20th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

Vintage French postcards are all over Etsy and Pinterest. Some are portraits of pretty young ladies. Many others advertise tourist destinations or famous French aperitifs. Sets that illustrate fairy tales seem to be more unusual and Cotsen is fortunate to have some examples from the so-called Golden Age of Postcards between 1890 and 1915.One of the most sumptuous sets in the collection (Cotsen 60506) retells Perrault’s fairy tale of “Sleeping Beauty” (“La Belle au Bois Dormant”) in six scenes. They may look like postcards, with unsigned color illustrations centered on borders of attractively torn paper set on a gold background, but they were not designed to be sent through the mail. Flip any of the cards over and the back is a beautifully composed advertisement dated 1900 promoting Aristide and Marguerite Boucicault’s Le Bon Marché, the first department store in France, as one of the foremost attractions in Paris..“Little Thumb” (“Le Petit Poucet”), also from Perrault’s Histoires du tems passé is illustrated in 10 scenes reproduced from half-tone photographs of carefully posed models (Cotsen 60505). The color was added by hand or with stencils. The man playing the ogre mugs at the camera while wielding a huge knife and grabbing one of the hero’s little brothers by a foot. Never mind if the thief Petit Poucet swimming in the ogre’s seven-league boots looks as he won’t be able to run like the wind to rescue his siblings. B. Chenas sent a one-line message on each card sometime in 1908 to Mlle Gabrielle Perez, a guest at the Patte d’oie (“The Foot of the Goose”) in Herblay, Seine-et-Oise, a northwestern suburb of Paris about twelve miles from city center.The postcard collection has three versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Le Petit Chaperon Rouge”). The set with sepia photographic illustrations is signed in the lower right hand corner “J.K” and numbered in the lower left-hand corner “660” (presumably the publisher’s number for a title within a series). Cotsen 60503 consists of five scenes featuring an adorable little girl with bobbed hair wearing a print apron over a ruffled skirt and sabots. The skeletal wolf standing next to her in the second card looks as fake as the wolf’s head in grandmother’s mob cap in the fifth one. Everything after that may be missing. There’s no publisher or address lines on the back, so perhaps these charming cards were made for another purpose.The second “Red Riding Hood” (Cotsen 60502) in twelve acts is based on “The Big Bad Wolf,” the 1934 sequel to the wildly successful 1933 Disney Silly Symphony “The Three Pigs.” The story is a mash-up of Perrault and the English folktale. The piggies dance with Red down a path through the woods until they are ambushed by the wolf in an outrageous fairy costume. The girl doesn’t lose her nerve and runs away, while the cowardly pigs shiver on the ground. They do pull themselves together fast enough to get to the grandmother’s cottage in time to save their friend from the vile hairy beast.“Le Chaperon Rose” is a slightly saucy version of the fairy tale in five beautifully produced hand-colored photographs acted out for the camera by two exquisitely turned out children around eleven or twelve (Cotsen 60501). The wolf, played by a boy in a short suit accessorized with a cane, watch, and bowler hat, greets Chaperon Rose, dainty in a pink gown bedizened with tucks and ruffles. She presents him with a rose from her basket and pins it to his lapel, a gesture which obviously pleases him. She invites him to kiss her on the check, accepting his token of esteem with a coy, knowing look. “N. Guillot” sent sweet kisses to Mlle. Yvonne Guillot in Lille—perhaps a father travelling on business or a grandparent staying in touch between visits in 1907.

Type two words—“creativity” and “children”—into the search bar, hit the magnifying glass icon, and watch the results cascade down the screen. The tenor of all these hits to scholarly articles in psychology, curriculum on public television for carers, websites devoted to child development, Ideas.Ted.com, etc. is unlocking every child’s imaginative potential is crucial to their intellectual and emotional progress.

Art instruction emphasizing creative self-expression through craft projects is believed to be among the best ways of opening up children’s minds to this process. The idea that children should be inspired to discover within the seeds of creativity and to release their individuality through art for its own sake rather than to prepare for careers dates back to early twentieth-century Vienna. Franz Cizek (1765-1943), the most celebrated professor of art education of his generation, promoted a method which encouraged pupils to teach themselves, discarding the traditional formal study of technique for the exploration of a wide variety of media.

Cizek’s course inaugurated in 1903 at the School of Applied Arts, with its strong ties to the Viennese Sezession, was not the only place in Austria where boys and girls were taught according to this philosophy. Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska (1890-1956) opened a school just for girls in 1915. nfluenced by Cizek’s progressive, “permissive” methods, she brought deep interests in applied design, and the so-called naïve design language of indigenous peoples, and women’s handwork in the textile arts. Zweybruck parted company from Cizek in her practice in bringing out self-expressive potential through achievement of technical proficiency and her dedication to training both amateurs and young women aspiring to careers as artists.

A sample of work by some of Zweybruck’s students has been preserved in the Cotsen collection. Among the most delightful are the hand-drawn postcards. The assignment seems to have been to illustrate the front of a commercially printed card and write a message to their teacher. The illustration shown below is signed “E. C.” and the signature is “your Evelyn.” The back is postmarked “1916.” Lisbeth Haase is one of the most accomplished artists in the archive. Here is her design of a girl watering a cactus for a postcard. The black and white drawing is the right-hand half of a frame for a double-page spread in a book. The third is a clever jumble perhaps of Lisbeth’s favorite things or an assortment of subjects Zweybruck suggested be incorporated into some kind of picture.The largest group reflects the method’s foundational principle of letting children try their hands at different media and includes linocuts, collages, papercuts, and drawings, some signed by the young creators. One of Zweybruck’s techniques was to read aloud detailed descriptions or little stories lasting around 5 minutes and allowed the students “to find their way as best they can and will” in their responses. One day’s project must have been based on the legend of St. George and the dragon and it’s fascinating to notice the differences between these two attempts. Unfortunately they are both anonymous designs.Perhaps this whimsical collage of an elephant by “N. J.” was a design for a toy or figurine. N. J. used silver paper and sequins in addition to different colored papers.The horizontal borders in watercolor or cut papers are unsigned, but the linocut of the fence is credited to Zviki Abramowicz. The unsigned designs for borders range from abstraction to the highly stylized “primitive. It’s also possible to compare two versions of the same image within the archive. This design was executed in black and white and in full color. The black and white version of the Virgin and Christ Child was mounted on the same sheet as a quick sketch of several faces. This ambitious image is also unsigned.In the coming months, all the materials by Zweybruck’s students in the collection will be reorganized so they will be more accessible to researchers. The names of all the students who signed their work will also be recorded. Perhaps someone some day will try to identify the girls who studied with Zweybruck and establish how many went on to be artists.