Tot Shows

Last week New Yorkers who were willing to make the trip down to 175 Canal St. and up four flights of stairs had a chance to note the effect of the Sino-Japanese war upon the minds of American-born Chinese children aged 4 to 16. The children's first National Art Exhibition, staged by the alert four-year-old Chinese Art Club, had gathered 550 drawings and paintings from every part of the country, including Honolulu.

Like their parents, the youngsters were not taking the Far-Eastern conflict lying down. Among studies of animals, film stars and traditional Oriental themes, the Chinese children bitterly pictured what their ancestral enemy was doing in China.

Many of these young propagandists adopted the cartoonist's and caricaturist's method. A sixth-grader conceived Japan as a silkworm just fallen off a mulberry leaf (entitled He Overate!); one Chune Fook did a heart-rending distortion of two famine victims. Judged best was Ernest Louie's deadly earnest, broad-stroked water color of a Chinese family fleeing in terror from a bombed village. Ernest, a 16-year-old Clevelander, reads the papers.

Across the East River at the World's Fair a group of youthful and Metropolitan Occidentals, members of the Young American Artist's Association, were also showing their wares. The 75 drawings and paintings flapped against the barnlike outside walls of the Contemporary Arts Building from dawn to dusk last week. If they lacked the fervor of war psychology, there was plenty of emphasis upon sociology in the pictures of tenements and subways they lived among.

Youngest of the young, and one of the most interesting, was twelve-year-old Alex Kozloff, a Brooklyn carpenter's son, who beamed beside three small bright oils. His Coney Island was a broad copy of pictures he had seen on Sunday trips to museums, but his uninhibited use of paint and his free brush were evident. Sea Beach, he says proudly, "is out of my head."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.