Adept Child

The charm of most child paintings, abundantly demonstrated in several shows this season, depends as much on technical innocence as on anything else: when children master adult techniques, they usually copy adult subject matter as well. In London last week, visitors at the New Burlington Galleries saw something different in the way of. childish art--the creations of an Austrian girl who used a grownup, effortless technique, as skilfully as some clever illustrator, to picture childish fantasies, fairy stories, dreams, allegories, religious ponderings. Roswitha Bitterlich is now 18, but her show included pencil drawings (of herself with two guardian angels) that she made at the age of three; a charcoal depicting plague, war, hunger and unemployment, with foul vice hovering in the background, done at 12; a provocative oil called Madman (see cut) done at 14. By the time she was 12, Roswitha had become so proficient that when she dashed off a book of water colors of dwarfs for her brother's Christmas, a Berlin publisher grabbed it, and colored postcards spread her slightly melancholy, Walt Disneyish figures over Germany.

Facing 15 years of Roswitha's productions, critics found them a little disconcerting. They seemed less the work of a gifted child than the work of an adept adult with a child's mind. Although most of her 412 pictures were humorous or sentimental sketches of saints, animals and fairies, critics harped on the macabre quality of her work, cited examples like Destroying Angel, in which the angel, with flaming wings and gaping mouth, is shown snatching properly terrified victims from doorways. Roswitha, who is now finishing high school in Innsbruck, did not go to London for the opening of her show, consequently missed speeches in her honor by Nazi officials, by pro-Nazi English bigwigs like Lord Mount Temple. To the strangeness of Roswitha's painting, English critics added an incidental complaint: the difficulty of seeing them for the crowd of gallery visitors who huddled together discussing news from Germany, exchanging "quick upflick salutes."

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