Since
the vivid horrors that flooded American living rooms during television coverage
of the Viet Nam war, we have been shielded from graphic images of war and its
victims in-and-out of uniform. Perhaps
if looking at the day-to-day dying during war returned to our sanitized
television sets, with its mud and its senseless carnage, there would be fewer
armed conflicts. Certainly American
citizens would be less willing to allow our elected leaders to engage in
mechanized manslaughter.
First-hand
accounts of the Great War started early.
Because of an increased literacy among the rising middle class, more and
more books and newspaper accounts were available, bringing the realities of the
conflict into stark relief. Following is
an account by Fernand Léger about the siege of Verdun, penned on November 7th
1916: I climbed up to the top of the gully I am in. Behind me was Fleury, and
in front of me Vaux and Douaumont. I could see out over an area of ten square
kilometres that had been turned into a uniform desert of brown earth. The men
were all so tiny and lost in it that I could hardly see them. A shell fell in
the midst of these little things, which moved for a moment, carrying off the
wounded - the dead, as unimportant as so many ants, were left behind. They were
no bigger than ants down there. The artillery dominates everything. A
formidable, intelligent weapon, striking everywhere with such desperate
consistency.
Leroux
painted Hell (L’Enfer) in 1921, and
it can currently be seen in the Imperial
War Museum. The picture represents
the experience of serving on the Western Front – where war became
industrialized. The picture was probably
inspired by the 1916 battles in defense of Verdun. The French Army lost nearly half a million
men between February and December 1916 repelling repeated German attacks. Staggering casualties occurred on both sides,
but the face of warfare changed from hand to hand combat to high-tech artillery
bombardments.
Leroux
frames the grotesque image with an arch of brown smoke (created, no doubt, by
the background fires). The landscape is
littered with corpses and with blasted trees; there is no life or vegetation on
view, and it almost seems as if the earth were coughing up corpses.
A mud
hole is filled with dead or dying men, and others trying to escape. Taken out of its Great War context, and it
could easily serve as an illustration of the Biblical Hell. Leroux consciously draws on centuries
artistic depictions of hell to tell his story; the picture quakes with echoes
of Dante and Bosch. The fires, which
serve to maximize our attention on foreground figures, also highlight several
blasted trees that almost look like ruined crosses. Here, Leroux says, there is no hope for
salvation.
In
yesterday’s painting, In Eparges, 1915,
Leroux showed us the face of an everyman finding repose in death; here we do
not even have the solace of the grave.
Tomorrow
– a beautiful picture from Leroux’s long-term love affair with Italy.
No comments:
Post a Comment