Over 50,000 drawings by children are stored in a vault in Zurich. An art historian has been studying them to find out how they reflect the past century’s social, political and educational changes. The odd famous name can be recognised among them.
Anna Lehninger moves briskly around the storage room on the outskirts of Zurich. She climbs a shaky ladder, opens cardboard boxes and drawers, leafs through them for several minutes and comes back with a selection of sheets of paper. She arranges them in order, studies them intently and then, as so often happens here, her face registers surprise.
What she has in front of her are collages made with cut-outs from the glossy magazines and catalogues that started coming into Swiss homes with the economic boom. The children’s drawn figures look like modern-day Frankensteins, and evoke an era, just like the thousands of other works in the archive of the Pestalozzianum Foundation in Oerlikon.
The 33-year-old is regularly caught off-guard by the works here. Like the day when, quite by chance, she found the drawings of the young Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who as an adult wrote plays like The Visit and The Physicists that made him famous throughout the world.
There are six drawings done in pencil, coloured pencils and ink which recall his youthful passion for painting, history and noble characters. Dated 1934, the sketches represent intrepid figures like American Indians, or Adrian von Bubenberg, the legendary defender of the city of Morat during the Burgundian siege of 1476.
«To tell you the truth, I was looking for another picture by Dürrenmatt, published in a Pestalozzi school calendar in the 1930s, in which he depicted a historic Swiss battle. I still have not found that one, and I fear that it is no longer in the collection,» explains Lehninger.
The 13-year-old ‘Fritz’ Dürrenmatt (as he signed his name on the back) sent in his work for the annual art competition sponsored by the Pestalozzi Foundation. He may have done it with a heavy heart.
«Dürrenmatt had already entered the contest, winning first prize – a pocket watch. But when he unpacked his prize, full of excitement, he let the precious watch fall on the floor and it broke. So probably he was sending in these six drawings in the hope of getting another watch. But this time the jury only gave him an honourable mention,» recounts Lehninger.
Dürrenmatt’s are not the only treasures contained in the archive. Lehninger has found a pencil sketch by the son of Albert Einstein, the 13-year-old Eduard; an engraving by Celestino Piatti, a respected graphic artist and painter from canton Ticino; a picture of the Swiss cartoon character Globi by the future finance minister Kaspar Villiger and later chairman of UBS.
Mirroring events and changes
The archive is surprising not only because of the odd well-known name that turns up, but above all because of the richness and variety it contains. The 50,000 pictures come from 25 countries.
Works were produced during art classes or for an art competition in Switzerland or elsewhere. The Pestalozzianum Foundation collection is one of the main such archives in Europe, with others in Vienna, Prague, Mannheim and Lausanne.
Leafing through the drawings one can trace the passing of time, relive landmark events over the last century, see changes in society reflected, and appreciate how the teaching of art in schools has evolved. «There is enough material here for decades of research. It is fascinating to see how children gave expression to the reality surrounding them,» says Lehninger.
The 20th century was certainly not without epoch-making events. Some of them particularly struck the imagination of these young artists. They are very much aware of the Second World War – represented by fathers, uncles, and cousins in uniform, military weapons, and the struggle to bring in the harvest during wartime; later on this focus gives way to sporting competitions, then the first moon landing.
The pictures also reflect social processes, especially within the family. «Whereas up till the 1960s roles in the home were well defined and respected tradition, from the 1960s on, children drew the father working in the kitchen, or feeding the baby its bottle, while the mother drives a car,» says Lehninger.
Taken out of their boxes, these pictures reflect a turbulent century. Lehninger searches through the light pencil lines, the heavy brush strokes, the bold collages, for history seen through children’s eyes, as a bust of Pestalozzi, the prince of educational reformers, serenely gazes down.