They Still Draw Pictures‪!‬

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 definitely down.