Drawing the Epoch: Children, War, and Revolution in Propaganda and the Art of School Children between 1914 and 1917

Abstract

This article considers children’s experiences of war and revolution and its reflection in their drawings. The authors construct two pictures of the war, one official, which used the images of children for purposes of propaganda, and the other unofficial, which reflected the war through children’s imagination. The authors conclude that the children’s view of war is mostly mythopoetic, and that the drawing process was quite often a game for them. Although children’s drawings do not allow us to conclude that negative changes took place in their authors’ minds, they do contain images that later became symbols of the Revolution and the Civil War. Children’s art from 1917 demonstrates that the year of revolution affected children more than World War I.