This is perhaps the most antagonistic pair of human creation. On the one hand the sublime and elevated; on the other, the pathetic, cruel and despicable. What can they have in common? Much, since the artists, subtle crystals of humanity, sensitive to everything that concerns its course in this life, have focused on its consequences. In turn, art and artists, like all the inhabitants of this world and their activities, are influenced by the ravages and consequences of wars. In these dark times of war, let us make a brief retrospection in the history of war seen from the arts, not as an exaltation -much art has done it- but to those who reflect on the fatal effects that these disputes entail. Hard task, if not impossible, we propose.
Let us consider that in all times, in all cultures and in all their disciplines, the arts reflected on war. Serve some examples of the visual arts, from the seventeenth century to our times.
The Great Miseries and Misfortunes of War by Jacques Callot
-The 30 Years War, Europe, 1618 to 1648-
L'arquebusade, or The firing squad. Engraving 12 of The Great Miseries of the War by Callot.
Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre (The Great Miseries and Misfortunes of War) is a series of 18 etchings by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635). Its original title is The Miseries and Misfortunes of War, but this suite is often called The Great Miseries… to differentiate it from another series of even smaller size, considering that this one is only 83 × 180 mm per engraving. It was published in 1633 and is one of Callot's masterpieces. It has been called the first "anti-war statement" in European art.
They describe the destruction unleashed on the civilian population during the Thirty Years' War, waged in Central Europe (mainly the Holy Roman Empire) between 1618 and 1648, in which most of the great European powers of the time took part. . The suite was published fifteen years after this terrible war. In them we see bands of victorious soldiers successively attacking a farm, a convent, and a carriage, or burning a village. In certain plates, prisoners are rounded up and subjected to various methods of public torture and execution. Others show us crippled soldiers in a large hospital, or dying under the force of vengeful peasants.
Goya and The Disasters of War
-The War of Independence, Spain, 1808 to 1814-
What needs to be done more? No. 33 of the series The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya.
The Spanish painter and engraver Franciso de Goya (Fuendetodos, 1746 - Bordeaux, 1828) was painter to the royal court of Spain when the Napoleonic troops invaded the Iberian Peninsula. The Aranjuez mutiny forced Carlos IV to abdicate and hand over power to his son Fernando VII. For the first time in the royal history of Spain, a king handed over his power to his son. And after the Dos de Mayo uprising, the so-called War of Independence began against the invading troops of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, which lasted between 1808 and 1814. In October Goya traveled to Zaragoza called by José de Palafox, traveling in the one who witnessed several acts of arms that inspired him The disasters of war.
The disasters of war is a series of 82 engravings made between 1810 and 1815, in the technique of etching, with some contributions of drypoint, burnisher and gouache. They are a cruel reflection of the convulsive historical period they reached. A modern report of the atrocities committed, a vision devoid of heroism and where the victims are always individuals of any class and condition. Murder, impalement, torture, mutilation, mountains of corpses and famine are seen in these shocking images, records of a war that took between 215,000 and 375,000 souls. The prints were praised by artists such as Gustav Doré, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Baudelaire, and have been inspired by the aforementioned series, Les Misères et les Malheurs de la guerre by Jacques Callot.
The set of 82 engravings is divided into three groups according to their themes: a First part (prints 1 to 47), with prints focused on war, the Second part (prints 48 to 64), focused on hunger, either as a consequence of the Siege of Zaragoza in 1808 or the famine in Madrid between 1811 and 1812 and the Third part or “emphatic whims” (prints 65 to 82), which refer to the absolutist period after the return of Ferdinand VII. Sociopolitical criticism and the use of allegory through animals abound in this section. During the author's lifetime, only two complete sets of the series were printed, one given to his friend and art critic Ceán Bermúdez. The first edition appeared only in 1863 at the initiative of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.
The Second and Third of May in Madrid
The Second of May 1808, oil painting by Francisco de Goya, 268 x 366 cm. Prado National Museum, Madrid.
The Third of May 1808, oil painting by Francisco de Goya, 268 x 347 cm. Prado National Museum, Madrid.
The war of Spanish independence motivated another great work of the Spanish genius, the oil painting entitled The Third of May, also known as The executions on the mountain of Príncipe Pío or The executions of the third of May. Painted after the war was over, it refers to the execution of Spanish civilians the day after the May 2 uprising of the people against French domination. Note the resemblance to the scene depicted in Callot's The Firing Squad print reproduced here. In both images soldiers with arquebuses shoot at prisoners, some alive, others already dead. However, in relation to the Frenchman, Goya greatly exacerbates the drama in his work. The scene of the murder is in the foreground, and the closeness of the soldiers to the future victims is much greater. While the prisoner in Callot's work is tied to a post and blindfolded, Goya's are loose. His bodies and faces express fear, terror, some implore mercy. The sky is terribly black, and blood pours from the dead bodies. This large 268 x 347 centimeter oil painting is in the Prado Museum, and forms a pair with the oil painting The Second of May.
In America, the War of the Triple Alliance (Paraguay, 1865 - 1870)
Cándido López and his oil painting After the Battle of Curupaytí
After the Battle of Curupaytí, by Cándido López; oil on canvas, 50.6 x 149.5 cm. National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires.
For its analysis we turn to the description of this work made by Roberto Amigo for the National Museum of Fine Arts.
Cándido López represented the Paraguayan War (1865-1870), in which he fought until he was wounded in Curupaytí, through analytical-descriptive painting derived from the representation of battles in European military cartography. A mode of representation that had had its development in the Río de la Plata, reaching an outstanding point in the paintings of battles known as Victorias de Urquiza (Palacio San José, Entre Ríos) painted by Juan Manuel Blanes in 1857.
The non-professionalization of López (he was a photographer, soldier, shoemaker and rural worker) in times of “artists” brings him even closer to the past of the regional tradition, when “art” was also the task of artisans, soldiers, typographers and calligraphers. Of course, López had acquired a brief pictorial training in the Buenos Aires of the 1850s and had not been able to achieve his desire for improvement, so photography in country towns was a commercial outlet for his non-artistic insertion .
However, his stylistic decision is not the result of his level of learning but of the acceptance of a way of visual representation of war, residual already in the times in which he produces his work. The formal election allows the reading of the war of the Triple Alliance as the last episode of civil wars and, at the same time, as the military conflict for fixing the limits of the Nation-States. In this way, his painting is the last link with the regional tradition and the first that functionally serves modern nationalism (1).
The idea of representing the experiences of the war had its origin during the campaign, as his sketchbook attests, but external factors, the economic crisis of 1876 and 1890, seem to have driven the artist to complete the task with intensity. Painting was his claiming tool, comparable to the public action of veterans, to the request for salaries and pensions; and through it he managed to join the patronage system of the conservative order after his resounding exhibition in 1885 at the Gymnastics and Fencing Club, with the sponsorship of the Argentine Industrial Center (two institutions of turn-of-the-century nationalism). Both the individual exhibition and its complete acquisition by the State are exceptional cases in the history of Argentine art of the 19th century. In this exhibition, López presented 29 paintings from an exact year of the war: from August 13, 1865 to August 13, 1866. It is probable that the artist's condition as an invalid influenced the public repercussion: it was the observation of the One-armed painter who trained the unskillful hand, as if he were one of those phenomena of the popular shows of the 19th century.
Cándido López wrote descriptions of the episodes represented, for After the battle of Curupaytí his text is one of the briefest: “Obeying the signal to withdraw, the troops began it without being pursued by the enemy. When not a single Allied soldier remained within range of the cannon, the Paraguayan 12th Infantry Regiment came out of the trenches to collect the loot” (2).
Notes:
1. Cf. Roberto Amigo, “El alba con la noche” in: El alba con la noche, cat. experience Asunción, Center for Visual Arts- Museo del Barro, 2009, p. 6-14.
2. Transcript of the document in Dujovne, 1971, p. 33.
Otto Dix: Der Krieg (The War)
-First World War, Europe, 1914 - 1918-
Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor ("Stormtroopers advance under gas attack"). One of the seventy plates belonging to the series "The War", from 1924.
No other 20th-century artist dealt with the First World War more intensely and emphatically than Otto Dix (1891-1969). His startlingly realistic depictions of the wounded and dead in the trenches of World War I have entered the collective visual memory.
Like many artists of his generation, Otto Dix, at the age of twenty-three, voluntarily enlisted in the army to fight in that contest. Years later, in 1924, still young but already teaching at the Dresden School of Fine Arts, he made a series of 50 prints entitled Der Krieg (The War). Grouped into five folders of ten prints each, it had a print run of 70 copies. The work is part of the New Objectivity, an extension of German expressionism. The friction of these two certainly contradictory concepts (the objective versus the expressionist) is notorious in this brutal work: reality from the traumatic vision of those who suffered those events in their own flesh.
The influences of Jacques Callot's series are evident in this work, as well as the suite The Disasters of War and the painting The Third of May, both by Goya.
Years later (between 1929 and 1932) Dix made a monumental polyptych with the same title, "The War". Conserved in the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, it is one of the key works of German realist painting of the 20th century. In the manner of the old masters, the four panels reveal the "primordial catastrophe of the 20th century". You can see the exodus of the soldiers at dawn (left panel), the battlefield as a place of death (middle panel), the return of the warriors from hell from battle (right panel), and the rest of the soldiers in a wooden coffin (predella) (1).
Note:
1. Predella: Lower part of a painting or sculpture altarpiece.
Der Krieg (The War). Oil by Otto Dix. Central altarpiece: 204 x 204 cm. Lateral altarpieces: 204 x 102 cm. Predella: 60 x 204 cm. Museum: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (Germany)
The Second World War seen from Argentina: The drama by Raquel Forner
The drama. Oil painting by Raquel Forner, 126 x 174 cm. National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires.
The production of the Argentine painter Raquel Forner (Buenos Aires, 1902 - 1988) is outstanding for three primary reasons: her adherence to the avant-garde that was gaining ground against nineteenth-century naturalism, heir to impressionism and Spanish regional painting, her commitment to reality contemporary world, and these two crossed by the fact of being a woman artist. Regarding the former, already in 1928 the Buenos Aires press, from its presentation at the National Hall of Fine Arts, stated: “Forner is an artist attentive to the rhythm of the time, she defines herself with clear profiles in the avant-garde group […] it expresses its reality, which does not suppose a literary reinterpretation of the world of reference, but rather a conscious support of sensible things” (1).
In 1937 Forner began her Series of Spain, linked to the drama of the Spanish civil war. She identified with the struggles embodied by the Popular Front – the anti-fascist international – and constituted a powerfully expressive iconography centered on the image of women as protagonists. Her dramatic sense colors her work in these years. "I need my painting to be a dramatic echo of the moment I live in," she expressed when presenting Women of the World, one of the works in this series. She concluded this series in 1939, the year she began the Drama series, which continued until 1946, focusing on World War II. Belonging to this series and with the same name -The drama- is the work that we present, painted in 1942. Let's compare it to that of Otto Dix. In both, the frontal presentation, the lack of perspective and the non-realistic scale of the characters evoke the pre-modern iconographic composition, in the manner of the medieval or mannerist. What is represented is also shared by both paintings: soldiers, corpses, dead trees or ruinous metals live in front of a dense atmosphere charged with smoke and vapours. They make up a pathetic world, a tragic, devastated and devastating landscape. The big difference between the two: the presence of women. Absent in Dix's work are the protagonists here. In the foreground they observe the desolate scene. One girl holds a dead peace dove, another is depicted in a broken painting within the painting itself. It is, Forner's work, a heartrending appeal, a denunciation. As Diana B. Wechsler writes in the cataloging of the work for the National Museum of Fine Arts “A whole declaration of principles raised with the vocation of never again”.
Note:
1. “The XVIII National Hall of Fine Arts”, La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, September 30, 1928.
The 59th Venice Biennale in time of cancellations
-Russian invasion of Ukraine, 2022-
Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, photographed in 2009. It was designed by architect Alexey Viktorovich Shchusev and opened in 1914.
It is now necessary to twist the focus of our analysis. If up to this point we have observed what artists have to say about war, let us stop at what war and its consequences demand from the field of art. They are news these days, in a world attentive and terrified by Russia's invasion and war on Ukraine, a series of cancellations that range from the laudable and justifiable, to the crazy and somewhat xenophobic.
The Venice Biennale, one of the most important artistic events in the world, announced at the beginning of March that it will not accept the participation in its 59th edition that will begin on April 23 of official delegations, institutions or personalities linked to the Russian Government due to the invasion from Ukraine. In turn, the same curator and the artists of the Russian pavilion decided to cancel their participation. "When civilians die under missile fire, Ukrainian citizens hide in shelters and Russian protesters are suffocated, there is no place for art" This is how the Russian artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov and the curator Raimundas Malaauskas signed in these days. The Biennale, for its part, expressed its full solidarity with this "remarkable act of bravery and stands alongside the motivations that have led to this decision, which dramatically personifies the tragedy that has beset the entire population of Ukraine." In turn, the Ukrainian Pavilion temporarily suspended its participation, while they are working to ensure the participation of the Ukrainian artist Pavlo Makov.
Ukrainian artistic and cultural heritage in danger
The wave of desolation and death that a war means takes with it not only -and of course, primarily- the lives of human beings, but also the destruction and looting of the cultural heritage of the invaded country. Ukrainian and international organizations warn of this danger, which has already become effective with the fire at the Ivankiv Historical and Cultural Museum, about 70 kilometers northwest of Kiev. With the arrival of Russian troops in the capital city, fear is aroused over the Saint Sophia Cathedral, one of the seven places in Ukraine declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The Ukrainian embassy to the Vatican has asked the Russian government not to destroy it, something that is not ruled out.
For their part, the 18 museums of the province of Lviv have stored 500 pieces selected from among the 65,000 that make up their heritage in a secret bunker, and they do not rule out the possibility of protecting them abroad, not only from their destruction, but mainly from the robbery or plunder, especially with the interests that Putin places on Kiev regarding the history of Russia and its roots. “Many finds made in Ukraine during the 19th and early 20th centuries are already in the two best Russian museums. And there is also evidence that objects from archaeological excavations in Crimea have been sent to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,” says Fedir Androshchuk, director of the National Museum of Ukraine.
Armed artists
The dancer Lesya Vorotnyk is armed and in military clothes.
Another echo of the horrors of war is the armed participation of artists on the very front of the conflict. As read in the international press, the first dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, Oleksii Potemkin; Lesya Vorotnyk, dancer of the Kiev National Opera; and, so far, musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk, rapper and vocalist for Boombox, are among the civilians who have taken up arms for war.
Last Sunday, March 6, the Ukrainian actor Pasha Lee passed away. He had enlisted in his country's Territorial Defense Forces last week to help defend Ukraine from the Russian invasion. He died after Russian troops shelled the city of Irpin, west of Kiev. His death was announced by the Odessa International Film Festival and later confirmed by the local news channel TSN.
And the cancellations continue
The 21st century installed, a mixture of bourgeois morality and cybernetic virality, the fashion of cancellations. The war in Ukraine is no exception to this usage, and a wave of cancellations is affecting Russian artists and Russian culture in general in the Western world. Let's list some examples:
* The Andalusian film library canceled the screening of the film Solaris (1979) by Andréi Tarkovsky. The institution justified its decision within the framework of the recommendations of the European Film Academy. The Cannes Film Festival has also announced that it will not accept Russian delegations at its next edition.
* Warsaw banned the opera Boris Godunov, composed by Modest Musorgsky in 1874.
* The Cardiff Philharmonic has removed Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture from the concert it will offer next Friday, March 18, at St. David's Hall in the Welsh capital.
* The Bicocca University of Milan canceled a course on Dostoevsky, but in the face of the scandal the university has had to back down.
* The Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam, a branch of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, has severed its relationship with the country, which implies the immediate closure of most of its facilities.
* Elena Kovalskaya resigned from the directorship of the Meyerhold state theater in Moscow, along with a statement in which she radically distances herself from the Russian president: "You cannot work for a murderer and receive a salary from him."
* The Eurovision Song Contest has kicked Russia out of this year's contest.
* Western artists and companies have canceled their tours and performances in Russia: rock and pop bands like Green Day, Imagine Dragons, Franz Ferdinand and The Killers. Meanwhile Walt Disney, Sony and Warner will not premiere their films there.
* The soprano Anna Netrebko was removed from the next seasons of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, by refusing to publicly repudiate the government of Vladimir Putin. The same thing happened with the famous conductor Valeri Gergiev, separated from the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was the principal conductor. Then, the musician was left without a contract to give five concerts in the United States with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He was separated from the production of a Tchaikovsky opera that La Scala in Milan already has on its stage. And he also lost the baton of musical director of the Swiss Verbier festival and of another one that the Rotterdam orchestra usually performs in his honor. Both Anna Netrebko and Valeri Gergiev are artists close to Putin, and did not agree to publicly reject the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
* Various figures of Russian art signed letters and messages disagreeing with the war on Ukraine. Among them the director of the Alexandrinsky theater in Saint Petersburg, Valery Fokin, the actor Oleg Basilashvili and the violinist Vladimir Spivakov. The case of the director of the Bolshoi theater in Moscow, Vladimir Urin, is significant. In recent days he signed the following letter: “We speak here not only as cultural figures, but as ordinary people, citizens of our country, our homeland. Among us are the children and grandchildren of those who fought in the Great War, witnesses and participants in that confrontation. In each of us there lives a genetic memory of the war. We don't want a new war, we don't want people to die. The 20th century has brought too much pain and suffering to humanity. We want to believe that the 21st century will become a century of hope, openness, dialogue, a century of conversation, love, compassion and mercy. We call on everyone on whom it depends, on all sides of the conflict, to stop the armed action and sit down at the negotiating table”, However, his participation in the Teatro Real de Madrid, in which six were scheduled, was cancelled. performances of the ballet La bayadère. Against him, the Western theaters do not forget the support for Vladimir Putin's policy in Ukraine and Crimea that the director of the Bolshoi signed in 2014.
* The Minister of Culture of Ukraine, Oleksandr Tkachenko, has called for sanctions to "limit the Russian presence in the international cultural arena" and has called for the boycott of Russian artists at all fairs and exhibitions.
Regarding this mass cancellation, music director Daniel Barenboim declared "A witch hunt against the Russian people and culture must not be allowed." The Argentine-Israeli musician, known worldwide for his fight for world peace and particularly between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, conducted a benefit concert for Ukraine in Berlin on March 6. The teacher began with the memory of his grandparents, from Belarus and Ukraine, who fled to Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century. He also warned of the danger of “falling into the trap of now putting all Russians under general suspicion”, while making it clear that new bans and boycotts of Russian music or culture evoke the worst associations for him.
These examples serve to reflect on such a complex and powerful issue: Art about war, and ars in tempore belli, art in times of war. On the one hand, art as a witness, as a report, but also as a catharsis, that purification of the passions of the soul through the emotions that the contemplation of a tragic situation provokes. Very fruitful has always been the link between art and the ugly, the pathetic, the grotesque and the tragic.
But on the other hand, our unfortunate time of war has once again shown us how war contaminates everything, perverts everything by awakening the darkest ghosts of individuals and society, unleashing death and destruction, but also other extremisms such as censorship and xenophobia. Destiny wants all of these to settle down again. We will not naively say that they disappear. If history teaches us anything, in this case seen from art, it is that unfortunately these ghosts are part of our essence.