The Art of the American Soldier

National Constitution Center, Philadelphia

Through Jan. 10, 2011

Another important collection of 20th-century war imagery was “collecting dust” until this fall, said Giovanna Palatucci in NationalGeographic.com. A cache of paintings created by American soldiers across several wars, it depicts “everyday military life, from training and deployment to combat and sacrifice.” The Army first commissioned artists to capture the experience of soldiers during World War I; since Vietnam, the artists have been selected from the Army’s own rank and file. “Together, over 1,300 soldiers have contributed nearly 16,000 works of art.” Some skeptics might wonder: Why didn’t the Army just commission photographers? But a visit to the National Constitution Center’s exhibit shows that the ways soldiers chose to render their experiences reveal what made each war— and era—unique.

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As you’d expect, there are plenty of action scenes, said Art Carey in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Paul Rickert, posted to Vietnam when he was 19, painted “soldiers under fire rushing for a chopper” and various other combat scenes. Yet he and plenty of other artists also presented a quieter side of the war experience—soldiers “doing laundry, savoring mail, praying, playing baseball.” The Army says its artists are told to avoid propaganda—and for the most part, they do. A painting by one Roger Blum shows a Vietnamese woman and her children fleeing their burning home—“a lurid conflagration of incandescent yellows and oranges that radiate heat, humiliation, and horror.” At first this looks like a standard-issue anti-war image—until you learn that the husbands of women like these were “hiding in caves, picking off U.S. troops.” Anyone who enters a combat zone needs to be brave, but there’s also admirable artistic bravery in confronting, while there, the contradictions of war.