Following the war, a cache of the drawings made by the children under Friedl's tutelage was discovered, and eventually became the subject of its own powerful museum exhibit and book. It was widely understood as a symbol of the strength of the human spirit during times of unimaginable repression. (In an unlikely and extremely ironic footnote, a replica of one drawing from that collection — an imaginary moonscape by Petr Ginz, one of Friedl's students — was in the possession of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon when the space shuttle Columbiadisintegrated in February.) What wasn't made clear by that version of the story was the essential continuity between the children's reclamation of their creative power and the idealist dreams of the prewar Modernists — a continuity personified by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
Friedl's journey can be seen as a series of broken artistic utopias — from the lofty Modernist aesthetic revolution of the Bauhaus to Communist Berlin and Red Vienna to the bustling refugee community of Prague to the Nazis' duplicitous "ideal city of the Jews" at Terezin. But underlying the stripping away of ideological prescription that accompanied each successive disillusionment was a groundswell of confidence in the power of art to transform and heal our relationship to the world — not through the programmatic imposition of our aesthetic will, but by awakening our senses to the beauty and sanctity of the world as it is, here and now, even under the most adverse circumstances.
"It takes on particular significance today, when we're feeling so nervous and there's such a high level of anxiety in what everybody's doing," says curator Seidman Miller. "You read Friedl's quotes from 1942 where she said, 'If you have one day, then you have to live it, because the only way to escape death is by living. So I choose to and if I fight by picking up a pencil and drawing a picture, so be it.' And you see she believed in creative resistance — and it empowered her and empowered the children. It's not a romantic story — the truth is that all the survivors that we interviewed who worked with Friedl said they don't think they would have survived without her classes."
One of Friedl's students — not from Terezin, but from the period just before, in Prague — was young Edith Kramer, the same Edith Kramer who brought Friedl's teachings to America and laid the foundations for the contemporary practice of clinical art therapy.
ART THERAPISTS AS ARTISTS | Loyola Marymount University, Laband Art Gallery, One LMU Drive, Westchester | Through April 12
FRIEDL DICKER-BRANDEIS AND THE CHILDREN OF TEREZIN: An Exhibition of Art and Hope | Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Plaza, 9786 W. Pico Blvd. Through September 1
