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I still remember going to New York's Museum of Modern Art as a kid and seeing Pablo Picasso's famed painting Guernica -- 11.5 feet tall by 25.5 feet long! -- hanging there. It was an eye-catching apparition, his gigantic 1937 protest against the devastating bombing of the town of Guernica by German planes connected to the forces of Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco. And it was in New York because, for all the obvious reasons, it couldn't be shown in Spain until after Franco, the only fascist winner in what became World War II, finally died in 1975.
A me'lange of devastated or dead humans, a screaming mother holding a dead child, and a bull and a horse in a crisis of their own, all in black, white, and grey, it would prove to be a (even the) classic protest painting and a memory piece for the horrors of war. As a kid, though, fascinated as I was by it, I had next to no idea what to make of it. Just being in that museum amid the other Picassos, Matisses, Van Goghs, and so much else was a strange wonder. And I was looking at a scene from a war that, some years after Picasso painted it and long before I would view it, set the stage for my father's war, World War II. Though he would take me to popular movies about his war in the 1950s -- think John Wayne -- and I assumed that they told me everything I needed to know about his experience, he absolutely refused to talk about what he had experienced.
Still, art and war, how truly strange. It seems as if they shouldn't be in the same room. Well, think again and let TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan take you into her own version of art and war -- of a kind that could someday leave all of us on this planet in a global version of Guernica. Tom
The Art of the Submarine
Or 5,824 Hiroshimas Per Sub
Walk through any art museum and you're likely to see a mix of the classical and contemporary, impressionist and surrealist, refined and raw, beautiful, eerie, and provocative. Looking at art allows me at least a few moments of relief from the "that's just the way it is" attitude of our hyper-consumerist, hyper-militarized, hyper-nihilist nation. I can step outside my day-to-day life and accept an invitation, however briefly, to boundlessness! I can experience invention, creation, and re-creation just moments apart. I can see everyday objects with new eyes as they're repurposed and reframed in extraordinary ways. I can celebrate the relentless power of human vision and imagination. In a museum, I often find that I can actually breathe.
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, where I live, has one floor for its permanent collection, with works from the 1600s to perhaps a decade ago, a mixture of famous names and those that are (at least to me) obscure indeed. That collection on the first floor remains the same, year in and year out, while new exhibits circulate through the upstairs galleries every few months. I try to take in each new exhibit and often find myself surprised, inspired, and even educated by what I see.
Recently, I visited an exhibit I've been unable to get out of my mind: Beatrice Cuming: Connecticut Precisionist. Ever heard of her? No? Well, neither had I. Cuming was born in 1903 in Brooklyn and studied painting at the Pratt Institute. She continued her studies in France, traveling extensively to Brittany, Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere before ending up in New London of all places. Cuming had returned to New York from her travels in 1933 and then decided to move to Boston. On a train with all her belongings, she looked out the window -- so the story goes -- as it pulled into New London and impulsively got off, drawn by what she later described as the "obviously beautiful, powerful, dramatic, [and] exciting" subject matter in our town.
And she stayed, painting city scenes and diving into the local arts community. To support herself, she got a job as a security guard at the General Dynamics Electric Boat company. I try to imagine her, maybe wearing a green jumpsuit, a flashlight, and a ring of keys at her waist, patrolling Electric Boat's massive yard and docks in nearby Groton. During World War II, that company must have been a 24/7 operation as it churned out 74 submarines and 398 PT boats from those very docks. Those subs were responsible for fearsome (and stealthy) destruction of Japanese targets. That war ended, of course, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the 1950s, with the Cold War with the Soviet Union ramping up, Electric Boat would start manufacturing nuclear submarines.
Submarines As Still Life
Eventually, realizing the prodigious talent of its security guard, the company commissioned Cuming to begin documenting its contributions to the war effort. As Electric Boat's artist-in-residence (so to speak), she produced a number of breathtaking works. All too literally. I sat across from her painting Welders at Electric Boat Company unable to breathe.
It's a dark painting with enormous pieces of metal being transformed by heat and fire, the background crowded with partially built submarine components. Its dominant colors are brown and yellow. At the center, a white-hooded welder bends over his work as plumes of white smoke billow upward. There are four other workers in the painting, all indistinguishable, hooded and jump-suited in layers of protective gear. That's the detail that stays with me, that stuck in my throat -- those workers enshrouded in their safety suits.
However those suits may have protected them, count on one thing: what they and their successors built will not protect us. The power they wielded (and welded) to shape and connect part to part in the last days of World War II has held the world hostage ever since. We, all 8.1 billion of us, are today anything but protected from the nuclear submarines their successors would make. In our flimsy pedestrian garb, we remain so desperately vulnerable. In the background of Cuming's painting, there are ladders up to a platform and almost out of the painting. Where do the ladders lead? Does Cuming mean to offer an escape from that man-made hell? That might be reading too much into the painting. But what else are you supposed to do in an art museum?
It's a mesmerizing wartime portrait that draws you in -- even though there's nothing beautiful about it. Another of Cuming's works from that period, Chubb, is at least set outside, with glimpses of sea and sky through the unfinished hulk of another sub, the USS Chubb, as it towers on that dry dock.
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