Tempi Terribili. Libri Belli.

“The children’s book is one of the most powerful weapons of socialist education of the younger 2 generations. Through children’s books the foundations of the materialist worldview of the younger generation must be laid. This is a great and important task, and it is a task that can be fulfilled”.
Nadežda Krupskaja (moglie di Lenin)

Curated by Federica Rossi, the exhibition showcases 140 works, 123 from the Adler collection out of 257 acquired in addition to 17 children’s books from private collections as well as terracottas and other artifacts useful for contextualizing the historical period.

The exhibition focuses on childhood, children, artists and books i.e. key players in the creation of a better future.

“Then, in the turbulent years following the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war, as now, we must look to artists and children to guide us through the uncertainties we face every day,” comments James Bradburne, director of the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Braidense Library, which recently opened the International Center for Children in its rooms.

An extraordinary story, that of the Adler collection, which begins with a battered brown leather suitcase. Architects Hans Edward and Hedwig Adler had fled to England from Nazi Germany in 1939, leaving most of their possessions to Hedwig’s mother in Cologne. The story does not end until Hedwig’s death in 1986 when her daughter Susan, clearing out the apartment, finds a suitcase in the attic, a suitcase containing a treasure trove: 257 Soviet children’s books, including 169 in Russian, 85 in Ukrainian and 3 in Yiddish, mostly published between the late 1920s and 1933.