Nelson Mandela's prints on show in New York

The colours are vivid, the lines simply drawn, a strangely idealised version of what Nelson Mandela saw -- or wished to see -- through the bars of the tiny cell where he spent 27 years for resisting South Africa's apartheid regime.

But the man who went from political prisoner to president, militant revolutionary to Nobel peace laureate, has his own explanation for the upbeat lithographs of the notorious Robben Island prison off Cape Town.

"Today when I look at Robben Island, I see it as a celebration of the struggle and a symbol of the finest qualities of the human spirit than a monument to the brutal tyranny and oppression of apartheid," he says in a note attending the exhibit that opened on Tuesday in New York's Rockefeller Center.

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