I-Solation: Children’s Self-Portraits in the Age of COVID-19

When Jella Lepman inaugurated the International Youth Library in a Munich villa in 1949, 600 children’s drawings from twenty-two countries covered the walls of the rooms and the stairwell. Lepman considered children’s drawings, like children’s books, “among the most endearing messengers of international understanding.” For her, they were visible evidence of a universal children’s creative will that transcended national borders and had lasting impact. The highly acclaimed exhibitions of international children’s drawings that Lepman organized in the following years attest to her genuine interest in children’s art. Perhaps the most important exhibition was held in 1952 with the title Ich selbst—myself—moi-même; it was curated by a high-ranking jury of artists, art educators, and child psychologists. Out of 4,000 submissions, the jury selected 350 self-portraits from thirty countries for the exhibition, which then traveled to New Delhi via Paris and New York.

The idea for the present exhibition of children’s self-portraits came to the International Youth Library’s mind when a shipment from Taiwan arrived in Munich in late February 2020. It contained copies of two pencil drawings of children portraying themselves with masks covering their noses and mouths, as well as an artistically accomplished self-portrait of an adult wearing a mask. It was the well-known Taiwanese illustrator Ming-Chin Cheng who had sent these pictures, at a time when people in the West still felt that the pandemic was unreal and far away.

The self-portraits of the masked Taiwanese children powerfully brought home the fear of the pandemic for the first time. A few weeks later, Germany was also in lockdown. By mid-March, the COVID-19 pandemic had brought the world to a standstill. The drawings from Taiwan, which movingly and hauntingly showed the consequences of the pandemic for children, suddenly became a call to remember the beginnings of the library, when children from all over the world sent their self-portraits to Munich and created a kind of global children’s community across national and cultural borders in the medium of art. Within a few days, a call for self-portraits was issued to children around the world, asking them to draw or paint themselves, sharing how they felt. They were to scan the pictures and e-mail them to Munich so that a virtual exhibition of the artworks could be accessible to everyone as a sign of the children’s collective pandemic experience. The call “I-Solation. Children paint yourselves!” was sent out in several languages through the library’s social networks and many IBBY sections.

The response was overwhelming. Over the course of four weeks, almost 850 pictures were sent in from forty-two countries and all continents, which the International Youth Library gradually published on its homepage in an online gallery from mid-April of 2020. Visitors could view the children’s self-portraits either in random order or sorted by country. They came from Afghanistan, Armenia, France, Iran, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Pakistan, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, Venezuela, and many more countries. A particularly large number of children from the Dominican Republic, Iran, Germany, and Greece took part in the exhibition, while only a few pictures arrived from other countries. Nevertheless, an overall picture emerged that reflected the global dimension of the pandemic and showed how children all over the world experienced the situation as threatening, frightening, constraining, and often boring.

Children aged three to eighteen showed their faces: some gray and frightened, others colorful and cheerful, sometimes with a mask, sometimes without—usually with big eyes. Several art schools participated in the project and sent artistically sophisticated pictures. Elsewhere, children sat down in front of the mirror and made quick, focused sketches of themselves. Some showed themselves in their rooms, home-schooling on the computer, or playing in the garden; some translated their fears into threatening scenarios or told...