Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

HISTORY IN ART - The Great War

HISTORY IN ART - The Great War

"How American artists captured the Great War up close" PBS NewsHour 3/2/2017

Excerpt


SUMMARY:  It was a cataclysmic, world-shattering and world-shaping event.  Today we can relive the visceral human effects of World War I through a new exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which showcases a myriad of iconic images and art for and against the divisive conflict.  Jeffrey Brown reports.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  "I Want You," about as direct as it gets, an iconic image from World War I.

"The Flower of Death," an evocative title for a painting by an American soldier named Claggett Wilson, that captures some of the close-up horror of the war.

Just some of the ways American artists responded to a cataclysmic, world-shattering and -shaping event, the subject of a major new exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia titled "World War I and American Art."

Co-curator Robert Cozzolino:

ROBERT COZZOLINO, Co-Curator:  At heart, this is a human interest story.

JEFFREY BROWN:  You mean the whole war, as big as it was?

ROBERT COZZOLINO:  You have these artists who are thinking, basically, here's this huge global conflict going on.  How do I make sense of it?  And how do I also bring it down to a human level and express either dissent, an urgency for America to take part in it, or to just express what's at stake?

JEFFREY BROWN:  'The Great War' began in Europe in 1914.  The U.S. didn't join until three years later, after an intense public debate over entering a foreign conflict.

Artists weighed in on both sides.  John Sloan's After the War, a Medal, Maybe a Job in 1914 was one of the earliest anti-war drawings.

Marsden Hartley was conflicted.  He lived in Germany and fell in love with a German military officer killed in the war, who Hartley depicted in a series of paintings.

Childe Hassam on the other hand, active in the pro-interventionist movement in New York, streamed flags across his canvasses in support of the allies.

And George Bellows, an early opponent of the war, was moved to support it by a U.S. government report, later disputed, of German atrocities.

ROBERT COZZOLINO:  He's swayed that he has to show what happened.

JEFFREY BROWN:  And he swayed, big time, because this is an atrocity painting, right, on a large scale.

ROBERT COZZOLINO:  Yes, he makes these history paintings about this contemporary event, and he's showing the brutality of these atrocities being committed to citizens.  He's showing it at its most visceral.



This post first appeared on Mage Soapbox, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

HISTORY IN ART - The Great War

×

Subscribe to Mage Soapbox

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×