printable versionExhibition explores the representation of conflict in art
BY BARBARA PALMER
Patience Young, curator for education (left), and Betsy Fryberger, curator of prints and drawings, worked together on “Conflict and Art” at the Cantor Arts Center.
“John Brown”, 1939. Lithograph; John Steuart Curry, U.S.A., 1898–1946
"Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Descending the Staircase Fighting," 1994; David Gilhooly, U.S.A., b. 1943. Electric engraving with hand-coloring in watercolor on BFK Rives paper, 5/16
The wild-haired, wild-eyed figure of the militant 19th-century abolitionist John Brown, as pictured in a 1939 lithograph by the American regionalist artist John Steuart Curry, could be considered the "poster child" of a new Cantor Arts Center exhibition, Conflict and Art, said Patience Young, education curator.
Violent, volatile and internally torn, Brown launched his campaign of guerrilla warfare against slaveholders during a time of intense social and political conflict in the United States, Young pointed out during a public tour of the exhibition last week. As such, the image, from the Cantor Center's collection of more than 10,000 works on paper, embodies many of the complexities about human conflict that are explored in the exhibition, now on display through Aug. 27.
With works that range from a sixth-century B.C. Grecian urn, ornamented with depictions of helmeted warriors, to a silkscreen print of an electric chair by Andy Warhol, the exhibition surveys ways in which diverse artists have depicted conflict within individuals and in society in a variety of cultures and contexts. The exhibition, which holds more than 140 works on paper, paintings, sculpture, photographs, ceramics and artifacts from Europe, North America, Africa and Asia, was curated by Young and Betsy Fryberger, curator of prints and drawings.
Artists represented include the anonymous creators of such works as a warrior's shield from Borneo, an American Indian knife sheath and a Japanese samurai's sword as well as acclaimed figures including Théodore Gericault, Francisco José de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Eadweard Muybridge, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Masami Teraoka, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, among others.
In creating the show, curators were building on the museum's 2004 Question exhibition, which experimented with new ways of engaging visitors with the museum's collections, Young said. The goal in organizing the current exhibition was to draw on the resources of Cantor's existing collections, to allow curators to collaborate and to bring works out of storage that weren't often on view to the public, she said.
As curators sifted through ideas, the concept of conflict emerged as one that "had echoes in every collection," Young said. It's a topic that is "universal, timely and timeless," she said.
The show offers a rare opportunity to view the museum's collection of works on paper, which are not often put on display because of their fragility, Fryberger said. Many of the works ordinarily would be viewed only by students and researchers, she added.
In winnowing down candidates for the exhibition—the first cut consisted of more than 300 artworks—curators considered only those works that showed overt conflict, Young said. They also included in the exhibition the questions they used to frame their selections. "When, if ever, is conflict desirable?" asks one, displayed alongside Kollwitz's turbulent depiction of a labor uprising, The Weaver's Revolt: Sturm.
The prevalence of scenes depicting warfare and battles indicate war's persistence and pervasiveness throughout history, but conflict also abounds in images depicting literary and mythical figures. (Conflict drives plot forward, as every good storyteller knows.)
Curators have leavened the seriousness of the subject matter with images of typically non-lethal conflicts, such as football and wrestling, including Muybridge's pioneering motion studies of two men boxing and fencing. Also on the lighter side is David Gilhooly's 1994 comical spoof of Marcel Duchamp, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Descending the Staircase Fighting, which appears near the entrance.
At the exhibition's conclusion are works, including Goya's Ravages of War, selected to represent the aftermath of conflict. The works were intended to mediate the intensity—and pain—of the images in the exhibition, Young said. Many of those images turned out to be very similar in effect to the other images in the exhibition, the curator said. It turns out "there is very little that is tranquil about the aftermath of conflict," Young said.