In the late 1930s, at a time when all ethical constraints seemed to be evaporating from the world, the Spanish Civil War introduced a new kind of horror to modern warfare — the targeting of civilians. In outrage at the wholesale destruction of a town in Northern Spain by Nazi bombers (more than 1,600 inhabitants were killed ), Pablo Picasso responded with "Guernica," one of the world's great antiwar icons.

Picasso's fierce picture sums up the carnage for those of us who weren't there. Yet thousands of other images document the war in a way that's more personal and heartrending. They were drawn by children.

Evacuated from battle areas and sent to safe havens, communities of children ages 4 to 16 lived through the war with a few teachers and nurses, trying to recover some sense of normalcy even though many had lost their families and homes. Living in groups of 10-50, in schools or abandoned mansions, the children were given art lessons and asked to draw.

"To my knowledge, it's one of the first organized, systematic uses of art as therapy for children suffering the trauma of war," said University of Washington Spanish professor Anthony Geist, who put together a book and exhibition of the archived paintings and drawings. "They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo" opened this month at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the UW School of Art. The children's pictures hang next to documentary photographs from the Spanish Civil War, including several by acclaimed photojournalist Robert Capa.

Most of the artworks come from the Spanish children's colonias, but Geist also added a selection from other conflicts, other parts of the world, ranging from images of the Holocaust, to wars in Kosovo, Palestine, Chiapas, Sri Lanka, Burma, Iran and Sarajevo, all seen through the eyes of children.

The images poured out, often in great detail:

Airplanes spilling bombs on houses, bridges and main streets. Houses crumbling and burning. Dead bodies. Children arrested. Men tortured. A woman leaping from a cliff to avoid a soldier pursuing her on horseback. Bombs dropping through smoke-clogged skies. Always more airplanes; always more bombs.

Adults are giants

In the drawings, adults sometimes show up as enormous creatures towering over tiny stick-figure children. The power difference is vast. Kids may not be able to formulate such ideas in words, but it's clear enough from the pictures they make.

Pedro Garcia Garcia, age unknown, made this drawing in the 1930s.

Geist organized the exhibition into four sections to contrast the children's experiences during the war with their serene memories of the past and hopeful imaginings of what the future would hold. We see what life was like in peacetime: children going to church, playing under sunny skies with parents nearby, going to the theater, feeding chickens in the yard or watching men work the fields. Normal everyday things.

And then, pictures of displacement — of homeless people with bundles on their backs, children sleeping in traincars. Those who made it to the colonias were the lucky ones, where they studied and drew pictures and played together in a safe place. Others were killed or maimed in the bombings or got routed off to any sort of foster care.

One survivor, Alfonso Ortuño, of Madrid, recalled being 10 years old when his mother sent him and his sister away from the bombardments. "They told us we were going to live in colonias, in camps, which turned out not to be the case," he said in a 2001 interview transcribed in Geist's book. Instead, they were sent to Puebla Larga, where a town crier announced the children's arrival.

Recalls in detail

"They took us to a building called the Casa del Pueblo. I remember this perfectly," Ortuño said. "The people of this town were waiting there, and they chose us like slaves: 'I want this one. I don't want that one.' Like slaves. That experience left its mark on me and I'll never forget it."

ROBERT CAPA / COURTESY OF CORNELL CAPA AND THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY, NEW YORK Documentary photos, including this one of a girl in 1939 Barcelona by acclaimed photojournalist Robert Capa, are part of the exhibit.

For the children who made it to the colonias, a sense of safety seemed to re-emerge. In the pictures they drew, life is orderly and clean. Trees grow in tidy rows, checkered cloths drape the dining-room tables, houses stand tall and undamaged. The sun shines. Boys kick soccer balls in the fields.

But did drawing pictures really help these children recover from overwhelming fear and loss?

"It's extraordinarily effective," said Dr. Janice Hoshino, chair of the art-therapy program at Antioch University, Seattle. "If you think about how we learn to think, it's in symbolic processes. Art transcends culture; it transcends language. It can be a wonderful vehicle to heal, to communicate, to express yourself."

If you take a traumatized child into an office and ask her how she feels, you will most likely get a limited answer, Hoshino says. But if you give her paint or colored pencils, images can begin to bubble up. The American Art Therapy Association, formed in 1969, recognizes that verbal therapy is not as effective for all people. Children progress through sequential stages of symbols development, Hoshino says. And there are characteristics that emerge with certain disorders, if people are psychotic or depressed. From psychotics, Hoshino says, you might see drawings with fragmented images and figures floating about rather than standing firm on the ground.

It's the act of transferring the image to something external and tangible that offers relief. "The fear of the trauma or event can be overwhelming as a memory but if it can be expressed through art, people can sometimes find peace and closure," Hoshino said. "The threat of the memory becomes somehow less. Art is a very, very powerful process."

For the UW's Geist, who has spent years searching archives and tracking records of the Spanish Civil War to assemble this exhibition and the book that accompanies it, the value of art therapy is only part of the message he hopes to convey. "What I find so powerful is that it's children representing their own experiences, not adults representing them," Geist said. "This is the strongest anti-war statement I could come up with."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com