Véronique Plesch – Bearing Witness

Visual art does not—and cannot—exist in a vacuum. Even the most escapist of paintings can be seen as a response to circumstances, an emphatic refusal to engage with unpleasant, challenging, or distressing realities. As I reflect upon this issue’s theme and the times we live in, some of the works of art I regularly engage with in my classes take on heightened resonance.

Käthe Kollwitz’s March of the Weavers is the fourth in a series of six etchings titled Ein Weberaufstand (A Weavers’ Revolt). The prints are loosely based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 play The Weavers, which recounts a rebellion of cotton workers that took place in 1844 in the region known as Silesia (now mostly in Poland). We see the weavers marching to their employer’s house to make their demands known (the next print is titled Storming the Owner’s House). The stream of people advances, from left to right, against the backdrop of a bleak landscape. On either side, figures are cut, suggesting that the crowd extends beyond the picture’s confines. Except for a woman who carries on her back a sleeping child, all the figures are male, and they all possess poignantly gaunt features.

The horizon line is visible on the right two thirds of the composition and is reinforced by a thick and black edge. Its strong rendition ensures that the viewer, who at first might have been tempted to perceive the crowd as simply progressing from left to right, notices that it is in fact moving slightly diagonally. The image is thus endowed with a downward and somber thrust, echoed by the figures’ body language, their hunched over poses suggesting exhaustion, further enhanced by the dark horizon that seems to weigh over them.

At the time, Kollwitz was working on a series of prints based on Émile Zola’s Germinal, which recounts a strike of Northern French coal miners (not coincidentally, Zola’s novel is thought to have inspired Hauptmann). Upon attending the premiere of Die Weber in Berlin on 26 February 1893, Kollwitz wrote in her diary that it was “a great event” and “a milestone” for her work as she immediately set to work on The Weavers, abandoning the Germinal series. The premiere of Die Weber was held as a private performance for the members of the subscription-based theatre club Die Freie Bühne (The Free Stage) because of the play’s subversive content, with barely veiled references to the famine that had befallen Silesian weavers in 1891–92. Köllwitz’s print series was similarly seen as critical of the government but was received to great acclaim by the artworld. Although concerning events that took place half a century earlier, A Weavers’ Revolt, as in so many of her works, addresses the plight of the downtrodden in her own day. March of the Weaver’s simple and powerful composition affectingly renders the workers’ determination. The viewer feels physically and emotionally close to them: notice how the woman and the man who walks in front of her are cut by the plate’s lower edge. As beholders we become bystanders, as if standing right by the demonstrating weavers, observing them shouting their demands, raising fists, holding pickaxes and mallets. Will we join them? Will we support their demands? Will we feel compassion for the mother and child?

In Goya’s depiction of the events that took place on 3 May 1808 in Madrid, the artist and thus the viewer similarly stand very close to the protagonists. We are made to witness a brutal execution by firing squad of Spaniards who had revolted against the Napoleonic troops during the Dos de Mayo uprising. Goya had to wait until 1814, when the French were driven out and King Ferdinand of Spain restored to the throne, to capture the dramatic event. Seven faceless soldiers are tightly lined up, impersonal extensions of their bayonets—they are a killing machine. The French soldiers are opposed to the Spaniards being executed, who are endowed with highly individual features. Several rebels already lie dead on the floor, blood pooling under their corpses, while many more are about to be shot. Among them is a man who is heavily lit by a lantern placed in front of the squad, a friar crouching next to him. As the man stretches his arms in a gesture that reminds the viewer of Christ on the cross, he becomes a national martyr (he even appears to bear stigmata on his hands).

This was not the only work that Goya created to memorialize Spanish suffering during the French occupation, for he also dedicated to it a series of prints, posthumously published in 1863 as Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), but which he referred to as Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfaticos (The Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte. And Other Emphatic Caprices). Goya worked at this extensive series between 1810 and 1820, creating a total of eighty-two prints in which he combined etching (and aquatint) with engraving and drypoint. We witness blood-chilling wartime atrocities, such as executions, rape, and famine. As in El tres de mayo, we are made to understand that the victims are not just individual soldiers and civilians, but the country itself, the dismembered bodies standing for the torn and mutilated body politic. In the end, the series is an unforgiving indictment of the Bourbons and the Church and of their assault on Enlightenment values such as morality and truth.

It is well known that Goya was at once drawing inspiration from and paying homage to an illustrious predecessor: early 17th-century printmaker Jacques Callot. Not only did Callot play a major role in perfecting etching (1), the very process Goya used so masterfully, but he too created a series on the horrors of wartime. Les Misères et les Malheurs de la guerre (The Miseries and Misfortunes of War) is a set of eighteen etchings that was issued as the European conflict known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was raging and Callot’s native Duchy of Lorraine was being occupied by the French troops (2). Starting with soldiers being drafted and a battle scene, the series includes an inn being raided by troops, and houses, monasteries, and villages being looted and burned down. We see executions by hanging, firing squad, burning at the stake, and on the breaking wheel. Eventually, war ends, with soldiers in hospitals or left to beg or to die in the streets. The series culminates in peasants fighting back and a ruler dispensing rewards.

In the fifth plate, we see soldiers ransacking a house. As in each of the sixteen other scenes, six verses accompany the image. This plate’s text starts with an ironic declaration: “Here are the fine exploits of these inhuman hearts” and goes on to list theft, kidnapping, murder, and rape. Although Callot inspired Goya, his overarching message is very different; the scenes of execution, for instance, are presented as the right retribution for crimes committed. On plate eleven, “infamous thieves” hang from a tree “like unfortunate fruits,” the rhyming couplets concluding: “that is the fate of the vicious men/ To receive, soon or late, heavenly justice.” Although traditionally interpreted as a realistic rendition of the invasion of Callot’s native Lorraine and therefore conveying anti-French messages, the fact is that the series was published with a royal privilege from King Louis XIII of France. Furthermore, it would be anachronistic to imagine that Callot’s purpose is to promote anti-war sentiments. Instead, as Katie Hornstein convincingly argues, in a time when war was a constant reality, the prints depict “war-related violence as a problem concerning diverse groups of the community, from a constantly changing relativistic perspective, without making absolute assessments of guilt.”

Just like Callot, Picasso avoided a documentary approach when he painted Guernica. But unlike his 17th-century counterpart, he was responding to a very specific event: the bombing during the Spanish Civil War of a Basque town on 26 April 1937 by planes from the Nazi Luftwaffe. In this profoundly personal response to the killing of thousands of civilians on a market day, Picasso eschewed a factual rendition of the heinous attack (we don’t see planes, for instance) or any kind of obvious symbolism. Instead, the artist dug into his personal repertory (see for instance the horse and bull, motifs that often appear in his bullfighting images). At the same time, the painting’s palette, restricted to black and white, resembles newsprint and alludes to the fact that Picasso learned about the bombing through newspapers such as the communist daily L’Humanité. Despite the absence of any overt iconography to refer to the actual event, the title leaves no doubt and when it was displayed at the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the International Exposition in Paris, inaugurated a few months later in July of that year, it was meant as a political gesture.

The bombing of Guernica occurred in the years immediately preceding the Second World War; just a few decades earlier, the First World War had resulted in an unprecedented number of casualties (over eight million soldiers and an even higher number of civilians). We are all familiar with the monuments to the soldiers fallen during the “Great War” that grace so many localities, such as the one I photographed in 2014 in a village in the Scottish Highlands (which explains why the soldier sports a kilt!). War monuments celebrate dead soldiers and the inscription on this one declares that it was erected “in grateful remembrance of the men from this parish who gave their lives for king and country in the great war.” But what about all the soldiers who survived but were forever disfigured by shrapnel in the trenches and were called in French “les gueules casssées”—the broken mugs? And what about those whose psychological wounds were invisible?

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the founders of the German avant-garde movement Die Brücke, enlisted in 1915 as an “unwilling volunteer,” but soon experienced a physical and mental breakdown. This self-portrait was painted when he was back in Berlin, before being sent to a sanatorium. A cigarette dangling from his mouth, still wearing the military uniform of the 75th Artillery Regiment (as we can see in his epaulettes), the artist is in his studio as is suggested by the presence of a naked figure behind him (it could either be a live model or painted on a canvas). Kirchner’s eyes are vacuous dark blue pools, a powerful visual rendition of what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and at the time was known as “shellshock” (3). Kirchner represented himself bust length, turned three-quarters; he holds his right arm bent in front of him to ensure that the viewer sees that his painting hand is missing, cut at the wrist. Although the artist was not injured in the war, this gory detail conveys how the experience mutilated his creativity. This is someone bearing witness to the horrific effects of the “Great War”—not only physical, but also, and most importantly, psychological. The stump is placed at the center of the composition’s lower edge, the closest to the viewer: while the artist denies us emotional connection, he thrusts into our consciousness the mutilated limb. The impact of the painting and what it says about the disastrous effects of war was not lost on the Nazis, who included it in the 1937 exhibition of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art; first in Munich and then traveling to other German cities in 1937 and 1938). In these infamous shows, this self-portrait hung along other works by Kirchner, accompanied by wall texts that read “Deliberate sabotage of national defense” and “An insult to the German heroes of the Great War.”

Many of the depictions I included in this essay display harsh realities, refusing any triumphalist iconography, focusing instead on the lived experience of those who might be forgotten as their sheer presence contradicts propagandistic messages. For many of these artists, that is their role, perhaps even their responsibility: to expose this reality, and to do so in such a manner that the viewer cannot remain indifferent.

 

Notes

1. Callot improved etching ground by adapting recipes from the varnishes used by luthiers.
2. The set is often referred to as Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (The Great Miseries of War) to distinguish it from another series on that subject, in a smaller format.
3. It should be noted that the terms “war neuroses” and “traumatic neuroses” were discussed at a symposium held in the context of the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Budapest. Not surprisingly, the meeting took place in September 1918, just a few weeks before the armistice was signed on 11 November and World War I officially ended. Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel, and Ernest Jones presented papers on the subject of war neuroses, which were published in 1921 and can be consulted here.

 

References

Kollwitz, Käthe. Diary and Letters. Ed. Hans Kollwitz, transl. Richard and Clara Winston. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955; 42.

Hornstein, Katie. “Just Violence: Jacques Callot’s Grandes Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre.” University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology Bulletin 16 (2005): 29–48. Quote on p. 45.

“Self-Portrait as a Soldier.” Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.