[REFUGEE CHILDREN’S EVACUATION FUND; Oskar KOKOSCHKA; J.G. SIEBERT.] The War as Seen by Children.

‘Who Is Right? We Grown-Ups or the Little Ones?’

[REFUGEE CHILDREN’S EVACUATION FUND; Oskar KOKOSCHKA; J.G. SIEBERT.] The War as Seen by Children. [London: Refugee Children’s Evacuation Fund. 1943.]

8vo. Stapled as issued in the publisher’s printed wrappers, child’s drawing to upper wrapper; pp. [24]; numerous black-and-white in-text illustrations; slight soiling to wrappers, short repaired chip to upper wrapper touching price of 1-; uniform light toning; else a very good copy.

A catalogue produced by the Refugee Children’s Evacuation Fund for a wartime exhibition of children’s paintings, drawings, and crafts held at the Cooling Galleries on New Bond Street on 4 January 1943.

The Refugee Children’s Evacuation Fund was dedicated to the ‘relief of suffering children who have been haunted and persecuted by the merciless child-hunters of our age – the Fascists’. Amongst the patrons of the Refugee Children’s Evacuation Fund were the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz, Walter de la Mare, Bertrand Russell, and Vita Sackville-West.

The basis of The War As Seen by Children was the much smaller 1941 exhibition Children’s Art from all Countries, featuring works of children by twelve nationalities and opened by Jan Masaryk – then Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia – and biologist Julian Huxley (later first director-general of the United Nations), by the Free German League of Culture (Freier Deutscher Kulturbund), the anti-Nazi émigré collective founded in 1938 at the London home of the German-born Jewish painter Fred Uhlman.

The present exhibition was extended ‘to include the works of all the children of the United Nations’, and explores how children viewed the horrors of war and how they perceived the future, how refugee and evacuated children could rebuild their lives and national identities, how refugee and evacuated children viewed their new surroundings, and how they might feel united under a common purpose. This catalogue features twenty illustrations by children aged seven and a half to seventeen from Austria, China, England, Germany, and Poland, as well as photographs of the exhibition’s opening. Particularly haunting are depictions of families huddled together in a bomb shelter (Pamela Thomas, British, age fifteen), ‘Terror’ (Karin Glaser, German, age sixteen), ‘Tank Attack’ (Plato Chan, Chinese, age ten), ‘In Poland Now’ (a grinning Grim Reaper before a crying moon and stars by an anonymous thirteen-year-old Polish child), ‘New Order’ (a man being shot by a Nazi firing squad by George Herzog, Austrian, age seventeen), and the cover image, ‘God of Vectorey [sic]’ (Harry Turner, British, age seven and a half).

This catalogue also reproduces the 1943 exhibition’s keynote speech by Oskar Kokoschka, who emphasises the ways in which the exhibition ‘shows how the spirit of true democracy unites children of different nations, and educates them not only to understand each other but to respect each other […] Who is right? We grown-ups or the little ones? Perhaps the thing to do would be for us to learn again our lesson from these young survivors of the carnage. May be there are still some old ideals lingering with democracy’ (pp. 9–10). Kokoschka had exhibited in the FGLC’s 1939 First Group Exhibition of German Austrian Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors at the Wertheim Gallery in London and ‘served as Honorary President from 1941, advocating for Jewish emigrants and political enemies of the Nazis held in internment’ (Ben Uri Gallery, online); he became a British citizen in 1947.

SKU: 2126355