Miraculous, mutilated, mundane: Redrawing children’s art in Francoist Spain

Abstract

Children’s drawings hold a contested place in archives of war. Often portrayed as unfiltered records of psychological impact on innocent young civilians, the same drawings are also sophisticated testimonies of agency. With child-artists creating their work within classrooms, families, and communities, this article offers an alternative reading of their historical significance. Children’s art offers not simply a firsthand view of conflict but also a critical view onto the alliances and ideologies of the adults who guided their creation. Before and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), after which Spain entered into several decades of National-Catholic dictatorship, psychologists and teachers used children’s drawings to further educational projects toward both progressive and conservative ends. Across key nodes of conflict and postwar quietude, I ask how advocacy of children’s art allowed teachers to practice what I call a form of pedagogical postmemory. Centering on Francoist-era education and the artists who created new openings for individual expression, the essay focuses on two educators, namely the artist Ángel Ferrant (1890–1961) and the novelist Josefina Aldecoa (1926–2011). Contrasting their paired views of children’s art as a liberating, imaginative activity with that of the Francoist pedagogue Josefina Álvarez de Cánovas (1898–?), this study exposes how the same fundamental rhetoric of imagination and freedom could result in vastly different archives of children’s drawings under dictatorship. Understanding children’s art as bound up in wider social and political processes, it posits the seemingly neutral sphere of postwar art education as a key vehicle for pedagogical memory and historical recovery.