Mexico v. Vermont

Mexican children grow up in intimate awareness of their environment, and they paint it in all the richness of its color and detail; Vermont children never really see what they look at. This difference was dramatically displayed last week at Manhattan's Bonestell Gallery in a show called "Children 3,000 Miles Apart," arranged by an artist named Elsa Rogo.

Miss Rogo, a restless New Yorker, studied art in New York, Paris and Vienna, wrote for newspapers in Latin America, got caught in a rebellion in Mexico, was shipwrecked off Havana, spent her honeymoon (with Artist Stefan Hirsch) in the jungles of Yucatan. In 1931 she and her husband paused to paint in the then isolated little hill town of Taxco (rhymes with Moscow), 100 miles southwest of Mexico City, and hit it off so well with Taxco's kids that she started an art school for them.

To Elsa's first class went 43 kids, mostly boys. They were illiterate, but they knew how to work with their hands and had grown up amid the visual excitement of sunbright red roofs, shapely pots, sculptured sweet cakes. Their chief architectural monument is their delightfully ludicrous churrigueresque church. Miss Rogo gave them a minimum of technical instruction, just showed them how to grind colors and let them paint. When a talented youngster complained that people wouldn't stand still, she suggested a model who she knew hadn't moved for two years --the village loafer.

When she had made her school a going concern, she asked the Mexican Government to take it over. Mexico City officials were incredulous: they didn't believe the paintings she showed them had been made by children. But Education Minister Ezequiel Padilla (now Mexico's Foreign Minister) was won over. The Taxco school, officially blessed, turned out some well-known artists.

Two years later Miss Rogo started an art class in a one-room schoolhouse at Old Bennington, Vt. She horrified the teacher the first day by clearing away the desks and squatting with the children on the floor. She discovered that:

At the age of six a New England country kid knows very little about the shape of a cow's rump or the color of a tree. At eight he knows still less. Schooled in a severe, literary tradition, he always paints an apple red, a tree green. When he is urged to cut loose, he is more likely to picture a fairy tale than the homely things he sees every day. Miss Rogo's conclusion: "In general, art is simply not taught to children in the U.S."

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