See also Anne Balifs article in which she quotes Dr. F. Minkowska's comments on De Van Gogh el Seurat aux dessins d'enfants, illustrated catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musee Pedagogique (Paris) 1949.

²¹³ "l recall that Frangoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Mme. Minkowska calls 'motionless' houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity. ' This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing guard over the house.' . . .

"Often a simple detail suffices for Mme. Minkowska, a distinguished psychologist, to recognize the way the house functions. In one house, drawn by an eight-year-old child, she notes that there is 'a knob on the door; people go in the house, they live there.' It is not merely a constructed house, it is also a house that is 'lived-in.' Quite obviously the door-knob has a functional significance. This is the kinesthetic sign, so frequently forgotten in the drawings of 'tense' children.

"Naturally too, the door-knob could hardly be drawn in scale with the house, its function taking precedence over any question of size. For it expresses the function of opening, and only a logical mind could object that it is used to close as well as to open the door. In the domain of values, on the other hand, a key closes more often than it opens, whereas the door-knob opens more often than it closes." As translated by Maria Jolas in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 72-73. — Ed.