FRANCES  NEWMAN - A WORLD AT  WAR

War, Art, Artists and Society

Mike Gonzalez

It is in times of war that the majority of people may be made to feel most powerless. The exploding bombs and ringing speeches full of moral certainties can drown the voices of protest or doubt. What possible value, after all, could our personal horror, our fear or pain have in the face of these overwhelming moral truths? For every war has declared itself to be the battleground where good and evil meet, or progress and savagery, or civilization and barbarism.

It is at just such times that the role of art can be most sharply and clearly defined. For all great art, as Leon Trotsky put it, is ‘life-affirming’. When all that is human is threatened with destruction art’s power is, in some sense at least, at its greatest. This power is threefold; first, to validate and value the doubt, the muted questions, the insistent search for an answer to the question why. Secondly, art can reimpose the human dimension on these great and apparently overpowering forces – the narrow interests that hide behind the moralism, the individual life that humanizes the faceless ‘flood of refugees’. And out of that can come a new conviction, and a power to act.

The First World War brought home to a generation how destructive and brutal war was. The mythology of heroism fell to pieces in Passchendaele and Ypres, where tens of thousands drowned in stinking mud or in the futile battles for a few yards of scorched earth. Every army had its official war artists at the front and in the trenches; their job was to record the scene as mere document. Some, like Max Beckmann, found it too unbearable and were driven to despair by the things they saw; others like John Singer Sargent, with paintings like ‘Gassed’ represented the horror of it all with a harsh and unforgiving realism.

Yet in some ways the art of those who did not paint what they saw, but what they felt, came closer to an art of war. Franz Marc (himself killed in the war) painted ‘The death of animals’ before the war began – yet its strident colours and overwhelming sense of chaos seemed to predict the apocalypse to come. Making the picture itself became an act of protest, a way of unmasking the realities behind the patriotic rhetoric.

The Dada movement ripped away the mask of reason and exposed the madness, the absurdity of war. This, they said, was a catastrophe by any other name. We cannot accept the excuse that there is reason or logic embedded in this global violence. This war was the opposite of human progress, even if it was conducted in its name.

Above: ‘Without Hope’ Modelled wax 16 x 12cm 2002.

Above: ‘Fear is the Key’ Unfired clay figure 22 x 22cm 2003.

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