CHOICE 1 Representations of the horrors of war have been depicted through abstra

Question

CHOICE 1
Representations of the horrors of war have been depicted through abstraction as well as realism.
Choose one of the following. Write two paragraphs; compare and contrast:
a) Picasso's Guernica, with Adams' photograph, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executing the suspected leader of a Vietcong commando unit.
b) O'Sullivan's Harvest of Death, see module 11.4, and Red Horse's Battle of Little Big Horn
c) Felix W. Weldon's USA Marine Corps War Memorial and Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial


INCLUDE IN YOUR COMPARE AND CONTRAST:
1) Describe the form and how it relates to the content
2) Discuss how the content relates to the theme of representations of the horrors of war, if you choose "a" or "b", or memorializing war if you choose "c".
3) Discuss the style of abstraction or realism in relation to the effect each image has on you.

CHOICE 2

The use of photography and film in the 19th and 20th centuries brought a greater level of realism to images of the horrors of war.  Felix W. Weldon's "USA Marine Corps War Memorial"  is a war memorial meant to invoke the reality of the moment of the Marines proclaiming victory at Iwo Jima during WWII as well as commemorate that victory. Weldon's sculpture depicts realistic figures based on a photograph taken during the war.  The photograph, taken by Joe Rosenthal for the Associated Press, has been the subject of controversy; since many believe that he re-staged the event of raising the flag with soldiers, some of whom were not directly involved in the battle or in raising the flag on the first day. It is important to realize that art which represents war is often made for impact and may not always be truthful. Therefore, the manipulation of the viewer to think and feel certain things should be part of your analysis of the meaning of photographic images.

Write two paragraphs discussing how Weldon's sculpture impacts you.

a) What formal elements and principles of design are being used to cause the viewer to think/feel in a certain way regarding this sculpture.

b) Include in your analysis how knowing that Weldon might have "staged" this photograph of war impacts the way you think about the authenticity of the moment depicted in the memorial.

c) Does this knowledge change the meaning of the work or the way you think/feel about it?

Explanation / Answer

Compare and contrast of Picasso's Guernica, with Adams' photograph, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executing the suspected leader of a Vietcong commando unit.
Paris’s International Exposition des Arts et Techniques Modernes was scheduled to open in May 1937 and, with only a month to go, Pablo Picasso hadn’t got started on his contribution. He had agreed to do a gigantic painting for the Spanish pavilion — right next door to Albert Speer’s monstrous Nazi tower — to showcase contemporary Spanish art and boost international support for the Republican government’s struggle against Franco and his supporters Hitler and Mussolini. Until now, Picasso’s work had focused on the meeting space between the private and the mythic: portraits and nudes, wine bottles and guitars, the Harlequin, the whore, the matador, the Minotaur. Then, on April 26, a squadron of Nazi warplanes carpet-bombed the Basque market town of Guernica, largely destroying it and killing many civilians. Picasso had his subject. Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles.
To mark Guernica’s 80th anniversary, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid has mounted Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica, an exhibition exploring the painting’s artistic roots. In the first room, you hear the voice of Picasso’s friend Paul Éluard intoning his own protest poem “La Victoire de Guernica”, with a flickering film-loop of the destruction. There is a model of the Spanish pavilion itself, a modest example of Corbusian architecture, where Picasso’s work would appear alongside art by Miró, Calder and other modernists. Nearby a case displays a selection of early responses to Picasso’s painting. This show’s curators TJ Clark and Anne M Wagner — the team previously behind Tate Britain’s 2013 excellent exhibition Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life — trace the genesis of “Guernica” to Picasso’s engagement with the grotesque and the monstrous, which had immediately followed his so-called Neoclassical period, the joyful and positive post-Cubist phase in which the artist moved significantly back towards naturalism. Around 1925, his old experiments in rupturing the visual field began to re-emerge, but in the looser form. Quantities of still lifes and nude female studies were painted in this new-style Cubism, but they are markedly more pessimistic about human existence and increasingly brutal in manner. Dominating the first section of the show is Tate Modern’s greatest Picasso, “Les Trois Danseuses” of 1925, which curators Clark and Wagner take as the first stirring of the tendency. The dancers were followed by a series of ever more ferocious and rebarbative images, deconstructing (mostly female) bodies and the spaces they occupy: out of doors, swimmers, sunbathers, and populations are radically dismembered, while the features of studio sitters — with the furniture, fixtures, and fittings around them — are similarly monsterised. Picasso’s encounter with surrealism had much to do with his spearpoint tongues, trap-like vaginas, and other body parts that corkscrew, stretch and wrench away from each other. All this serves as background to Picasso’s representation of terror in “Guernica”. But the other half of this show’s title is “pity”, and there is very little of that quality in these works predating “Guernica”. A bright, sanguinary red — just the shade of the matador’s cloak, the muleta — creeps into the palette, particularly in still lifes and female nudes, but in “Guernica” he seemed determined to avoid crowd-pleasing gestures, completing the work in the familiar grim near-monochrome. Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles.
The great work itself, occupying the central position in the show, is accompanied by a small selection of Picasso’s extensive preparatory sketches. One sketch of the bereaved mother even suggests what a colored Guernica might have looked like, playing in vivid crayon with the (later discarded) idea of having her struggling up a ladder, carrying her dead child. Another sketch renders the agonized horse with its head not thrust upwards but bowed down. So we see the artist trying out ways to modify and repurpose his earlier experiments in distortion: what had been virtually sadistic now becomes pitiable. The concentrated effort to convey pity over terror did not quickly leave Picasso and now he painted and drew a series of “post-scripts” on the theme of the wailing mother — an interest that culminated in Tate’s “Weeping Woman” (1937). This is not in the show, but an array of others are, their mouths contorted and tears appearing to swing from their eyes on threads. The outright butchery of the pre-Guernica period never returned. There is a certain want of historical context in this show, particularly information on the doubtful critical response to the unveiling of “Guernica”. But the focus is firmly on the creative story, following the idea once floated by Picasso himself when he remarked that “it would be interesting to discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream”. If Picasso dreamt of creating an anti-war picture for the ages, Clark and Wagner have gone some way to show how he did it.

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