahead, do it. It's yours.' And so I did."

From at that place, the project seemed to take on a life of its own. Working with Peter North. Carroll, chairman of the board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Athenaeum — the brigade was the name under which well-nigh iii,000 American volunteers fought against Franco in the state of war — Geist created They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo, an exhibit and accompanying book, released in 2002.

The project centers on selected children'southward drawings from the Castilian Civil War, simply also includes art works from subsequent wars. Included are images from a Japanese-American internment camp during Earth War Two as well every bit others from Poland just earlier that war and from later conflicts in Kosovo, Sri Lanka and Burma, among other nations. Ane analogy is from the Vietnam War, Geist said, and one is from Iran during the 1980s. Accompanying the illustrations are vintage wartime photos by famed documentary photographer Robert Capa.

The children'due south art images are divided into five categories, Geist said: before war, during war, displacement, life in the camps, and finally, visions of peace.

The exhibit has been shown at six venues nationwide, including at Dartmouth and Southern Illinois University as well equally at the Axa Gallery in New York Urban center. Its run at the UW's Jacob Lawrence Gallery, from March 2 to April 1, will be its last. At the UW, the showroom was preceded by a film series titled El Ojo Herido (The Wounded Eye), which ended on Tuesday. Geist and Carroll's volume will be available at the gallery.

Luisa Rodriguez, age xi, Bilbao Colonia Infantil de Bayona (France). "This cartoon is the evacuation of my female parent, my blood brother and me equally we were leaving for Santander. And the cannons shot shells that set Mt. Arraiz on fire."

Accompanying the exhibit at the UW will exist a symposium chosen "Children of War" on Friday and Sabbatum, March four and five, in 102 Smith. Geist will convene veterans and survivors of the Spanish Civil War forth with artists, archivists, scholars and children's rights activists "to explore," as his advance notes state, "the transformation of trauma and memory in art and expression." As he did at UC-San Diego, Geist is teaching an accompanying class this quarter on the poetry and politics of the Castilian Civil War.

Geist said he fabricated efforts to contact the creators of the evocative drawings, and tracked down nigh 12 of them. He recalled an example when he phoned 1 of the artists, now in his senior years, and said, "I'm looking at a drawing you did 60 years ago." The feel, he said, was "very emotional, very powerful."

The exhibit and book, in Geist'south view, underscore two chief points. First, "I understood the exhibit every bit a powerful anti-war statement — a demonstration of trauma and violence wrought upon the most innocent of victims by state of war." Second, he said, "The drawings stand up as a testimony of the strength of the human spirit, to create works of beauty out of trauma." In a way, they are like the drawings whatever child will produce, he said, "and still so different."

The showroom is beingness sponsored past the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Sectionalisation of Spanish and Portuguese, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery and the Role of the Acquaintance Dean for the Humanities at the UW.

Of the feel, Geist said, "In many means, it has exceeded my expectations. This has been the near — 'satisfying' is not quite the word — I experience it'southward the near meaning work that I accept done."

And throughout his work, he said he idea often of the young victims of the world'due south current wars. "What struck me was, this is a historical problem, merely it is also a current, ongoing problem." He said the children of state of war-torn Iraq have been "enormously" on his heed equally he worked.

Of those children, Geist said, "I can but promise in that location will exist plenty paper and crayons."

Rafaela Jover Rodgiguez, age 13, Colonia Escolar Bellus (Valencia), "During the Trip."

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Source: https://www.washington.edu/news/2005/02/24/children-of-war-visions-of-conflict-seen-through-innocent-eyes/

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