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Special Report
War Ensemble
The National Constitution Center unveils exhibit of soldier art in time for Veterans Day.
PHILADELPHIA — In 1942 the War Department tapped George Biddle to head its new Art Advisory Committee. A generation earlier eight artists had been commissioned as captains in the Army Corps of Engineers and sent off to document the Great War for posterity. Charged with expanding upon that initiative, this is what the Philadelphia lawyer-cum-artist Biddle told the forty military and civilian artists recruited for the sequel:
You have been selected as outstanding American artists, who will record the war in all its phases and its impact on you as artists and as human beings. Any subject is in order if as artists you feel it is part of the war; battle scenes and the front line; battle landscapes; the wounded, the dying and the dead; the nobility, courage, cowardice, cruelty, and boredom of war; all this should form part of a well-rounded picture.
To roam Art of the American Soldier — an exhibit culled from the rarely displayed collections of the United States Army Center of Military History and the National Museum of the United States Army by the always inventive and clever curators of the National Constitution Center — is to see Biddle’s vision borne out in affecting, frequently harrowing pencil sketches, charcoal rubs, watercolors, acrylics, and oils on canvas encompassing every modern conflict from World War I through Iraq.
There are a few familiar pieces, notably Tom Lea’s “Marines Call it That 2,000 Yard Stare” and several satirical “dogface” drawings by Bill Mauldin (“I can’t be funny about the war,” the heralded soldier cartoonist once said, “but I can try to make something out of the humorous situations which always accompany misery”), as well as a smattering of iconic scenes: MacArthur reviewing a decimated Philippine landscape in 1944; the liberation of Buchenwald in cold, sorrowful darker hues; Eliza Golden’s 2005 painting “Martyrdom Denied” rendering through desert haze the demolition of a Mosul safe house U.S. Special Forces ensured would not live up to its billing for Uday and Qusay Hussein.
Mostly, though, the exhibit vista is idiosyncratic to the ground-level micro reality as the soldier sees it, usually overlooked and, thus, wholly engrossing: Medics struggling to maneuver a wounded man down a mountainside under the cover of darkness (“Night Shift”); bloody sheets outside a hospital tent (“Normandy Wash”); red, kinetic blur of chaos in Vietnam (“Hot Village”).
“I can tell you put your soul into this portrait,” a man tells Master Sgt. Martin Cervantez, one of the Army’s current frontline artists on hand for the exhibit opening, “it touched my heart.”
The painting in question is of a masked Afghani translator working with American officers in Khost, and risking his life to do so. Cervantez is a self-taught artist who joined the military with no inkling he’d eventually paint scenes for the Army to warehouse as part of the nation’s historical record. In off-duty hours he pursues abstract art. On deployment Cervantez enters the heat of battle with all the usual concerns — the welfare of the soldier next to him, security, the mission — plus one more: Discovering, capturing, and relating the essential truth of what churns around him.
“God bless you,” another admirer whispers shyly as she slips by.
The medium partially explains the atypical accolades. We are inundated with digital images. In the purest, most sophisticated form these no doubt still chill blood and swell hearts. (See, for example, the film Restrepo and the book Infidel.) But Art of the American Soldier takes war far enough out of our typical consumption pattern to slow. us. down. Today’s media is an automatic transmission, too sleek and smooth at times. This exhibit is a standard. We are forced to shift, to think a bit, to focus, and the images consequently speak to us in new ways.
Then there is the matter of the creators themselves.
It is important, of course, to have noncombatants document wars — vital, indeed, for a democracy, which requires transparency and civic oversight.
Yet no matter how deeply or bravely embedded, a journalist can never comprehend in toto the lives and sacrifices of the men and women who fight on our behalf. I covered combat in Iraq. It was not exactly an Orwell Homage to Catalonia experience. When the shooting starts the soldier’s job is to deal with it. The embedded journalist’s job is to go duck where the soldier tells him to go duck.
I’ve met fantastically brave reporters, correspondents with innate courage that humbles as much as it baffles, who go far outside the confines of the embed so that the rest of us might have some idea what the hell is happening out there in this cruel world. And proximity and direct experience are extraordinarily valuable.
Nevertheless, divergent perspectives are inevitable. Soldiers are less likely to see themselves as archetypes or symbols of a larger policy. The motif is less important to them than the individual, the immediate community he depends on for survival and sanity, and the amenities or lack thereof as the days of the tour tick down.
Both voices are worth hearing; one seldom is.
About the Author
Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (63) | Leave a comment
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Booger | 11.12.10 @ 6:24AM
From the desk of D. Mephistopheles, Attorney-at-Law
To: President B. Hussein Obama
Dear President Obama,
In light of your current pleas for more assistance following your recent mid-term "shellacking" at the polls, my firm has put forward the following proposal. If you will do your part in implementing it, then we will be happy to continue our assistance to you.
One of our favorite human attributes is pride. You yourself have proven to be a great advocate of this trait when you proclaimed of yourself and your followers that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." Such pride is quite helpful to our great cause. Yet standing in its way remains gratitude, that pathetic excuse for a virtue championed by so many of your pathetic race.
What, then, is to be done? Teach them to forget the sacrifice of others on their behalf. Gratitude is the tool of our Enemy, and must never be tolerated. When your ridiculous little nation has her foolish "days of remembrance" for the soldiers who fought and died for your pathetic "freedom" just ignore the holiday. Pay no mind to the traditions or ceremonies involved. As commander in chief the people will look to you for guidance, when they see that you lack gratitude to the fallen they will learn to emulate you. When they see that you attribute your own freedom to no one but yourself, they will learn the same. They will lift themselves up in pride, and become easy prey for our firm.
Remember, dear President Obama, you owe your freedom and comfort to no one but yourself. Honor no other, save this firm of course. Forget and ignore Memorial and Veterans Day ceremonies. A nice vacation and a round of golf will be a much better use of your time.
Your friend and supporter,
D. Mephistopheles, Attorney-at-Law
From Iraq| 11.12.10 @ 10:53AM
He is still our C-in-C, which makes this disrespectful, not satirical. Give it a rest, pal.
Steve A| 11.12.10 @ 11:58AM
Is this the same C-in C who accused you of killing civilians & air raiding villages?? Just checkin...
Booger| 11.12.10 @ 12:14PM
Dear From Iraq and Steve A,
Satirizing the C-in-C is a grand tradition for civilians and grunts alike for as long as there has been a C-in-C. It's part of what sets us apart. As to any accusations he has made, well.... never mind, that would veer into the disrespectful. Please bear in mind the speaker/writer in the piece is not the C-in-C, merely someone encouraging him in a certain direction, so consider the source.
Cordially,
Booger
c| 11.12.10 @ 1:20PM
don't believe you are in iraq. you are a liberal democrat trolling a conservative website.
geokster| 11.12.10 @ 9:20PM
Booger generally has his shit together. In this case more so because the C-in-C today has never worn a uniform and thus has no idea of which he speaks. Sadly.
Virus Warning| 11.12.10 @ 8:54PM
Hate to change the subject, but *don't* click on the link to "2000 yard stare" - the website at the other end just downloaded a virus to my laptop. Right through McAfee!
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:11PM
The Civil War was noble, too;
wasn't it, Billy-Bob?
The good old days were,,, so JUICY.
Tim*| 11.12.10 @ 6:35AM
That looks just like The ETO Look.
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:17PM
Oh, the screams of the bopys in grey as their blood nourished the soil of Antietam and Vicksburg;
Shiloh and Fredricksburg.
Richmond, Gettysburg...
I DO miss the old days.
Louis Jenkins| 11.12.10 @ 8:35AM
One thing I like about modern war art (if you can call it that), it deals more with the "grunts" and not at all with the heroic pictures of generals and future rulers. It gets down to the men and women who fight, and the baggage they carry the rest of their lives.
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:18PM
... the adoring screams of eviscerated Confederate boys as they called for their Mamas' ....
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:45AM
Ditto for the Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:08AM
So you perhaps think mega-death is patriotic?
Patriotic by way of WHOSE cause?
However if you don't know, you just don't know.
Bill| 11.12.10 @ 9:10AM
Tom Lea's painting (painted after Peleliu) is called "The 2,000 Yard Stare," not "Marines Call It the 20,000 Yard Stare."
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:19PM
The amputations in Confederate surgical tents...
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:45AM
Ditto for the Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:15AM
But, Lou, where does the Dred Scott decision stand in 2010?:
Absolutely Nowhere. It is as rotted as any beauty who lived 150 years ago. Gone with the wind-- forever.
Shawn Macomber| 11.12.10 @ 9:27AM
Bill,
The original Life magazine title of the picture was "Marines Call it That 2,000 Yard Stare"
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:21PM
...the shrieks of Confederates as their burnt faces were daubed...
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:46AM
Ditto for the Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:17AM
Yet you will admit that-- as Communism-- the Confederacy was not only a lost cause, but a bad cause as well?
If so, we are in agreement.
Bill| 11.15.10 @ 9:57AM
Life Magazine may have captioned it that way, but
http://www.tomlea.net/works/2,000-Yard_Stare.html
Shawn Macomber| 11.12.10 @ 9:35AM
P.S. I meant to add, I'm working on getting rid of that extra zero...
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:22PM
...the pus oozing from days-old Confederate wounds.
Tim*| 11.12.10 @ 11:32PM
Wow, ObamaBoy Brooks . You Got A Obsessional Real Hang Up About The Men Of The South.
Both Sides Suffered Losses.
Do Your Homework.
The Union Armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates:
Battle deaths: 110,070
Disease, etc.: 250,152
Total 360,222
The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:
Battle deaths: 94,000
Disease, etc.: 164,000
Total 258,000
See A Therapist.
Alan Brooks| 11.13.10 @ 12:20AM
Yes, Timmie, call the doc.
It's that communist Paul Newman and his salad dressing;
I drank three bottles of his Creamy Hemp this morning and my head is spinning.
That IDF lady Marge is hypnotizing me, too!
Tim*| 11.13.10 @ 10:02AM
No Comment Necessary.
Attendants, Get The Net.
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:47AM
Ditto for the Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:23AM
Tim*, I looked out my window all day, there is no net in sight. Nor is there any trace of a Mossad agent sent by Marge, or a cavalry formation headed by Jubal Early (I guess Jubal must be late-- not early). However one must be patient and be willing to wait until Hell freezes over, Mr. Jenkins; then might the
Confederate rainbow shine through showers of blood.
Shawn Macomber| 11.12.10 @ 9:55AM
P.P.S. Since Bill was kind enough to bring it up, I'd like to add that anyone interested in the story of Peleliu should read William Manchester's classic Goodbye, Darkness...
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:23PM
... confederates coughing up blood on the battlefield.
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:47AM
Ditto for the Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:26AM
And God's sword was in Confederate hands? in that case God does work in mysterious ways.
Bill| 11.15.10 @ 9:54AM
I questioned why all the photos of the dead on Civil War battlefields showed men with their shirts and blouses rucked up and their bellies bare. The documentary The Civil War answered that: they were checking to see if they had been gut-shot before they died.
Robbins Mitchell| 11.12.10 @ 12:40PM
I first saw the above pic in Life Magazine's 2 volume set "History of World War 2" that I received as a Christmas present from my father about 1960...he had been with a USN occupation team on Okinawa and had seen that very start on some mud Marines while there....the 2 volume set also included a record of Churchill's WW2 speeches...I still have that set and cherish it
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:24PM
...innucleated Confederate eyes hanging out oif sockets.
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:48AM
Ditto for Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:32AM
And whose visage is on the $5 bill? Jefferson Davis'?
Even by your very own commercial (you are no social democrat) standards, Louis,
Lincoln was a winner:
Abe wins all around.
Bill| 11.15.10 @ 10:04AM
Was this guy from the South or the North?
http://www.tomlea.net/works/The_Price.html
Explosion Proof Light | 11.13.10 @ 12:29AM
For most Americans, Obama doesn't seem to be giving them something they don't have, but instead to be taking away something they already value.
Bob Mack | 11.12.10 @ 3:02PM
Why not satirize the C-I-C? In the RVN, some of the guys had a monkey named Johnson, as in Lyndon B. Johnny loved cigarettes, used to eat a pack a day...
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:25PM
... Confederate testicles hanging by a thread...
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:49AM
Ditto for the Union too Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:46AM
... since America only respects winners:
Abe Lincoln, Winner.
Jefferson Davis, loser.
You can't have it both ways; a mind divided cannot stand.
Bill| 11.15.10 @ 10:08AM
V.C. shouting across road at G.I.: LBJ is a son-of-a-bitch!
G.I. shouting back: Ho Chi Minh is a son-of-a-bitch!
As the two men are standing in the middle of the road shaking hands, they are run over and killed by a supply truck.
From Full Metal Jacket:
Marine in airborne Huey to door gunner as he fires at ground targets: How can you shoot women and children?
Door Gunner: You just don't lead them so much!
Oldefarte| 11.12.10 @ 4:04PM
test
Alan Brooks| 11.12.10 @ 11:27PM
Confederate children wandering dazed around ruined southern villages.
We DO miss the good old days.
Le Cracquere| 11.13.10 @ 5:42PM
Can't wait for Andersonville to reopen for business. Dibs on an internship!
Louis Jenkins| 11.13.10 @ 10:50AM
Yankee children wandering about without a father. No I do not miss the old days. We are all Americans now Alan Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:39AM
Gotcha, there, Lou!
Yankee kids' villages were mostly unscathed; same wasn't true of Dixie. Was it God's punishment? or Satan's? Or perhaps there is no God? for once YOU tell ME-- that is if you have any idea. Was the Confederacy meant to win but Satan intervened?
So if you don't know, please say: "I don't know."
Yosemeti Sam| 11.13.10 @ 11:38AM
"My goal is, 'That's where I've been, that's what I've done, that's what it looked like,'" Cervantez explains. "It's the greatest thing in the world for me to have the opportunity to tell these stories, but if a fellow soldier can't look at these paintings and say that, I haven't done my job."
Well, shades of reality - that those who've been coiled in WAR are not those with smiley faces.
Who'd THUNK it!
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:57AM
You have the best and most apparent point here, Sam (which isn't saying a whole lot, though).
What motivates me is my illiberal parents embraced bad causes;
isn't it a good idea to reject bad causes of ALL sorts? whether Communism, fascism/National Socialism neoConfederacism, etc?
Yosemeti Sam| 11.14.10 @ 9:52AM
Bad causes? Veritably, determined in the eye of the SUBJECTIVE beholder.
Philosophers, Theologians and - Darwinists - are in perhaps better chiseled out pulpit positions to reply to:
http://www.lyricstime.com/war-.....yrics.html
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 1:50AM
All you have to do is tell all these things to thousands of Confederate nostalgists. The Confederacy was as great a success as Vietnam.
Oh, I wish I were in the land of cotton,
ole times there is not forgotten.
Lindsey Lohan| 11.14.10 @ 1:02PM
Keep the letters coming, Booger! Awesome!
ทาสีคอนโด | 11.14.10 @ 1:33PM
Can't wait for Andersonville to reopen for business. Dibs on an internship!
Alan Brooks| 11.14.10 @ 10:56PM
Okay, let's replace
"war is not healthy for children and other living things" (which WAS cloying)
with
"war is healthy for population control, DARPA, and other important things."
castingroomtv | 11.14.10 @ 11:07PM
ya tuhan, kasihan jeritan sang prajurit yang malang
castingroomtv | 11.14.10 @ 11:09PM
O god, sorry for the screams of the unfortunate soldier
general summerall| 11.15.10 @ 1:06AM
Wow, Allan, why are you not disturbed by Ramsess II taking the whole Regiment of Amun out and killed in the field outside Kadesh, where the Hittites could see the whole thing, after the regiment had broke and ran before the Hittites. It did wonders for the morale of the Egyptian army who went on and whipped the whole Hittite army. Or that is what Ram told everyone back in Thebes.