Art & War

In this Bloutcher

• Announcements
• Art and War; and a Gentler Order of Feeling
  

Announcements:

• If you are in the Boston area, please join me at the Newton Public Library on September 13th, 7 pm, for an Author's Talk and book signing. I will be discussing Becoming a Life Change Artist; 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life. Get there a little early because I will have a special guest handing out some special goodies! Thank you to Discovering What's Next and the Newton Public Library for sponsoring this event.

• Anyone who cares about creativity and its importance in American life and business should check out the article in Newsweek that appeared a few weeks ago: The Creativity Crisis. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html. It's time to take this seriously. At the very same time that this article is sounding the alarm, the 2010 IBM CEO Study shows that CEOs identify creativity as the number one need in business leaders.
  

Art and War

All the recent news about combat troops leaving Iraq and the ongoing concerns about Afghanistan brings up for me the very strange relationship between Art and War.

For one thing artists such as Picasso have been credited with introducing camouflage into modern warfare. Now that's a strange footnote to military history! And Leonardo Da Vinci was the man who both painted the Mona Lisa AND invented prototypes of war machines such as the tank.









Leonardo's Tank


WWI Camouflaged Boat


But for me the most compelling story about art and war relates to a lesser known but remarkable French sculptor and artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

At the beginning of the last century he was unknown in his native France but hung out in London with some of the artistic greats such as Jacob Epstein and Ezra Pound. By the time he enlisted in the French army at the age of 22 at the outset of WWI he had already produced over 120 sculptures and 2000 works on paper including pastels.

Gaudier-Brzeska sent several letters from the front in which he describes the day to day scene around him. "Human masses teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again. Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside. Dogs wander, are destroyed and others come along. The bursting shells, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle do not alter in the least the outlines of the hill we are beseiging." Trench warfare was brutal, often fought hand to hand. Corpses laid in the wasteland between the two encampments.

At one point Gaudier-Brzeska wrestles a mauser from a dead German soldier and takes it back to his trench during a break in the battle. In a letter he reflects: "It's heavy unwieldy shape swamped me with a powerful image of brutality. I was in doubt for a long time whether it pleased or displeased me. I found I did not like it. I broke the butt off and with my knife I carved in it a design, with which I tried to express a gentler order of feeling which I preferred."

In the midst of this horrific devastation the young Gaudier-Brzeska finds it within himself to reconfigure a weapon of killing into a "gentler" form.

Two months after he sent this letter, Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in battle. He was 23 years old.

Art and War. Artist and Soldier. Creator of life and Destroyer of life. How do you explain this side by side capacity for brutality and gentelness? Where does it come from? These opposites contained within us?

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