Art during war time

Great ‘war art’ transcends its historical borders and has a universal appeal. When this genre of art confines itself to depicting the glory of the conquerors, it descends to the level of becoming a paean to the powerful, opines Vijayan Kannampilly

ART and war rarely go together, though artists have depicted both the bloody passion of the battlefield and the numbing horrors suffered by the victors and the vanquished. As opposed to this general rule, we also have the recent example of a war exhibition in Delhi, where the participating artists decided to give 50 per cent of their sales proceeds to strengthen the war effort; that is, 17 per cent more than what they would have normally given to an art gallery.

An example of art at the service of war, as triumph and not tragedy, is the Siege of Chittor painted by the artists, Bhura and Sarwan, for Akbarnama. Though the miniatures are of great artistic merit, they do not convey anything at all about what Bhura and Sarwan actually felt about the bloodletting which they were witnesses to. Perhaps, like true loyalists they saw the carnage before their eyes as a just battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, between ‘us’ and ‘them’ where, to use a modern euphemism, we ‘lose our lives’ and they ‘get killed’ the first invests death with the grace of humanity, the second is the fate reserved for insects.

This is not to say that there are no just wars. In modern history the war against fascism is an example of a war which had to be fought and was for the sake of the greater good. Over half-a-century later, a painting of that period which still speaks to us is Picasso’s Guernica.

Great ‘war art’ (if that is the appropriate description) transcends its historical borders and has a universal appeal. When this genre of art confines itself to depicting the glory of the conquerors, it descends to the level of becoming a paean to the powerful. The truly great examples of war art avoid this pitfall of propaganda because the artistic sensibilities of their creators spring from the soil of their humanity which, Wilfred Owen expressed so well in his poem, Strange Meeting "I am the enemy you killed, my friend."

In art nothing exemplifies this humanity so well as the set of 82 prints, the Disasters of War, drawn and engraved by Goya between 1810-1820 and published 35 years after his death.

Goya’s Spain was a land ravaged by an obscurantist clergy wielding the weapon of the Inquisition to silence all free thinking and a reactionary, repressive feudal nobility feeding off the people, the opposition to this came from a small group known as the ‘llustrados’ who drew their inspiration and values from the French Enlightenment — the ideology which ultimately gave birth to the great French Revolution. Goya gravitated towards the Ilustrados.

While these measures won the support of the Ilustrados who had worked tirelessly for these very aims, the mass of the Spanish people did not see things this way. Hurt national pride, the atrocities committed by the French army, and the political manipulations of the ‘born-again nationalists’ combined to form an explosive mix. War broke out and the word ‘guerrilla’ from Spanish entered all languages.

The very brief history given above is essential to understand the Disasters of War. At the centre of it there is a paradox. On the one hand, it is done by an artist who was ideologically closer to the foreign rulers rather than the native ones. On the other, while Goya may not have been a ‘nationalist’ as we understand this debased term today, he was certainly one of the first great painters who was visually moved by ordinary people and invested glory, through outstanding works of art, on the humdrum of their everyday life. By the ‘logic’ of his emotional ties Goya should have been an avid supporter of the people’s war against French rule, while his ideology should have made him view the war as an attack on enlightenment.

In the Disasters of War Goya does not see the issue in these terms of black or white. He depicts a truth which is fundamental, and which is, therefore, unpalatable to the partisans on both sides. Using black and white Goya defines a world of grey where only bestiality equates the violence of the oppressor and the revenge of the oppressed, with the only truth being the word ‘nada’ (nothing), scrawled on a tablet by a corpse.

In Goya’s eyes wars do not have victors and vanquished; only victims. His art did not have room for 17 per cent patriotism.