Art and War

Laura Brandon

• Éditeur: I.B. Tauris
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857732811
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Art General

This is a truly encyclopedic survey of artists' responses - both 'official' and personal - to 'the horrors of war'. "Art and War" reveals the sheer diversity of artists' portrayals of this most devastating aspect of the human condition - from the 'heroic' paintings of Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent to brutal and iconic works by artists from Goya to Picasso, and the equally oppositional work of Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and others who reacted with fury to the Vietnam War. Laura Brandon pays particular attention to work produced in response to World War I and World War II, as well as to more recent art and memorial work by artists as diverse as Barbara Kruger, Alfredo Jarr and Maya Lin. She looks finally to the reactions of contemporary artists such as Langlands and Bell to the US invasion in 2001 of Afghanistan and the 'War on Terror'.

Part I

A Long, Rich History

Chapter 1

Ten Thousand Years of War Art to 1600

Prehistory

Any understanding or recognition of war art presumes a prior knowledge of the war culture that has underwritten its creation. War art does not exist without war. We can only assume that our prehistoric ancestors fought each other – fighting seems part of the human condition. As hunters and fishers, they had weapons – the spears and arrows that brought down an animal being equally adept at killing and wounding humans. A small, twenty-centimetre-wide rock painting in the Gasulla gorge near Castellón, Spain (c.8000–3000 BC), depicts a ritual dance involving bows and arrows that could be a war or hunting dance. We simply do not know – we have virtually no familiarity with the military or warrior culture of the time. All we do know, from examples in south-west France, is that many identified cave dwellings are high up and inaccessible, so the inhabitants probably had to defend themselves.

In the fourth millennium BC, some of our ancestral hunter-gatherers settled in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq. They began to grow, store, and trade crops and to domesticate animals for food. With settlement and trade came territory – and a need to defend it because it provided sustenance. A clearly identifiable legacy of settlement is conflict. Another is art for display that bears messages about power, social condition, memory, and, of course, war. And the two legacies of settlement – conflict and art – are connected and merge and remerge in the art-historical trajectory from then until now.

The art of conflict seems not to have any clear associations with nomadic peoples. Before the period that produced cave paintings, nomads tended to generate small, portable art objects that they could handle rather than display. The celebrated stone carving the Venus of Willendorf (25,000–20,000 BC) is a prime example.¹ She fits comfortably into a hand, and her curves adjust to the palm’s concavity. Her role, however, is a mystery. And we cannot securely guess whether she served as protection or fertility or perhaps exemplified an aspect of her owner’s spiritual or martial life.

This chapter offers a forced march, as it were, through highlights in the history and development of war art – from Mesopotamia and Egypt, through Greece and Rome, with a side trip to China, and then back to Europe, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Mesopotamia

Faced with a prehistoric culture that hardly reveals itself, we begin our study of war art in Mesopotamia – specifically in Sumer – in a period of growing Middle Eastern settlement when independent, trading city-states begin to flourish. In the art of ancient Mesopotamia, several thousand years before the birth of Christ, we encounter the first visual depiction of war. We also apprehend a visual depiction of peace on this early artefact – the rightly celebrated Royal Standard of Ur.² The ‘peace’ depicted here, with its portrayal of victory celebrations and the spoils of war, may be more about war than about peace, and its title sheds more light on early twentieth-century understandings of what constitutes peace than on the Sumerian social state.

The Royal Standard of Ur is a somewhat mysterious small, blue, box-like object. It resembles a Toblerone chocolate bar without the segments being narrower at the top than on the bottom. Found in a large grave cemetery at Ur, an ancient city in southern Iraq, it dates from about 2600–2400 BC. It is breathtakingly beautiful. A luminous mosaic of white shell, red limestone, and blue lapis lazuli, this small, delicate structure positively glows. Its British discoverer, Leonard Woolley (excavating 1922–1934), assumed it to be a standard of some kind – a combination of flag and moral compass suitable for carrying on public occasions. Others think it perhaps the sound box of a musical instrument. When Woolley and his colleagues first saw it – in a centuries-old rubbish dump near Ur’s temple or ziggurat complex – it was in pieces, its wooden frame having long ago decayed and mingled with the city’s detritus. What we see today is a restoration that the British Museum houses and maintains.

Ur’s rubbish dump provided gravesites for thousands of people. Unable to build on the site, the citizens buried their dead there instead. And they interred with them many very beautiful objects. Woolley concluded that many graves contained royal corpses, but there is no conclusive evidence that Sumer had a monarchical social structure like twentieth-century Britain’s. A system of city-states seems more likely, linked possibly by kinship, certainly god-fearing and hierarchical, but not necessarily possessing a single, all-powerful ruler. All we can securely deduce is that there was wealth in Ur and that its residents buried many of their dead with jewellery and objects that confirm a rich, complex, and creative society. We also know that there were soldiers in Ur. The crushed skull of a soldier bearing a copper helmet indicates battles in Sumerian society and that its people expected protection. He is one of six people in his grave.

3. Royal Standard of Ur (war side) from the Sumerian Royal Graves of Ur.

The Royal Standard of Ur resembles a rather ornate comic strip. The ‘war’ panel, like ‘peace,’ has three lines, along which a procession of figures, horses, and chariots appears to advance. Many scholars believe that this panel depicts a Sumerian military victory. ‘Peace,’ in contrast, illustrates the fruits of victory: lines of prisoners and servants carrying the booty of war – precious objects and food – along with captured animals. Poses repeat themselves, and figures – particularly horses drawing chariots – overlap, to suggest quantity. The stylized figures and animals appear somewhat flat, as if squashed. Torsos twist, with both shoulders and arms clearly visible. The work conveys a sense of movement through the horses, which, if we read from the upper left to the lower right of the ‘war’ panel, change from a calm, walking stance to a dynamic and active pose that suggests a gallop.

From the Standard, we learn that war was part of Sumerian society and that many people participated in it both on foot and in horse-drawn chariots. The Standard indicates the sorts of weapons that soldiers carried – spears seem common – and the kind of clothing they wore in battle. Helmets are de rigueur. Men who do not wear them are perhaps prisoners of war or conscripts. Some of the figures are of different sizes – perhaps a sign of rank and an indicator of a relatively sophisticated martial society. In the lowest register, the most conclusive evidence of battle is the presence of three naked, dead bodies under each of the three groups of galloping horses.

This first surviving visual evidence of a tradition of war art includes much of the sort of iconographic material and content that still surfaces in certain kinds of war art to this day. Alone among the genres of art, war art has tied itself closely to narrative presentations that provide documentary evidence about the conduct of war, the nature and materiel of its practice, who was there, what they did, who died, and what the outcome was. The quality of the Standard’s craftsmanship also tells us that visual depictions of war have long conveyed valuable information. Sumerian culture possessed a form of writing, but most people were probably illiterate and dependent on visual imagery for enlightenment and understanding. We do not know how much of that visual material was martial, but, as the Standard tells us, the society understood that war brought loss of life but also riches and considered it a worthy pursuit. The Standard’s beautiful working and decoration suggest that the conduct of war was a normal, even important part of life. Significant too was its role in societal memory. If Woolley was right, the Standard had a notable memorial and instructive function. The successful outcomes of war, however, were also to evoke remembrance through visual means in the next life: the Royal Standard of Ur was, after all, buried in a grave.

About 2300 BC, the loose group of cities of which Ur was part came under the domination of Sargon of Akkad, and the concept of royal power became entrenched. With it emerged a visual culture that glorified the person and deeds of the great ruler. War was an integral part of Akkadian society, and its successful waging worthy of permanent depiction. The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin in the Louvre in Paris depicts Sargon’s grandson leading his armies up a mountain.³ They diagonally criss-cross the two-metre-high sandstone block (possibly a memorial) three times, led by their exceptionally large horn-helmeted leader. Their wounded enemies have fallen at their feet. The stylistic precedent here is Sumerian art, but the detail and realism of this low-relief carving suggest more sophisticated skill and craftsmanship. Each figure – some fifteen are discernible – has an individual portrayal. Certain characteristics of the three main elements – leader, victors, vanquished – recur throughout subsequent war art. The ruling figure or leader stands out and appears heroic – strong, upright, unbowed, and well dressed. The victorious troops are not wounded or dying but determined, athletic, and well armed. The enemy is beaten down, dead, or dying. As well, the work conveys a sense of height – standing in, perhaps, for invincibility and victory – by the mountain peak, above which glow sun-like forms representing Shamash and Ishtar, the Akkadian gods of justice and of love and fertility, respectively, but also, in Ishtar’s case, of war.

War was now an integral part of Near Eastern society – nowhere more terrifyingly perhaps than in that of the dominating Assyrians from the north. War and conquest had made their kings into military commanders and their territory into a garrison state. Cruel and merciless, the Assyrians had a penchant for atrocity that provoked fear throughout the ancient world. They used art to document their success, their military culture, and their power. Awe-inspiring stone relief carvings decorated their palaces. Ashurnasirpal II at War (c.875 BC), a limestone relief sculpture a metre high and now in the British Museum, depicts the king in his chariot drawing his bow.⁴ Around him Assyrian foot soldiers cut the throats of their wounded enemies while others draw their bows. There is only one act of humanity in the scene, where an enemy soldier tries to protect a comrade from certain death by stabbing by one of the king’s men by pulling him away out of harm’s way. In this shallow-relief carving, the enemy does not seem weak or lacking in defence capability. Its soldiers shoot arrows from the ramparts of their fortress; they too have chariots and horses, and the same weapons as the Assyrians. The message, however, is that the Assyrians are superior and invincible.

The Assyrian empire gradually faltered in the face of renewed revolt in the southern Near East, in particular from Babylon. Newly secure, King Nebuchadnezzar built a remarkable temple dominated by a processional way made of blue glazed tiles decorated with lions, the symbol of the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, Ishtar. The reconstruction of the processional way in his Babylonian temple (now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin) ends at the Ishtar Gate (c.575 BC).⁵ On the walls, we see no scenes of gratuitous violence as in the earlier Assyrian reliefs; instead we infer the force of military might from the two long lines of elegant yet snarling golden lions on either side of the route. This is military power that denotes its presence through subtle symbolism and through the visible expense implied in the gorgeous structures that support and invoke this emblematic material. Here, war art presents itself not in images of cruelty, suffering, and fear but in the sophisticated skills and abilities of a culture that knows how to wage war but does not need to advertise the fact. War art, as we continue to discover, need not be obviously about war but can find distinctive or subtle expression, as the Assyrian and Babylonian cultures so differently show.

Egypt

The history of Egypt in the centuries before Christ’s birth follows a similar trajectory to that of Mesopotamia. Agricultural settlement on the banks of the massive Nile River provided stable conditions for developments in written language and the arts. Deciphering some two centuries ago of hieroglyphic writing – a pictorial means of communication – helped unlock some 3,000 years of Egyptians’ stories and spiritual life. Egyptians were hierarchical, deeply religious, obsessed with the afterlife, but also militaristic.

King Narmer forcibly joined Upper and Lower Egypt. The Palette of Narmer (c.3000 BC), literally used to hold eye make-up, includes an image of the king overcoming his enemies.⁶ The style of execution, closely associated with the Old Kingdom (c.3000–2000 BC), is one that dominates the balance of Egyptian art. Here we see figures in profile, their shoulders turned to the plane of the picture surface, and the pictorial elements carried in bands, with the lines that comprise the bands also supporting the figures. Also typical, the king is much larger than the other figures (fallen and beheaded enemies and his own soldiers) and guarded by a hawk – the sky god, Horus. In this, the palette introduces the concept of divine kingship in its imagery.

The Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom (c.2000–1500 BC) saw some fifteen dynasties, replete with kings or pharaohs and perio...