Art 330 essay

ART 330 Module 2 AVP Transcript Title: The World Goes to War Slide 1 Slide Content: On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, along with his wife, Sophie, and the declaration of World War I became imminent. [Image] Francis Ferdinand [Archduke] [Franz Ferdinand] [Archduke] (1863 - 1914). (2002). In World of

Criminal Justice, Gale. Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/worldcrims/francis_ferdinand_archduke_franz_ferd inand_archduke_1863_1914

Narrator: Between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (July 28, 1914) and August 4, 1914, the major combatants of World War I (Germany, France, Russia, Britain, Austro-Hungary and Serbia ) declared war on each other. It did not take long for heavily militarized Europe to begin fighting; on August 3, 1914 Germany invaded neutral Belgium, on September 6th the Battle of the Marne started and on October 18, the First Battle of Ypres began. Slide 2 Slide Content: Photograph by Billie Love (British soldiers who fell covering the retreat of the 5th Army, in 1918) [Image] World War I soldiers. (2009). In The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and

Weather Guide. Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/heliconhe/world_war_i_soldiers/1

Narrator: In the one month long battle of Ypres, 58,000 British, 50,000 French and 130,000 German troops died. The high death tolls would become typical of World War I engagements. This was the Great War, the war to end all wars. It did not accomplish that, but it did completely and permanently change the world. Let’s explore this conflict and its effects through the eyes of artists who experienced this war.

Slide 3 Slide Content: Conditions in the trenches were often appalling and, apart from the onslaught of enemy shot and shell, soldiers suffered numerous diseases as a result of their conditions, such as trench foot (foot rot caused by the continual damp), and trench fever and typhus (spread by body lice). [Image] World War I trench. (2009). In The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and

Weather Guide. Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/heliconhe/world_war_i_trench

Narrator: The machine, that had in the decades prior to World War I been viewed as “unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient – a giant slave controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources,” betrayed its master. Instead of making the world into a new Eden, machines threatened to destroy the very fabric of civilization. Factories in Britain produced half a million hand grenades a week and railroads and ships carried them to points all over the globe. Slide 4 Slide Content: Machine guns that could conservatively fire up to eight rounds per second allowing one gunner to do the work of forty riflemen mowed down entire battalions of men. [Image – Machine gunner in the field] Narrator: Machine guns that could conservatively fire up to eight rounds per second allowing one gunner to do the work of forty riflemen mowed down entire battalions of men. A horse- drawn artillery gun loaded with an 18-pounder shrapnel shell, containing 374 bullets, could theoretically fire a maximum of twenty rounds per minute. It was technology like this that allowed the French in August 1917 to fire three million shells in just three days at Verdun. These machines of war were so destructive that Hemingway’s first experience as an ambulance driver in Italy, picking up the scattered and anonymous body parts of nurses at a bombed first aid station, was not uncommon. Slide 5 Slide Content: [Image] Flameng, Francois. The Offensive at Saint-Pierre-Aigle, July 1918. (2008). In The Bridgeman

Art Library Archive. Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/bridgeart/the_offensive_at_saint_pierre_aigle_july_ 1918

Narrator: The slaughter of World War I was such that we are uncertain how many people died. Thousands of gravestones in France are marked simply ICONNU (unknown).

Countless thousands lie in unmarked and forgotten graves around world buried there either by their comrades on the double-quick or beneath the treads of grinding tanks in the outraged earth. Conservative estimates put the dead around eight million while a more liberal accounting indicates twenty-five million. It is usually reckoned that some twenty million people were wounded. Slide 6 Slide Content: Gertrude Stein coined the term “the lost generation.” She was a prominent writer and patron of important artists and writers such as Picasso and Hemingway. In this photograph she is aboard the SS Champlain as she sailed for her home in Paris after a six-month lecture tour in the United States, 1935. [Image] Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946). (2005). In France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.

Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/abcframrle/stein_gertrude_1874_1946

Narrator: The Great War gutted an entire generation. Gertrude Stein was the first to describe this generation as the “lost generation”. The phrase resonated. As Erich Maria Remarque wrote in All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, “We are forlorn like children. We are crude and sorrowful and superficial – I believe we are lost.” Slide 7 Slide Content: [Image] Edwin Lutyens, The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, 1928-1932, Thepval,

France. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thiepval_Memorial_to_the_missing.jpg

Narrator: Standing beneath the immense arches of the Thiepval Memorial, situated in a village that was completely destroyed in World War I, one feels keenly the ache of having lost this generation. On the walls of this monument are 72,367 engraved names of British soldiers who died during the First Battle of the Somme between July and November 1916 and who have no known grave.

Slide 8 Slide Content: [Image] Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911. From Stokstad Digital Library. Reprinted with

permission Pearson Education/Prentice Hall. Narrator: We know the names of some artists who died in the Great War: the painters, Umberto Boccioni, Franz Marc, and August Macke; the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the architect Antonio Sant’ Elia, the poets Apollinaire, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg. Undoubtedly Robert Hughes, the art historian and critic, was correct when he wrote: “For every one of these names there must have been scores, even hundreds, of men who never had the chance to develop. If you ask where is the Matisse of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.” Slide 9 Slide Content: Raymond Duchamp-Villon contracted typhoid while with his squadron in 1916 and died in October 1918. In 1914, he cast this work, The Horse. Today it may be found at the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, in Paris. [Image] The Horse, 1914. (2008). In The Bridgeman Art Library Archive. Retrieved with permission from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/bridgeart/the_horse_1914 Narrator: A small sampling of the famous fine and performing artists who served in the war include:

 Max Beckmann, a painter, served as a medic and was discharged after nervous breakdown in 1915.

 Humphrey Bogart, an actor, served aboard the U.S. Leviathan and was wounded.

 Georges Braque, a painter and sculptor, served in the infantry; he suffered a serious head wound and was trepanned.

 George Butterworth, a composer, served in the infantry; he was shot in head at the Battle of the Somme and died; since his body was never recovered his name appears on the Thiepval memorial; his song The Banks of Green Willow is often played at Thiepval during ceremonies.

 Otto Dix, a painter, served as a machine-gunner and was wounded several times, once almost fatally.

 Raymond Duchamp-Villon, a sculptor, contracted typhoid while with his squadron in 1916 and died due to complications resulting from the disease in October 1918.

 Ernest Farrar, a composer and the teacher of composer Gerald Finzi, served as an infantryman; best known for his Celtic Suite and The Blessed Damozel, he was killed shortly before the Armistice during the Battle of Epehy Ronssoy.

 Walter Gropius, an architect, served in the German infantry and cavalry, was wounded and nearly died.

 Fernand Léger, a painter, served as a stretcher-bearer and was both wounded by shrapnel and gassed.

 Bela Lugosi, an actor, served as an infantryman for Austro-Hungary and was wounded three times (and decorated) before being honorably discharged.

 Ernst Kirchner, a painter, served as a driver in the artillery and was discharged due mental illness.

 Oskar Kokoschka, a painter, served as a cavalryman; he was shot in the head and bayoneted in the chest, but survived.

 Carl Orff, a composer best-known for Carmina Burana (1937), served as an infantryman on the Western Front.

 Maurice Ravel, a composer famous for his ballet-score for Bolero, was a truck driver and served on the Western Front near Verdun.

 Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist, served in the German infantry, was shot in his right elbow and captured by Russian troops. His right arm was amputated. Later he learned to play piano with only one hand.

Slide 10 Slide Content: British soldiers after being blinded by mustard gas. World War I was known as the “chemist’s war,” because chemists were deeply involved in developing new explosives, drugs, dyes, and, most memorably, poisonous gas. [Image] World War I. (2005). In Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. Retrieved with

permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/abcscieth/world_war_i Narrator: “It was,” Hemingway wrote, “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up or fought.” The same may be said of most of the painters of this era. With few exceptions, most artists left no explicit memory of the war in their later work. It is still possible to discern the specter of the Great War in their art, but as in Hemingway’s short story “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925) where the war is never mentioned, it often appears – or rather does not appear – as the elephant in the room. Slide 11 Slide Content: British soldiers after being blinded by mustard gas. World War I was known as the “chemist’s war,” because chemists were deeply involved in developing new explosives, drugs, dyes, and, most memorably, poisonous gas. [Image] de Groux, Henri. The Assault, Verdun. (2008). In The Bridgeman Art Library Archive. Retrieved

with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/bridgeart/the_assault_verdun

Narrator: George Grosz (1893-1959) was a Dadaist who was conscripted into the German Army. In his book Autobiography of George Grosz (1955), he wrote:

What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded? I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it. I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them. I stood up as best I could to their disgusting stupidity and brutality, but I did not, of course, manage to beat them at their own game. It was a fight to the bitter end, one in which I was not defending ideals or beliefs but simply my own self.

Slide 12 Slide Content: Pyotr Pavlovich Karyagin, The Russian Infantry Attacking the German Entrenchments, 1918, State Central Artillery Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. [Image] The Russian Infantry Attacking the German Entrenchments, 1918. (2008). In The Bridgeman Art

Library Archive. Retrieved from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/bridgeart/the_russian_infantry_attacking_the_germ an_entrenchments_1918

Narrator: The experience of war was so overwhelming that Grosz tried to commit suicide, was discharged from the army and sent to a mental hospital. Grosz again: “I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either. Peace was declared, but not all of us were drunk with joy or stricken blind. Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great German army had disintegrated.” Slide 13 Slide Content: Francois Flameng, Infantrymen in a Trench, Notre-Dame de Lorette, 1915, Musee de l'Armee, Paris, France. [Image] Infantrymen in a Trench, Notre-Dame de Lorette, 1915. (2008). In The Bridgeman Art Library

Archive. Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/bridgeart/infantrymen_in_a_trench_notre_dame_d e_lorette_1915

Narrator: At the Front it was hardly possible to create much in the way of art. From the average man in the field we usually have only quick sketches and illegal photographs taken with Brownie Kodak cameras sent from home.

Slide 14 Slide Content: [Image] Schiele, Egon. Self-Portrait Nude, 1911. In The Bridgeman Art Library Archive. From Stokstad

Digital Library. Reprinted with permission Pearson Education/Prentice Hall. Narrator: From time to time, we have unusual cases like that of Egon Schiele whose commanders, respecting his artistic talent, kept him away from the frontline. By far however, most of the images of war were produced by commissioned war artists, both in painting and in photography. Slide 15 Slide Content: [Image] Poster for an Exhibition of Nash’s War Paintings (E.2321) 1918, Victoria and Albert Museum,

London. Retrieved from http://collections.vam.ac.uk Narrator: While on leave to recuperate from injuries sustained on the Western Front, Paul Nash’s (1889-1946) artistic talent for capturing life in the trenches was discovered. Charles Masterman, head of the British government's War Propaganda Bureau (WPB) enlisted Nash. Nash was an official war artist in both the World War I and II, but he was never the lapdog of the propaganda machine, rather he used his position as an official war artist to bring home the misery and senseless waste of war. This, from a letter he wrote to his wife from the Western Front on November 16, 1917: "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls." Slide 16 Slide Content: [Image] Nevinson. Paths Of Glory (IWM ART 518), 1917, Oil, Imperial War Museum, London. Retrieved

from http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConMediaFile.11457 Narrator: Christopher Richard Nevinson, who was born in the same year as Nash and died in the same year as Nash as well, was also an official war artist, and like his colleague, had a similar disdain for the great men who started the war and who kept it going. One of Nevinson's most famous paintings, Paths of Glory, features the bodies of two dead British soldiers. The title of the painting derives from Thomas Gray’s (1716-1771) poem 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard'. Though this poem was written in the 1700’s, Nevinson and his contemporaries recognized in its lines their own reality. They recognized the hollow ring of words like honor and glory. They recognized this war had devoured men and women who had not yet had a chance to make their mark upon the world and that the world, forever denied these gifts, was a poorer place for that loss.

Slide 17 Slide Content: Content repeated verbatim by narrator Narrator: A few lines from Gray’s ‘Elegy’: …For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share, … The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:- The paths of glory lead but to the grave. ... Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death? Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre: But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Slide 18 Slide Content: [Image] Nevinson. Paths Of Glory (IWM ART 518), 1917, Oil, Imperial War Museum, London. Retrieved

from http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConMediaFile.11457 Narrator: The supposed “paths of glory” led the soldiers in Nevinson’s painting to death in No Man’s Land – hardly the kind of image the War Propaganda Bureau wanted when it recruited

Nevinson. Paths of Glory was censored; meaning Nevinson was not allowed to show the painting. This did not stop him however from exhibiting the painting at Leicester Galleries in 1918; his defiant response to the verdict of censorship was to tape a paper strip across the canvas, inscribed with the word 'censored'. In this act, one can practically hear Nevinson muttering Nash’s curse: “May it burn their lousy souls.” Slide 19 Slide Content: Among the artists who designed World War I camouflage were the cubists Jacques Villon and André Mare. [Image] 1916 Camouflaged Steel Helmet, Imperial War Museum, London. Retrieved from Retrieved

from http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/conMediaFile.68983 Narrator: Perhaps the most unexpected and novel employment of artists in World War I was in the creation of camouflage. It became apparent early in the war that bright uniforms made excellent targets. If one was to survive the war, invisibility would be necessary. The military called on artists, with their nuanced understanding of visual elements, to create trompe l’oiel effects that could fool the enemy. Among the artists who designed World War I camouflage were the cubists Jacques Villon and André Mare. Slide 20 Slide Content: [Image] Picasso. Ma Jolie, 1911-12. Retrieved from Retrieved from

http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/conMediaFile.68983 Narrator: The cubists, whose special expertise lay in showing objects from multiple perspectives which confuse and disorient the eye, recognized parallels to their work in camouflage. When Picasso saw a camouflaged tank on the streets of Paris, his friend and patron Gertrude Stein reported, "Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. ‘It is we that have created that,’ he said. And he was right, he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that." Slide 21 Slide Content: Max Ernst with Here Everything Is Still Floating (1920), photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1965. After serving in World War I, Ernst became the leader of the Dada movement in Cologne (1919), working in collage and photomontage. [Image] Ernst, Max. (2006). In Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Retrieved with permission from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/ebconcise/ernst_max

Narrator: From the madness and waste of the Great War and the fragmented vision of Cubism, the “art style” Dada was created. It is something of a misnomer to refer to Dada as an art style simply because the Dadaists were vehemently opposed to structure of any kind. As artist George Grosz wrote, “In those days (after the First World War) we were all Dadaists. If the word meant anything at all, it meant seething discontent, dissatisfaction and cynicism.” Slide 22 Slide Content: “The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”

-Remarque [Image] John Heartfield (1891–1968), Fathers and Sons, 1924, gelatin silver print of photomontage,

Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung. Copyright ©2009 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Retrieved with permission from http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/foto/fullscreen/flash_6.shtm

Narrator: This “seething discontent, dissatisfaction and cynicism” arose because the men who had served time in the trenches knew they had been lied to by their leaders about the causes and nature of the war and the cost and duration of the war. It’s useful at this juncture to read a few paragraphs from Chapter 1 of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front:

During drill-time Kantorek [a school teacher] gave us long lectures until the whole of our class went under his shepherding to the District Commandant and volunteered. I can see him now, as he used to glare at us through his spectacles and say in a moving voice: 'Won't you join up, Comrades?' These teachers always carry their feelings ready in their waistcoat pockets, and fetch them out at any hour of the day. But we didn't think of that then. ...[A]t that time even one's parents were ready with the word 'coward'; no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas people who were better off were beside themselves with joy, though they should have been much better able to judge what the consequences would be… Naturally we couldn't blame Kantorek for this. Where would the world be if one brought every man to book. There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best – in a way that cost them nothing. And that is just why they let us down so badly. For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They

surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards - they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from the true, we had suddenly learned to see. We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.

There is amongst the lost generation a palpable sense of betrayal. No where is this righteous indignation seen more than in the work of the Dadaists. Using Cubism as a visual platform, Dada launched a heated rejection of all the traditions and beliefs that led to the war and the destruction of so many lives. Grosz noted that the Dadaists who gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, “held meetings, charged a few marks admission and did nothing but tell people the truth, that is, abuse them.” The Dadaists created collages and paintings made up of wounded men and the pompous bourgeois fatcats who led the world into war. Their landscapes and cityscapes appear as fragmented shards where nothing is quite right and corruption lurks in every corner. Of his work at this time, Grosz wrote: “I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crab-like limbs of steel; two medical orderlies tying a violent infantryman up in a horse blanket; a one- armed soldier using his good hand to salute a heavily bemedalled lady who had just passed him a biscuit; a colonel, his fly wide open, embracing a nurse; a hospital orderly emptying a bucket full of pieces of human flesh down a pit.” Slide 23 Slide Content: In this painting, Hartley memorializes his close friend Karl von Freyburg, a young cavalry officer who had recently been killed in action: K.v.F. are his initials, 4 was his regiment number, and 24 his age. [Image] Hartley, Marsden. Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

From Stokstad Digital Library. Reprinted with permission Pearson Education/Prentice Hall.

Narrator: Reflecting on this period, poet Philip Larken in his poem MCMXIV wrote there shall never be “such innocence again.” In order to endure a world capable of devouring its young not just in the thousands, but in the millions, the Lost Generation would have to find a new language, a new expression, to fit this new world. Be they Dadaists or Suprematists, Surrealists or Constructivists, the artistic languages expressing the horror of war and this generation’s shell-shocked vision of the future vary widely. However, they do share at least one commonality: art from this point onward becomes more abstract. In 1915, the painter Paul Klee offered an explanation for this; he said, “The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.” As you study the material in Module 2, keep this quote in mind and decide if you think this is why abstraction becomes so prevalent in the arts.

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