Art and memory: Moore’s Warrior with Shield
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Continuing from this morning…
One of the points Tony Judt makes in this New York Review of Books essay is that one reason the U.S. so frequently finds itself forgetting the horrors of war is because we’ve never been conquered, occupied, or suffered mass civilian casualties the way European nations have. We don’t understand the cost of war.
Henry Moore did. This is Moore’s 1953-54 Warrior with Shield. I love these Moore Warrior sculptures of figures with shields; I think they’re the most human, most affecting work in his oeuvre.
The cost of war is all too apparent here. There are the limbs or lack thereof. That’s awfully hard to miss. But my eyes go right to the warrior’s ribcage. He’s plainly hungry. War has robbed him of nourishment. (I’m certainly not a military historian, but Europe’s two world wars decimated agricultural land. And the Soviet influence in eastern Europe had an awful impact on agriculture, especially in Germany.)
The cost of the Iraqi war has largely been hidden from Americans — in more ways than one. In terms of tax dollars, the war has cost $515 billion. Economists estimate that the total cost of the war to the U.S. will end up north of $1.5 trillion.
Related: ‘Mission accomplished’ and the lessons of history. Goya. Manet.
Art and memory: Manet’s Rue Mosnier with Flags
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Continuing from this post…
For the French, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was a disaster of the most total sort. The Prussian army strolled through France and laid siege to Paris. As a result, the French government fell, the country lost territory (Alsace-Lorraine) and the Prussian victory effectively enabled the creation of modern Germany.
France’s leading painters offered mostly nationalist responses. Ernest Meissonier tried to squeeze triumph out of the siege with his goofy Siege of Paris, a painting so absurd that it rivals ‘Mission Accomplished’ as a propaganda piece. His student Edouard Detaille painted a few bleak scenes, but not many. This painting at the Musee d’Orsay presents the siege as a relaxing afternoon’s entertainment. (And by the 1880s Detaille recovered his tendency toward romanticization.) Today both Meissonier and Detaille are remembered as academic jingoists, as artists who missed the story.
Manet did not. The painting here is 1878’s Rue Monsier with Flags from the collection of the Getty Museum. The context of the painting has been well-discussed by T.J. Clark and others (including the Getty’s web text): In 1878 France declared a national holiday in an effort to celebrate France’s glorious recovery from war. Manet didn’t have quite as rosy a view.
You can’t miss the one-legged man, likely a war vet, at the left of the painting. The scene is apparently set on that national holiday and Manet juxtaposes the man against one of Baron Haussmann’s famously straight Parisian streets. On the right — on the other side of the street — are Haussmann’s new streetlights and a prosperous family. They all ignore the one-legged man. Manet is reminding us of the cost of war and of France’s willful negligence of its warriors.
When I see the Manet I think of the Walter Reed scandal. Just as the wealthy Parisians on the sidewalk look away, our government has tried to ensure we do too.
Related: ‘Mission accomplished’ and the lessons of history. Goya.
Art and memory: Goya’s Duel with Clubs
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This morning I posted about how artists have remembered war and about how their work should serve to remind us about war too. Don’t miss Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books on history, war and memory.
Goya lived through almost non-stop national strife: Both internal civil conflict in Spain and wars with Great Britain and France. Most memorably he lived through the French occupation of Spain. If there was ever an artist well-positioned to understand war it was Goya.
This is Duel with Clubs from the Prado, one of Goya’s Black Paintings. Goya presents the slog of conflict as simple and futile. The lesson in the painting is applicable to lots of circumstances, but when I look at it today I think of Iraq: Americans against Iraqis, Sunnis against Shia.
The Decider, Part II
Comments OffNote: This isn’t deja vu. Just keep reading and you’ll see I’m really not repeating myself.
Stage One
Stage Two
Stage Three - Final“Molten” - Acrylic on Cradled Masonite, 8 x 8 x 2″
This is the final stage of “Molten.” I wanted to show all of the major stages to give an idea of the many decisions that sometimes are made to bring a painting to a resolution. Any one of the steps along the way (including some of the intermediate steps not shown here) might have been perfectly acceptable, but I sometimes just feel like pushing on. You might also notice that this one acquired an obvious orientation because of the landscape feel of the composition.
This morning I was on a roll, and have completed two more that went rather quickly, but those will have to keep for another day. After all, I have to have something to blog about!
‘Mission accomplished,’ art history-style
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The May 1 New York Review of Books featured a terrific essay by Tony Judt about how history matters, about how all the old axioms about learning from history still apply, about how there’s nothing new about the post-1989 world or the post-9/11 world. Judt persuasively argues that in our rush to declare a new world order or to fight a nebulous Global War on Terrorism that we’ve failed to learn from the past.
Speaking of history: Tomorrow is May 1, the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Judt never out-and-says-it, but that Sforzian event is the backdrop for his essay. Judt effectively argues that the hubris behind that speech was sadly, uniquely American:
“What, then, is it that we have misplaced in our haste to put the twentieth century behind us? In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war.”
Clearly: Over 97 percent of American military deaths in Iraq have come since the ‘mission was accomplished.’ Even the Bush White House had to admit it blundered (in its own way).
Judt makes lots of connections between Bush Administration hubris and willful historical forgetfulness, but not all of them are relevant to an art blog. This one is:
“[T]he twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist — praising famous men and celebrating famous victories — or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.”
That is effectively an argument in favor of art and artists, individuals with voices historically louder, stronger, and more piercing than official commemoration memorials-by-commission. Art museums aren’t just aesthetic temples, they are repositories of histories. For hundreds of years artists have been part of our shared human memory, especially of war. (And, as Judt would expect, European artists most of all. Artists were the vanguard of Western anti-war movements: Dada was the West’s first anti-war movement.)
Throughout the day I’ll be posting examples of art as memory-of-war here on MAN. If other bloggers want to offer up their own examples of such, I’ll do a post of links on Monday or Tuesday.
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