fine art of war: limit two for generals and above, unlimited reprints for the troops
July 24, 2003
PAGE ONE
TELL ME A STORY
Read selected excerpts from the anthology "Floating Off the Page: The Best of The Wall Street Journal's 'Middle Column.' "1
For Some at the Iraq Front,
Art of War Is Oil on Canvas
Coalition Sent In Painters,
Others to Capture Images
By JESS BRAVIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
To wrest Iraq from Saddam Hussein, the U.S. and its allies sent a force of about 150,000 men and women, including infantry, commandos, marines -- and at last count, 13 painters.
Lewis Miller went as Australia's Official War Artist, the country's 58th since World War I. A civilian outfitted in body armor and khakis, he enthusiastically lugged canvases and brushes across Iraq's battlefields to produce a museum exhibit's worth of the art of war. He found Iraq's light "absolutely magical. It's like the south of France," he says, recalling sunrise over a bombed-out Iraqi checkpoint. "The landscape is utterly ruined, but it's wonderful for a painter."
Sgt. Jack Carrillo and Staff Sgt. Michael Fay went for the U.S. Marine Corps. Their assignment: to depict fellow Marines in action. "During the tank battles, I was out there drawing," Sgt. Carrillo says. "When you are out there and you're under that duress, your art picks up a certain freshness and vibrancy." On his second day in-country, "our Humvee flipped over in a night firefight and all my watercolors and paints were just trashed." So he produced more than 200 pencil sketches depicting everything from slain enemy soldiers to the time "our whole battalion was food-poisoned in Baghdad."
The U.S. Air Force sent eight civilian illustrators. The Navy sent two of its own. The Army's lone staff artist has just made it to Baghdad. Britain will send an avant-garde artist known for his "film installations."
The artists are heir to a once well-known military tradition that has largely vanished from the public eye. Mr. Miller's work will be exhibited in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra's second-most popular tourist attraction. But the work of Sgt. Carrillo and his American brethren will for the most part hang in military bases and at the Pentagon. "Three- and four-stars and the secretary and assistant secretary of the Navy can get original works on their wall, up to two," says Gale Munro, the Navy's art curator. "Lower than that, they can get reproductions."
Britain started the modern practice of appointing war artists in 1916. Hungry for propaganda to shore up the war effort, officials sent such leading painters as John Singer Sargent and Paul Nash to the front lines. Britain's World War I allies, including the U.S., Canada and Australia, followed suit with combat artists of their own.
There were occasional aesthetic battles between artist and army. No fans of modernism, Canadian authorities ordered World War I artist David Bomberg to redo his cubist rendition "Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunelling Company." But the work of war artists, reproduced in domestic magazines, provided folks back home their best glimpse of life in the trenches.
In World War II, the Pentagon sent dozens of artists into the field, including the well-known California watercolorist Standish Backus. In the immediate postwar years, official U.S. war art produced enthusiastic paintings of atomic bomb tests and almost psychedelic projections of futuristic combat.
But in succeeding decades, as photography improved and tastes changed, war art fell out of favor. Styles such as abstract expressionism, surrealism and pop art weren't well suited to depicting battle, says Prof. Denise Rompilla, a specialist in war art at St. John's University in New York. Moreover, as the Vietnam War escalated, many civilian artists found it "distasteful to be associated with the military," she says.
As it did for war, Vietnam marked a turn for war art: Although the U.S. sent artists there, their works failed to spur the patriotic response the Pentagon hoped for. "We had an exhibit, and people had a sit-in," remembers Jack Dyer, who served two tours as a Marine combat artist in Vietnam and today is curator of the Marine Corps art collection in Washington.
But war art still tells a story that mere photography can't touch, military painters say. "The photograph is like prose. The painting is poetry. That's my opinion," says Nick Mosura, deputy director of the Air Force Art Program. An illustrator himself, Mr. Mosura escorted four civilian painters to Iraq for a two-week stint painting airplanes and airmen. The Air Force maintains relations with five different illustrators' clubs across the country, in peace and war. In exchange for free travel to Iraq, the artists agreed to donate their paintings to decorate air bases.
The Army has yet to recover its war-art enthusiasm. Its single staff artist, Sgt. First Class Elzie Golden, sat out the Afghanistan war and wasn't sent to Iraq until last month. Sgt. Golden says he plans to re-create the war's major battles, including "the one where the Apache was downed and maybe the one where the maintenance guys were ambushed and Jessica Lynch was captured."
In London, the Imperial War Museum oversees the British war-art program, but it has deliberately strayed from the original concept. "We are trying to get away from the term, 'official war artist,' " says Angela Weight, who heads the museum's art department. "It doesn't go down well in the art world. People immediately think you're being censored, or dull."
The museum aims less to depict the bravery of British forces than to explore the horror of war, Ms. Weight says, and looks for artists who are "cool." In 2002, it sent to Afghanistan a pair of experimental artists whose work, according to a museum announcement, "focuses on the complex web of relationships linking people and architecture, and the coded systems of communication and exchange that surround us." Still, London has its limits: The museum rejected a 1994 work by Scottish painter Peter Howson depicting a rape by soldiers in Bosnia. Rock star David Bowie acquired it for his personal collection.
Australia has hewed closest to war-artist tradition, and its artists -- four since 1999 -- are among the country's most prominent. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra selects them, negotiates their fees and dispatches them to the war zone. Last year, the memorial sent painter Peter Churcher to Afghanistan to depict Australia's contribution to the American-led war on terrorism. He produced 50 works, which are on display through the end of August.
For Mr. Churcher, 38 years old, war was anything but hell. "This has been the absolute turning point for my career," he says. It has won him a number of commissions and a 25% increase in the market value of his art. Many of the works, with titles such as "Sleeping Guy in 'Helo' " and "View of Lagoon from the Eastern Side of the Island, Diego Garcia" will appear in a forthcoming coffee-table book.
Mr. Miller, 44, says he accepted appointment as official artist despite his personal opposition to the Iraq war. "I try not to bring those feelings" into the work, he says.
Despite Iraq's rich cultural history, Sgt. Carrillo says he wasn't impressed with the art he saw there. "In Iraq I'm sure there are a lot of fine artists. Unfortunately, they were only painting one thing," he says. "And that was Saddam Hussein. In everybody's house there were five to six Saddam Husseins."
Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com2 |
