Art: Bon!

After an art season notable for shows of U. S. child paintings, uninhibited, fresh and progressive, Manhattanites last week had a good look at the present state of child art in Spain. Displayed at Lord & Taylor’s department store were about 1,000 drawings and watercolors by Spanish children, collected in Valencia and Madrid and shipped to the U. S. to raise money for the Spanish Child Welfare Association. In charge of the exhibition was a gnome-like, darting little Austrian-born Spaniard named José A. Weissberger, who describes himself at present as “a nobody,” having been an insurance solicitor for 35 years in Madrid.

A significant moiety of Mr. Weissberger’s collection were drawings which Loyalist schoolteachers had their pupils do on “The Life of the Child” before and during the war. Drawings of child life during the war showed air fights and bombs going “Bon!” (Spanish equivalent for “Boom!”). Good sample of what war psychology means to a ten-year-old who knows high explosives better than he knows Dick Tracy was one drawing of an urban air raid in which war planes were carefully distinguished as tri-motor or single-motor jobs, small figures scurried for refuge stations. “Like bugs, poor darlings,” said Mr. Weissberger.