When the U.S. entered World War I, the thousands of soldiers who headed to Europe were joined by combat artists attached to the American Expeditionary Force.
In honor of the centennial, The National Air and Space Museum has created a new exhibit, Artist Soldiers, to remember their efforts, and the many forms of artistic expression inspired by that horrifying conflict.
Before World War I, artists kept the battlefield at a safe distance, portraying important, heroic moments from a macro-perspective that included generals, but not individual soldiers. Think, George Washington Crossing the Delaware.” So it was a unique experiment when the AEF commissioned eight professional magazine illustrators as captains in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in early 1918, and gave them nine months to roam wherever, whenever they pleased.
The result–the exhibit includes he best of more than 700 works in watercolor, pencil, and charcoal–is a fresh, immediate vision of the war. Images of soldiers fighting, carrying their comrades, or scrambling for their gas mask have all the realism of black and white photographs, as well as the emotion of a sympathetic human eye. Otherwise mundane images of soldiers disembarking from transport ships are shown confident and barrel-chested, while a pair of soldiers carrying their comrade on a stretcher move through a misty field of flowers in an unexpectedly beautiful scene.
The rest of the exhibit is dedicated to soldiers turned artists, the work of men who made creative expression part of their survival strategy. Painted helmets and satchels, as well as goblets, letter openers, and vases were meticulously crafted from war debris. There’s even a doll-sized table, with matching cups, made from bullet casings.
But perhaps the most exciting part of the exhibit is the work of Jeff Gusky, a National Geographic photographer, who has spent years exploring ancient stone quarries and salt mines repurposed by soldiers throughout the war. “They were created by quarrymen getting stones for castles, cathedrals and fortresses,” Gusky told NPR. The quarries were incorporated into enormous trench networks and equipped as long-term shelters. “They brought modern technology underground and created cities: rail telecommunications, electricity, hospitals, food systems, and theaters…They’re so big that you even see street signs,” Gusky explains. One of the mines uncovered is 25 miles long.
Carved in the walls are tributes to lost comrades, baseball scores (“Red Socks 7, Yankee 4”), self-portraits, and cartoon depictions of prime ministers and presidents. Altars and religious imagery embedded just under the front lines provided a last chance to pray for those going “over the top.” The tunnels were vacated immediately after the war ended, leaving the underground cities to corrode and gather dust.
Some men were trapped underground for as long as six weeks, giving them plenty of time to be exact. Part primitive cave art, part vandalism, part art gallery, the quarry walls hold chiseled messages to the above-ground world that are finally being received. Gusky’s black and white photographs–skillfully accomplished in total darkness–are an intimate look at life in the trenches. “They expressed their inner lives on the walls of these spaces, when the world, on the surface, was turning to hell,” Gusky says. Seen together, the amateur and professional work of Artist Soldiers is a compelling vision of World War I.
Artists Soldiers is on display at the National Air and Space Museum until November 2018.
