Art: Battles and Startled Geese

The Chinese term for portrait painting means, literally, “to draw truth.” Last week, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art showed some small examples of this interpretation: a show of 46 “War Pictures by Chinese Children.”

The pictures were collected from the desks of child students in Chengtu, the cultural capital of western China, 150 miles northwest of Chungking. Children between the ages of seven and 13, under their teachers’ guidance, expressed their reactions to war, caricatured their Japanese enemies, drew political cartoons. One drawing, by 13-year-old Peng Teh-chuan, made use of the Chinese proverbial phrase Giving Charcoal in Snowy Weather (“A friend in need is a friend indeed”) by picturing a forceful Roosevelt rushing aid to a stern Stalin (see cut).

Not all the pictures of the exhibition reflected Occidental draftsmanship. Alert for the Emergency, by Chang Ting-pang, twelve, was a traditionally Chinese water color of wild geese at the edge of a pond, executed with a few nervous brush strokes. Going to Battle was also pure Chinese pen-and-brush work, sketching a peasant figure whose only modern accouterment was the rifle on his shoulder.

Wrote Mai-mai Sze, artist daughter of Alfred Sao-ke Sze, former Ambassador to the U.S., in the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin: “Any child in Russia, Europe, or England, might do the counterpart. . . . A war child of the West would also know, as instinctively as the Chinese child, that a black line drawn along the hollow of the cheek is enough to describe hunger, and that people with empty stomachs seldom stand.”