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.
“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.”
I recall a unit commander winding up his tour in Samarra
describing war to me as a one-way door — a soldier passes through
it and cannot go back. Art of the American Soldier allows
a fleeting glimpse of that other side. It is well worth your time
and trouble to seek it out.
Art of
the American Soldier runs through January 10,
2011.
