Marie Paneth’s Practice with Young Holocaust Survivors: Art Therapy, Children’s Art, and the Museum of Modern Art

This chapter analyzes Marie Paneth’s work with young Holocaust survivors in Britain, demonstrating how she perceived art making to function and how her approach was rooted in historically contingent ideas about art. It sheds light both on how art operated in the postwar era as part of the care and rehabilitation of displaced children, and on early forms of art therapy that developed in residential childcare, educational, and to a lesser extent museum contexts. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a selection of these children’s artworks in Art Work by Children of Other Countries. The chapter analyzes the meanings of this display, locating it within the American institution’s agenda and the larger political context in which ideas about children and creativity were constructed, asking how their artwork was interpreted and mobilized by adults. This case study is necessarily transatlantic in scope, opening pathways for considering international networks involved in laying foundations for what became art therapy. Finally, moving beyond the more familiar art-historical narrative that children’s art was idealized and appropriated by modernist artists, the chapter concludes by discussing artworks by an adolescent girl with whom Paneth worked in view of voice and relational agency.