Images Of War

[poliphilo]

I’ve been looking at art of the First World War. Nothing changes. The artists tried to show things as they really were and officialdom tried to stop them.

C.W.R Nevinson put a little picture of dead Tommies into an exhibition in 1918. http://www.art-ww1.com/trame/090text.html. He was told to remove it. Instead he covered it over with brown paper and wrote "censored" across it. The War Office issued him with a reprimand. Not only was it forbidden to show pictures of dead bodies, it was also forbidden to draw attention to the rules that forbade it.

Nerves were very raw. When Frank Brangwyn was commissioned to paint murals in Westminster Palace in the mid 20s one of his offerings was this boys own image of tanks going into action. http://www.art-ww1.com/trame/022text.html. It was rejected as too morbid.

William Orpen painted this picture as a comment on The Peace of Versailles. http://www.art-ww1.com/trame/097text2.html. The nation refused to buy it, so he painted out the ghostly soldiers. http://www.art-ww1.com/trame/097text2.html. Actually I think the second version is an improvement, but it's nice to know that with the process of time and the thinning of the paint the two spooks are now beginning to show through.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah, Guernica!

Did you read how the copy that hangs in the United Nations building had to be covered over "to protect it" when Powell was there making the case for war?

Picasso was outraged by the bombing of civilians. These days we're supposed to take it in our stride.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I didn't know they covered over the UN copy, but it doesn't surprise me.

Picasso's vision was the Real War, not the PR war being spun by Powell.

Like John the Baptist yelling at--who did he yell at, Herod?

Unseemly.

I liked the first sad painting you linked, because I could feel the artist's sorrow there.

When we get war photos, so often they are intended to be uplifting--the men raising the flag at Iwo Jima. But what I remember are the other photos--the girl running in terror in Vietnam.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It would have been too ironic if Powell had had to stand there making the case for war with Picasso's great image of the cost of war behind his head.

These people fear art. They fear the image. The impulse that banned Nevinson's image of dead soldiers is exactly the same impulse that led Bush to try to censor images of coffins returning from Iraq.

[archyena.livejournal.com]

Well, it's the images that make things real and sometimes more than real. Until then you can call everyone "nattering nabobs of negativism" and get away with it. Numbers can be massaged, we can focus on "rebuilding," we can talk about whatever goals that are currently polling well at the moment; but it is very difficult to argue with bodies and coffins. Policy debates with the dead tend to be onesided.