Visual Representations of Violence in the Visual Arts

Transcription

1 Visual Representations of Violence in the Visual Arts Pei-ying Wu This paper is concerned with the visual representations of violence in three paintings: Paolo Uccello s The Battle of San Romano ( ), Francisco Goya s The Execution of the Rebels on 3rd May 1808 (1814), and Pablo Picasso s Guernica (1937). The analysis focuses on how the perpetrated violence on the battlefield is represented in painting. Images of violence in the past have always been created with specific aims and functions connected to the representation of power by the artist employed either by the State, Church or both. Uccello s The Battle of San Romano was commissioned by the Bartolini Salimbeni family as a state bedroom decoration, created mainly for the family to flaunt its victory over its arch-rival, Siena. The Battle of San Romano was painted in At that time the conduct of war was mainly a human affair with the interaction of individual soldiery with occasional feats of military engineering. The artist was not present on the battlefield but, six years after the event, Uccello was commissioned to paint three panels to commemorate the victory. He chose to do so as if it were a theatrical performance. Image 1 Title: The Battle of San Romano, Date: , Artist: Paolo Uccello (about ), Materials: Egg tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar, Size: x 320 cm, Location: National Gallery, London.

2 2 Visual Representations of Violence in the Visual Arts The painting [see Image 1] is presented as if through a proscenium with a number of theatrical stage devices, particularly swords and spears placed on the floor in a grid order. Actors, on the front stage are pretending to fight; it looks as if they might only be allowed horizontal movement on the stage; they seem to fight in slow motion for the convenience of the audience. The landscape backdrop of fighting outside the village is painted scenery flats and drop curtains. Although there are many soldiers on the stage (or on the canvas), no more than five people are viewed in action. This is a typical editorial technique when a splendid arrangement of scenery is needed but the stage space is limited, so the director would call actors to be placed on the periphery of the stage but leave one major pair fighting in the centre of the stage and the other pairs acting at the rear. The fighting was painted as a stylised theatrical performance while the confrontation is depicted in the form of a ritual duel. There are neither real perpetrators nor real victims. When machine power such as firearms in the form of muskets and cannon, began to be introduced in the early fourteenth century, the number of men who had opposed each other had rapidly grown but the battle remained very much what it had always been: a question of men standing up, at a certain carefully defined time and space (battles tended to be over in a few hours and seldom took up more than a few square kilometers), in relatively tight formations and fighting one another in full view of the other. 1 However, by the early nineteenth century the state of battle did not alter in a visual way to any great extent. With the developing technology of warfare and the impact of industrialization, the State began to develop systems to train civilians as combatants. With the imperial impulses of sovereign nations, each aware of its own identity, in the nineteenth century professional armies became more organized, and needed images to demonstrate their expertise and power. However, after 1790, a new concentration on the predicament and feelings of the Individual began to emerge, resulting in a new concept of human predicament the Victim. The glory of victory was no longer the only remembrance of war; certain individuals and power groupings started to commemorate the death of the anonymous heroes. This provides a different understanding of violence in this period and also changed artists perspectives of what was to be painted. Commissioned by the Spanish monarchy 2, The Execution of the Rebels on 3rd May 1808 (painted in 1814) was created as a protest against the Napoleonic occupation of Madrid, in which Goya created a visual emphasis on the dynamics of being a victim represented with understanding and sensitivity.

3 Pei-ying Wu 3 Image 2 Title: Execution of the Rebels on 3rd May 1808, Date: 1814, Artist: Francisco José de Goya ( ), Materials: Oil on canvas, Size: 345 x 266 cm, Location: Museo del Prado, Madrid. In Goya s painting [see Image 2], the focus is on the white shirted victim, whose arms signify helplessness, upheld in a posture of a Crucifixion. The image depicts the appalling moment of being shot by a French firing squad. In the eyes of the white shirted victim, we cannot see his fear of death or anger or emotion to the perpetrators. He is transfixed on his feet without motion, while the surrounding crowd s gestures indicate that they fear their own deaths. These victims reactions to their imminent death are depicted in detail: Almost everyone is kneeling down or cannot bear to stand. One with red trousers coming towards the guns covers his face with his hands to prevent seeing the action of execution. His reaction is that he doesn t want to believe this truth but there is no way to escape. Behind him is another person wearing white dress who appears as if he is about to faint.

4 4 Visual Representations of Violence in the Visual Arts Further back, behind the person in white, a man is praying. His hand gestures indicate that he is like a child who hopes that there will be someone powerful enough to save him from this nightmare. At the front the priest in the green robe looks down with his fist clenched and seems to be forcing himself to accept the grimness of his destiny. A body lies on the ground in a pool of blood. It seems to be a representation of a relaxed, sleeping man or a man who is tired of pleading. Another man next to the white shirted victim looks up to the dark sky with his fist gripped up to the air, searching for the answer of what he is facing and hoping to see a glimmer of God s salvation. Behind him is another, who is so stricken with fear that he hides behind in sorrow. One, further back, is retreating on to the hill with both hands covering his face. These three figures are like the three stages of facing death, the first one is searching for explanations and trying to find some hope to be saved, when there is no hope left, another is sad and hopeless, and for the third, life is no more than a distant shadow. In contrast to the particularly vivid detailed depiction of the victims, the portraiture of the perpetrators is in a form of a geometrical firing line. Their faces are hidden, their guns are in a horizontal position and they are represented as mechanical killing machines. Are they men or machines? When the event happened, Goya was in Madrid. He had witnessed the cruelty and bloody conflagration of violence in war. Goya recorded the horrors of war and his hatred of violence in his drawings and etchings, which later were to be published as The Disasters of the War in 1863, almost forty years after his death. He had deep empathy with the victims, a point of view exemplified in this painting. Although we see the exercise of power, the representations of its victims are particularly memorable in his composition. Now to the last of the three examples. In Pablo Picasso s Guernica (1937) [see Image 3], the canvas is dedicated to the cause of the victims. There are no obvious perpetrators in the painting; nor do the bombers and bombs appear in the composition. Technology not only changed the means of warfare but also the relationship between perpetrators and victims. The battlefield is constituted in the implied sound of the victims wails and their grief.

5 Pei-ying Wu 5 Image 3 Title: Guernica, Date: 1937, Artist: Pablo Picasso ( ), Materials: oil on canvas, newspaper print, postage stamps and other material. Size: x cm,location: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Within the twentieth century, a new actuality of the representation of violence was created through the mass media, depicting a more humanistic concept of war and its impact. On 26 April 1937, the town of Guernica was deliberately targeted for aerial bombing practice. The bombing of Guernica was one of the earliest such events recorded on the cinema newsreels and was well documented on a daily basis in the world s press. The world that witnessed this was horrified. Picasso was working in Paris when the event happened. He learnt the news through the mass media. At that time he had just accepted a commission from the Spanish Republican government to produce a painting to exhibit in Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of Being a radical and a supporter of the Republican government, he wanted to draw attention to the attempted overthrow of an elected government. Picasso created the painting Guernica as a political statement whilst many of the motifs already existed in his previous works. Completed within two months, the mural immediately became a most successful propaganda image on an international scale. Guernica was displayed in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937, and thereafter, traveled to Scandinavia, England, and London. When the Republican government fell in 1939, Picasso refused to allow this painting to be displayed in Spain until the Spanish people enjoyed public liberties and democratic institutions 3. It therefore stayed on display for many years at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York

6 6 Visual Representations of Violence in the Visual Arts City until Even the United Nations (UN) has a tapestry copy of Guernica, donated by the Nelson Rockefeller estate, displayed in the UN hallway outside its Security Council since The expression of Picasso s abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death 4 has clearly been there as a permanent reminder of civilian experiences of violence in automated war. We can see that the impact of these three paintings is clearly different, viewed from the perspective of the twenty first century. Uccello s painting was only viewed by limited people restricted to the Bartolini Salimbeni family and some associates whereas Goya s painting would have been viewed by a select coterie of the Spanish Court among Spanish aristocrats and other high-ranking citizens in the public domain 5. As for Picasso s painting, the publicity attached and the reproduction produced in the critical press and for sale, has epitomized violence visited upon civilians in modern warfare, and presented through a broad range of media for a consuming public. Also it is possible to see the depiction of the way in which the depiction of violence has changed within these three paintings: from Uccello s theatrical stylised performance where soldiers face soldiers; through Goya s sympathetic image of civilians facing armed soldiers; to the twentieth century, with Picasso s monochromatic symbolic battlefield where the civilians never see the perpetrators. The powers of these images are all effective and influential. To comprehend the reality of violence, one does not need images of blood and brutality torn limbs, viscera and mental suffering. It can be argued that in recent years, we have become desensitised to the waves of images of violence we are asked to consume. Especially in entertainment-based mediums such as TV, films, games and comics, it seems that we forget that in the past the aims and the functions of representing violence in visual forms were clear and sometimes formulaic rather than recreational. We also forget that the victims in today s war are mostly civilians. It is as if the victim, if shown, is somebody else. As the former US Ambassador to Britain Raymond Seitz recalled when, after diplomatic service, he returned to the United States in 1995, he noticed the changes in the way world events were represented on Television News; Things are different now. I remember sitting in a Boston hotel room in 1995 and turning on the CBS Evening News. The United States (and other allies) had just started enforcing the No-Fly Zone in Bosnia. This story led the broadcast. But the screen showed some old file footage of

7 Pei-ying Wu 7 combat jets taking off from an aircraft carrier and a few seconds of those grainy, day-glo, Gulf War images of smart bombs zeroing in on someone s front door. There was a brief gee-whiz voice-over, but no explanation of the significance or context of what was happening in Bosnia, and no thought that American pilots might be killing people on the ground in a distant land. No one was interviewed. As another jet roared into the sky, I felt I was riffling through a Captain Marvel comic book. 6 Image 04 Cover of Comic Book Warlord (London: D.C. Thomson & Co., Ltd. 1984)

8 8 Visual Representations of Violence in the Visual Arts Notes 1 Martin Van Creveld, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (London: Cassell & Co, 2000), The Execution of the Rebel on 3rd May 1808 was commissioned by Cardinal Don Luis María de Borbón, President of the Regency Council, who, in response to a petition of 24 February 1814, awarded Goya 1,500 reales on 9 March 1814 to perpetutate with his brush the most notable and heroic actions or events of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe. 3 David Walsh, UN conceals Picasso s Guernica for Powell s presentation, World s Socialist Web Site, 08 February 2003, (23 June 2004). < 4 In May 1937 Picasso made his position clear in a public statement: "The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? When the rebellion began, the legally elected and democratic republican government of Spain appointed me director of the Prado Museum, a post which I immediately accepted. In the panel on which I am working which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death..." cited in Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), The Execution of the Rebel on 3rd May 1808 had been displayed in the Prado Palace (now a museum) since 1834, which is the earliest recording date of the publicly exhibited. The painting was removed from Madrid in 1936 during the Civil War and sent to Valencia, Barcelona and finally Geneva, suffering some damage in transit. In 1939 the painting was returned to the Prado in Mardrid. 6 Raymond Seitz, Over Here. (London: Phoenix, 1998), 201.