Chapter Three                      

Artists portraying the effects of war

 

Goya

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes was a court painter in Spain but as a consequence of an illness which left him deaf, and the imminent conflict that was about to occur in Spain, his work took a dramatic change. The religious and classical portraiture gave way to his more striking images of monsters (sequences of engravings know as Los Caprichos, 1799) and other series of etchings showing the suffering of his fellow citizens. (Los Desastres de la Guerra, The Disasters of War, 1810-1820).

In 1808 in Spain an insurrection against Napoleonic France which was governing Spain had arisen; also know as the Independence War, it lasted from 1808-14, the first popular war of modern history.

Goya was living in Madrid at that time, old and deaf, his time as a court painter was now far away.                                                                                     7                            

Goya probably witnessed some of the atrocities committed by the French troops in Madrid. Two paintings dated from 1814 portray the events that took place in Madrid; one is “The Second of May 1808”, the day when the popular uprising took place. Killing is represented; a number of Mamelukes (French irregular troops of Turkish origin) were killed. As a result the next day the French took revenge, executing a large number of civilians, this is represented in ‘‘The Third of May 1808’’. In this masterpiece we can see the victims, some already murdered, in the foreground, some just about to be executed and the French soldiers pointing their rifles towards the prisoners. A central figure, dressed in white and in a crucifixion pose is representing a mixture of resignation and martyrdom. This figure is painted over sized in order to attract our attention. It is a very dramatic and powerful image.  

 

From 1810 till 1820 he worked on a series of etchings (83) to be named ‘Los Desastres de La Guerra’ (The Disasters of War.) In these drawings Goya showed all the brutality of the effects of war. No one had gone as far as he had in portraying murder, rape death and barbarism.

 

The basic message of the series is clear and remains unchanged from the earlier sequence to the final series: the brutal lunacy of war, the murderous inversion of values, the meaninglessness. The savage irony is all the more effective because of the particular historical irony of this bloody war ‘in Spain’.[1]

 

    Yet their purport is quite clear: Goya wished to denounce war by making a telling visual report on the Spanish nationalist insurrection against the French puppet King, Joseph Bonaparte, which began in 1808, and soon developed into the peninsular war.

The French artist Jacques Callot had made a somewhat similar, though smaller, series of prints for more or less the same reason nearly two centuries earlier. This had been published at Paris in 1633, and was titled Les Miseres et les Malheurs de la Guerre.  The influence on Goya both in title and content is unmistakable.[2]

 

Goya had witnessed some of the events represented. It is possible to say this because of the nature of some the titles such as number 44 ‘Yo la vi’ (I saw it), number 45 ‘Y esto tambien (And this too).    8

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

 Some images deal with rape such as number 11 ‘Ni por esas’ (Or these) is a powerful example. The scene is about an imminent rape of women.

 One of them is imploring mercy and the other one is conducted to the dark inside of a bridge, leaving her baby on the floor. The composition is very dynamic. Goya used a strong contrast of light and shadow known as chiaroscuro. All figures balance the composition and define the different planes. A church is in the background.            9                                                                       

                                                                                          

 One of the strongest images is number 37 ‘Esto es peor’ (This is worse). A naked man in the centre foreground has been impaled and his arms have been hacked off. His head is turned towards us: that increases and makes us more engaged with him. 

In the background French soldiers are sketched attacking.                               

                                                                                                     

Number 39 ‘Grande Hazaña! Con muertos! (Great deeds- against the death!), show three corpses, castrated and one of them decapitated and with the arms hacked off.                                                                                                          10                 

 Nakedness in these images means humiliation; this was repeated by the Nazis against the Jews in the holocaust during the WWII.

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Goya show us the most extreme brutality imaginable as in number 33 ‘Que hay que hacer mas? (What more can one do?) The French are cutting a naked man in half, probably the victim is still alive because it is possible to appreciate some tension in his right arm.

 

All of the drawings and the settings bring the viewers to a very close position as if we were contemplating the scene from a privileged position.

This set of drawings was not published until 1863, 35 years after his death when his work would be consider as more politically correct.

So considering that at the time the only medium to transcribe images was the traditional printing techniques or painting, this series probably didn’t have the impact desired by him. In that sense it is possible to say that his objective in revealing the wickedness of war was not achieved, not because of the quality of the work, but because it didn’t reach people as a consequence of the censorship and the disadvantages of the times respecting communication.

On the other hand the works were successful as a record of what happened there, and as a legacy for future generations of people in general, and for artists in particular who have been inspired ever since.

 

 

 1^ST WORLD WAR   

 

Paul Nash

 

Paul Nash isa good example of a commissioned artist who was disenchanted and perturbed by his experience in the battlefront becoming pessimistic and realistic about the nature of war.

 As he said: ‘ the rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water , the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunged overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating ,maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave which is this land; one huge grave, and cast up on it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious; I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.[3]

 

The experience of his second visit to the Ypres Salient changed his work from the first visit were only sketches far from the battlefield were produce, this time he declare ‘ I have just returned, last night, from a visit to Brigade Headquarters up the line, and I shall not forget it as long as I live. I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable’. This experience leads him to say that he will ‘rob war of the last shred of glory, the last shine of glamour’.[4]

Nash was a landscape painter concerned not with the realistic representation, but with the personal emotional response to it. That was reflected in his war images.

He was commissioned as an official war artist by the former Propaganda Department renamed Department of Information (DOI).                           12

As a result a number of paintings were produced; ‘We are making a new World’ is an example of the destruction but is made in a rather ironic way of representation. It shows a destroyed deserted landscape, the composition is very successful using dead trees in a greenish and curving shape of the soil in the foreground and mid-ground contrasting with the reddish background mountains and a bright sun emerging behind them, it can be read as an optimistic view that after destruction a new life will spring up.

 In 1919 Nash described the effect of war on his development as an artist;

   My war experiences have developed me—certainly on the technical side. I think I have almost discovered my sense of colour which was very weak before the war. I have gained a greater freedom of handling, due largely to

 the fact that I had to make the rapidest sketches in dangerous positions, and a greater sense of rhythm. I have been jolted.’[5]

After that affirmation it is possible to say that Nash took advantage of the war and if compared with Goya or Otto Dix his work is weaker in the sense of representing the effects of war. A reason for this could be his timidity in opposing the authorities and the long British tradition in waging wars.

 

 

Otto Dix

 

Dix served as a soldier during World War I as a machine gunner in the German Army taken part in many major battles.

He use to draw from his position before the battle started, leaving the pencil for the machine gun and taking the pencil again when the battle was over.

‘Wounded’ and ‘Trench Suicide’ are strong examples of his time on the front lines.                                        13                                                                                                           

                                                                  

In 1918 by the end of the war, he received the Iron Cross (second class); back in Germany his work took a dramatic change becoming more political and a critic of society and war, developing a left-wing ideology as his contemporary German artists such as John Heartfield, George Grosz or Max Beckmann.

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       All of them were disgusted with the treatment that the wounded and crippled ex-soldiers had in Germany.

 

Germany was in chaos after the WWI, scenes of war cripples, black marketers and prostitutes lining the major streets of Germany’s cities.

A group of artists called the ‘Verists’ portrayed that, among them Dix, who was one of the first to combine these realistic themes with a visual realistic style. That combination was characteristic of the Berlin Dada group.[6]

 

 In 1920 Dix completed four paintings of war cripples. This series are the most powerful works on the subject, ‘Match sealer’ (1920) is a convincing example.

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They are powerful images representing the effects of war in a realistic, ironic and satirical representation of the wounded and their role after the war. They were ignored and seen with indifference by society; in other words they were alienated by the rest of the population and by the government, since they were no longer useful.

 

He produces images of war, from his time in the trenches like ‘The Trench’ which was purchased in 1923 by The Wallrof- Richartz Museum. The painting was exhibited in 1924 and caused such polemics, that the director of the Museum, Hans Secker, was forced to resign.[7]

 

In the same year he created a series of 50 etchings entitled ‘War’ paying homage to Goya’s disasters of war.

 

Probably his best-known work was a triptych with the same title, War (1928- 1932) which can be seen as a final work or as a culmination of his war experiences.

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In 1934 with the emerging Nazi power in Germany his work was labelled by the new regime as ‘degenerate art’. Soon he was banned from teaching and exhibiting. This lead him to change his theme to create an allegorical and landscape oeuvre; in 1945 he was drafted again by the army to fight the end of the 2^nd WW, he was taken prisoner and interned in a French Camp, released when the war was over, he went back to Germany where he painted portraits and biblical scenes until his death.

 

If Dix’s greatness as an artist in these years can be attributed to a specific cause, that cause is the war experience and its influence upon the personality and perceptions of a young  and sensible man.[8]

 

 

 

PICASSO’S GUERNICA

 

                                                     In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which have sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.[9] 

 

As a result of a military uprising lead by General F. Franco on 18 July 1936, a civil war started in Spain.

On April 26, 1937, Guernica a small town located in Northern Spain, was bombed by German and Italian aircraft (both countries were supporting Franco), This town had a long tradition on preserving Basque Culture.

 

The town was under continuous attack for more than three hours; destroying almost completely the town and killing hundreds of civilians, many of them machine gunned when they were fleeing the collapsing houses. This attack was used by the ‘Luftwaffe’ as training for what would soon be know as blitzkrieg in other European cities during W.W.II.

 

Pablo Picasso was living in Paris at the time, and had accepted a commission by the Republican Spanish Government to represent Spain in the Paris International Exhibition of 1937.

The bombing of Guernica gave Picasso the theme for his work. He started to make sketches on May 1^st some of them inspired by Goya’s disasters.

 

On 11 may he started to work on the full size-canvas (3.50 by 7.76 meters).

In July the painting was finished and installed in the Spanish Pavilion. Guernica was full of symbolism but the work didn’t make much impact, neither did the Spanish pavilion.

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The main objection to the painting, according to Le Corbusier (architect of the fair)said in one of his critical reviews, was that the exposition was devoted to entertainment, and whereas most of the murals, such as Dufy’s La Fee e electricite , demonstrated la belle peinture, Picasso  did not. Because of this, wrote Le Corbusier, Guernica saw only the backs of the visitors, for they were repelled by it.[10]

On the other hand a powerful defense of Guernica was marshalled by writers, artists and poets of the Cahiers de’Art circle.

 

Amedee Ozenfant in one of his statements wrote:

    Our epoch is grand, dramatic and dangerous, and Picasso, because he is equal to his circumstances, makes a picture worthy of them.

Guernica is about our times, for it is an appalling drama of a great people abandoned to the tyrants of the dark ages… All the world can see, can understand, the immense Spanish tragedy.[11]

The exhibition closed on 1 November 1937 and with it the long exile of the painting started.

   The first touring exhibition, among works from Henri Matisse, George Braque and Henri Laurens toured Norway, Denmark and Sweden between January and April 1938.Guernica didn’t raise much controversy. After the tour the painting returned to Picasso’s studio in Paris and there he shipped it to the National Joint Committee for Spanish relief in London.

It was shown at the New Burlington Galleries, a private gallery, off Regent Street, from 4 to 29 October 1938.( 3000 people attended). Then it was exhibited at Whitechapel Art Gallery (12000 people attended).The artist David Hockney relates that his father remembers the price of admission to the exhibition being a pair of reusable boots; the painting itself was displayed behind rows of boots waiting to be repaired and shipped to the Republican troops.[12]

 

   From London, Guernica went to Manchester where it had a very good response in the large working-class audience. The Evening Chronicle’s headline announced, “NIGHMARE’ PICTURE OF GUERNICA BOMBING COMES TO CITY.” Accompanying the painting the poem Dream and lie of Franco and the sketches for Guernica were included.

The critic of Manchester’s Evening news wrote, “The picture does not do justice to the studies, but no one could fail to be impressed by a tremendous work which more than any words, condemns the crime of war”.[13]

 

The painting was very controversial in Britain where several English commentators lead by Anthony Blunt condemned Picasso for taking up a social theme, accusing him of misunderstanding of the Spanish civil war, although, of course, nobody would now treat what Blunt said seriously. The truth is that Picasso was not only honorary director of The Prado Museum but also that Guernica was a commissioned by the Republic.

   Another debate was taking place, this between the modernist (Surrealist and abstract) and the Social realist artists which Blunt and Cambridge graduates among several artists from the Slade School defended, that the primary duty of art was to serve the ends of a political and social movement Blunt wrote, “is the same as Picasso’s bullfight scenes. It is not an act of public mourning, but the expression of a private brain storm which gives no evidence that Picasso has realized the political significance of Guernica”.[14]

 

   Read attacked Blunt accusing him of use of art as propagandistic ideas, referring to the Social realism promoted by totalitarian regimes.

He defined Guernica and modern art as “The monumentally of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance cannot exist in our age, for ours is one of disillusion, despair and destruction. Guernica is a monument of destruction- a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of a genius”[15]

 

After the British tour the painting was shipped to the United States where it was supposed to stay for a few months and stay for 42 years ( Picasso stated that Guernica should return to Spain once  freedom was establish in the country.

During that time Guernica gained recognition as one of the greatest monuments of modern art and also as the unique example of the role of art as a way of understanding the modern world and determining political history.

 

Finally Guernica returned to Madrid once Franco was dead and the conditions were appropriate, it returned to Spain on 10 September 1981, starting a new controversy; Guernica citizens wanted the painting to stay at the place which inspired it.

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Guernica is considered the most powerful statement against war, it has been used to denounce war through the years like in the 1966 poster against the Vietnam War and in the recent invasion of Iraq a badge was reproduced in Britain.

Guernica’s controversy is still going on; a reproduction held in the United Nations building                         19

in New York was covered when the discussion of waging war against Iraq was taking place.[16]                                         

                                

             

 

II WORLD WAR

 

After the 1^st WW, which mainly was a colonial clash of powers, dictating new borders and inventing countries, also dictating severe restrictions on Germany, the outcome was somehow expected, a new war; this one had the most devastating and cruel effects so far. The 2nd World War started in 1939, just after the Spanish Civil War was over. It lasted from 1939 until 1945, an estimated 55 million people died. It ended in August 1945 with the dropping of two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing about 175,000 people having devastating consequences for future generations.

This leads the German philosopher Theodor Adorno to declare that ‘it will be barbaric to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz’.[17]

 This affirmation could apply to the visual arts as well.                                  

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The reason given above can explain why there were very few artists who portrayed the consequences and so many who were commissioned and made works glorifying the respective armies or with the use of propaganda.

Nevertheless, Grosz was one of the artists denouncing war in his painting Peace II from 1946; it is a sinister painting where a figure emerges from the rubble and the destruction around her.  

Grosz was living at the time in the United States working as a cartoonist but his work didn’t have the impact as in his native Germany, on the other hand his legacy is very important in modern art history, having been involved in the Dada movement, with among others Otto Dix, Oskar Kokosha and John Heartfield who together with Grosz invented photomontage.

 

In the year 1943 Kokoschka produces a painting titled ‘What are we fighting for?’ questioning the reasons of war.

 

 

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After  WW II a number of painters (apart from Grosz), such as Jackson Pollock portrayed the effects of the war, he made a drawing titled ‘War,’ 1947, it shows a woman and a cow being blown out of a pile of bones and debris in which there is, among the rest of it, a shot dove.[18]

The imagery of this drawing shows the influence that Picasso had on Pollock.

                 

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VIETNAM WAR

 

As a result of the technological improvements from the 1960S painting lost its hegemony in portraying war. WWII had see the growing effectiveness of

war photography and by the time of the war in Vietnam  the power of photography and moving  image as the most powerful medium to represent war had been established.                   

                                                                                           

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Despite photography some painters continue to denounce war; probably the most important of them is Leon Golub and Benny Andrews.

Golub is considered an activist artist whose idea of art is to use it as a political weapon in order to reveal the true face of power, ugliness and violence. His style retains some of the abstract expressionist violent brushwork and large canvases, but incorporating a crude imagery of figures, portraying the victims and the oppressors.

 

By the late 60s his work concentrated in a single subject, this was the Vietnam War.

Golub made a number of paintings interpreting the war in Vietnam and the effects that napalm had on people; ‘Napalm I’, 1969 is one of them. He used acrylic paint and his characteristic technique of scrapping and rubbing the surface creating a very dramatic texture. He often makes cuts into the canvases as in the Vietnam series.                   

                   

     Golub wants to show the pervasiveness of power, its fundamental influence on every level of human existence; he wants to indicate it as the “true” reality, the reality against which all other interpretations of human existence appear false, trivial, incomplete, and inconclusive. Rarely has an art concentrated itself so completely on a single task: single- handedly, and single- mindedly, Golub wants to disclose the ultimate truth of power. ‘[19]

 

After the Vietnam War his work deals with torture and he made a series of paintings dealing with that; ‘Mercenaries’ and ‘White Squad’ are two series dealing with the subject. They are based mainly on Latin American dictatorial regimes put in power under USA control such El Salvador and Nicaragua to name two examples in the 1980s.

Golub is the artist who concentrates most on the subject of war and violence for an incredible period of time, from the early 60s to the late 80s, with the exception of the mid 70s when disenchanted by the lack of attention from the main stream art world, (which was promoting conceptual and abstract art), he made a number of portraits                                                                  

of political leaders and dictators.

 

   Andrews in 1968 painted ‘War Baby’ using metal to build the soldiers face as a way of reinforcing the coldness and misunderstanding of the killing of the baby held in his arms.[20]

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The Century has been one long war, with occasional exhausted intermissions; its subsequent history is the unfinished business of 1918.[21]

                                                  

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However the best known images from that war are photographs portraying the victims of war like, ‘Girl accidentally napalmed by South Vietnamese planes’, 1972 by Nick Ut.

 

 

 

COMTEPORARY CONFLICTS

 

JOHN KEANE

    On 2 August 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait, an ally of Iraq during its war with Iran. US President George Bush cobbled together an alliance of 29 Western and Muslim nations to reverse the Iraqi aggression. When Saddam refused to withdraw from Kuwait by the United Nations deadline of 15 January 1991, the US-led coalition mounted an unprecedented intense bombing campaign against Iraq, followed by a brief ground campaign. Saddam withdrew his forces from Kuwait and a temporary truce came into effect on 28 February. The war claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 Iraqis. In April Saddam accepted the humiliating UN Security Council Resolution 687. It outlined the ceasefire, war reparations, and the conditions for the lifting of sanctions against Iraq: destruction of its medium-range missiles as well as non-conventional arms and research and production facilities to be undertaken by the UN Special Commission (Unscom).[22]

Following the long British tradition of sending artists to portray war, John Keane was commissioned by The Imperial War Museum as a official war artists.

As a main difference to most of the artists commissioned to cover the previous wars,(Linda Kitson, Falklands war) Keane was well aware of the politics and economic reasons of the war, he went to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait from 4 February to 8 March 1991.

As a war artist he was able to have a privileged position, he witnessed the events but also he interpreted them.

He took his camera with him, no sketches, he explains the reason:

   For me the camera is the most obvious and sensible way of approaching that. So I don’t see any kind of conflict. It’s not as if I was transcribing the photographs that I get literally in any sort of photorealist way. They are a source of reference. I’m working from memory with the use of photographs because they are my photographs of a situation in which I have been.[23]

Apart from photographs he incorporates banknotes, newspapers, video stills cans, fabric and debris.

                                                                                                          

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The painting, ‘We are making a new World order’ is a good example of his irony with the use of dollars framing the painting.

Keane uses symbolic imagery rather than portraying the victims, he concentrates on the political concept of the title World Order, repeatedly used from the 1930s and being an utopia ever since.[24] In this painting we can see a victorious black American soldier as a keeper of the place and on the opposite side of the painting an Arab with a red Mercedes walking towards the ruins and burning oil wells like as if he was ready to take over. There is the irony of who won with the war? Also the title is similar as the one used by Paul Nash during the 1st WW.

That irony is his method of approaching the subject, in contrast with a more direct approach from Peter Howson whose work will be analyzed later.

In Keane’s example his involvement in this conflict didn’t represent a dramatic change in his work: that is because the nature of his work deals with global conflicts, more than representing the suffering (he didn’t witnessed any victims) he tries to make a more ironic and ambiguous response to the armed conflict.

An example of this asseveration is the infamous attack on the retreating Iraqi convoy on the Basra Road where a massacre took place; Keane arrived five or six days after, when the dead were removed by the American troops.( these events were captured by the photographer Peter Turnley) 

       

 

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However Keane produce a series of six works on paper titled Scenes on the Road to Hell.

The last of Keane’s work was an homage to the dead, ‘Ashes to Ashes’, a mixed media work characteristic of his technique, this time using Oil, sand and coal on canvas.

 

 

 

 

PETER HOWSON

 

A civil war was taking place in Yugoslavia in 1992; because the situation was deteriorating the United Nations decided to take part in the conflict. U.S. and Britain were a leading part of that multinational force.

 

The Imperial War Museum decide to sent an artist to record that war, but for lack of funds the commission was sponsor by ‘The Times’ newspaper, The chosen artist was Peter Howson, one of best British figurative painters, member of the ‘Glasgow School’.

 

Howson went to Bosnia for the first time in June 1992, spending most of his time in the central British base in Vitez, central Bosnia.

 

He had a very hard time there, unable to work, only producing a few sketches: it was too dangerous. As a consequence of illness Howson was sent back home. He described that period as “The sixteen days I was there was the most intense time of my life”[25] trying to work from his sketches and imagination, but the memories were so vivid and intense that he thought that the only solution to get over his impossibility to work and also to win over his fear was to come back to Bosnia; so he did almost six months after his first visit. This time it was different, no sketches instead a friend with a video-camera.

 Finally he got the inspiration for his theme, fear, fear on the people’s faces and his own.

If you don’t get the trauma you don’t get the art ‘he said. ‘It’s all fear really, the whole thing.’[26]

So instead of painting heroes and soldiers he painted the people who suffer the consequences, civilians and mostly women and children.

Destruction, killing and rape were his subjects; he knew that it will be controversial. He said ‘I’m not aiming to be controversial. But I wanted to cut out all the reportage. It’s not my job to do that. My job is to do the things you don’t see, that’s the army doesn’t even get to see, not to be an illustrator, not to tell histories, but to produce strong images of things.’

He was accused of painting scenes that he didn’t witnessed but he replied; ‘I suppose I think I have the right because I was there and because as an artist I can do anything.’ [27]

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Howson didn’t see  much of what he painted but he discover that war is hell, war is frightening, war is boring, war is hard, and ten times harder if you haven’t got a lift home. But the truth is, women do get raped in war, men do get castrated, children do turn into monsters.[28]

One of his more controversial images was ‘Croatian and Muslim’, the scene is a rape, a brutal rape committed by two men in the woman house, it doesn’t need much more explanation.         

The painting wasn’t exhibited in the Imperial  War Museum with the excuse that he didn’t witnessed it, But I couldn’t have painted it if did’ Howson said: ‘How could you stand by and allow a rape to happen?’[29] The painting was purchased by David Bowie.

The war had grave consequences for Howson, accused of cowardice, after his first visit even from fellow artists, he almost quit art and got into alcohol and depression which put his life in danger.

 

Fortunately he overcame that, as he did in Bosnia with his fears.

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In 2001 he retake the theme of war with one painting, called ‘Crusader’. He explains it: It is not anti-American or anti-British, neither is it anti-Jewish, anti-Christian or anti-Muslim. It is a warning and a statement from my heart about the disasters of war.
I have the deepest sympathy for the dead and their grieving families resulting from the terrorist attack on the 11th of September 2001. But if we fight terror with terror and more innocent lives are lost, then these people will have died for nothing. Our only hope for the future is patience, understanding and dialogue. If we let warmongers, zealots, bigots and fascists lead us and manipulate us then we deserve the   raging monster in this painting.[30]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

 Recently his work has become religious just as it did with Dix, whom he admired .Howson also named Goya as one of his favourite painters.

 

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