Whether you approve of war or not, the essence of it would seem pretty clear: a nasty and brutish business. But this is not, nor has ever been, the consensus. What follows is a range, in five examples.

Beyond the utility of war as a profit-making enterprise, or in handling dignity issues, in the 19th Century “. . .the notion took hold that war called forth spiritual qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice, and manliness and was needed as a cleansing and invigorating therapy for the effeminacy and materialism of bourgeois society.” John Ruskin  (1819 – 1900), the celebrated art pundit, said “When I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of man.”**

It is perhaps significant that Ruskin never served in the military.

But we needn’t look far for war art of the hortatory, morally uplifting sort that Ruskin would doubtless have approved. Below we have the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull (1756 – 1843). There are bodies (bloodless, and delicately tucked away in the shadows), and flags

Trumbull - Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill - 1786 (W'ped)

and smoke, but the focus is on the dying general being heroically defended from the English soldier’s bayonet by the man holding him, and by the English officer who gallantly restrains his uncouth subordinate. The rebel on the left refrains, for no apparent reason except moral admiration, from shooting anyone, while the figure in blue and white on the right looks on in amazement (he also provides a strong right angle to anchor the composition’s leftward-thrusting diagonals–but let’s stick to the subject).

It’s Ruskin’s sort of war: noble, and full of virtuous display.

Paolo Uccello (1397 – 1475) had a more realistic sense of battle as having to do with fighting. This is not about gallantry or restraint–everyone is doing his best to whack the enemy. If the scene doesn’t strike us as savage–which it doesn’t–it’s because Uccello went for the decorative rather than the messy bits. The fallen armored figure on the left strikes us less as a dead man than as a tour de force of figurative perspective, a novelty in Uccello’s time. We’re spared the sermons, but the overwhelming impact is decorative grandeur rather than unpleasantness.

Uccello-Battle of San Romano c.1440 (W'commons)

Holbein - Bad War (W'ped)

Yoshitoshi - battle of Azukizaka (Wikipaintings.org)

Seventy-five years later, Hans Holbein the Younger (1498 – 1543) went for realism, showing the pike men of the two sides so closely knotted up that they’re having trouble getting at each other. It’s also a striking abstract composition, but in Holbein’s case, unlike Uccello’s, the form intensifies the subject rather than distancing it. There are no discreet groupings with different agendas, as in the Trumbull. No moral uplift. You have to wonder what Ruskin would have made of it.

And you really have to wonder what Ruskin would have thought of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839 – 92), who made many weird and violent images. This is one. He’s definitely in Holbein’s camp. Like Holbein, he makes the jumble work for him both abstractly and descriptively. There is a general on a white horse, but he isn’t presented as an object of admiration. The theme of the thing is unbridled violence from top to bottom and side to side.

Even more intense, because on a more intimate scale, is “Fight Inside a Mansion” by Yamazaki Toshinobu (1857 – 1886). Here the design (the pen drawing for a woodcut that was never executed) amounts to a jumble of crisp silks and swords represented by hard, angular lines, abruptly interspersed with faces–some concentrated, some horrified, some in agony, all vivid. The abstract rigor of the whole makes it tougher–we see such madness with such clarity.

Toshinobu - Fight Inside a Mansion c. 1880 (The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Goldyne in memory of Yorikatsu Mitsui, 2002.44)

Fight Inside a Mansion - detail

Poor Ruskin–where are thy virtues and faculties now? And yet we always seem to find fighting necessary, and must be grateful for moral uplift where we can find it. Which, I imagine, is why my childhood history texts featured Trumbull rather than Holbein, Yoshitoshi, and Toshinobu.

**Steven Pinker, “The Better Angels of Our Nature —Why Violence Has Declined”

San Francisco Gay Pride Parade 2011

Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie at The Wedding

Sometimes it’s delightful to notice the different messages that can be sent by similar visual information. Not profound, not unexpected, simply delightful.

fans at World Cup, 2006

Dia de los Muertos

Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891) was the inventor and only transcendent practitioner of pointillism–the rendering of form in dots of pigment rather than free-flowing brushstrokes and fields of color.

Seurat - Eiffel Tower 9.5 x 6" 1889 (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums)

Seurat - By the Seine 6 x 10" 1885 (W'ped)

Seurat was most successful with this method on a fairly small scale, where he produced images that have a subtly colored and immensely lively surface that unifies foregrounds and backgrounds, positive and negative shapes–as in these two examples.

The tradeoff is that the size of the dots swallows detail. Shapes must be kept simple if they are not to dissolve and disappear.

If lack of detail is a problem, the fix is to make the piece larger, so that each square inch describes a smaller part of the design. That works, up to a point. But as the piece gets larger and larger, and the dots stay the same size, the dots get lost. And since vivacity and intricacy of surface is the reason for using dots in the first place, the whole enterprise becomes self-defeating.

The study below hints at the problem. The right side and foreground, where the shapes and dots are large, is elegant and suggestive. As we go left, and into the distance, the rigor of the dots is lost. The handling gets niggly because Seurat is planning out the detail he intends for the final, full-size version. For example, compare the crimped woman in red at the left edge with the similar figure in “By the Seine” above. And in order to describe the sailboat in the distance he must abandon the pointillist touch entirely.

The problems get worse in the enormous final version, which pushes pointillism beyond its capacity. Allowance must be made for the fact that this is a photo: the original is grayer and duller, the colors are less intense, the darks not so hamfisted. But at a distance where you can see the whole thing, the dots disappear. The simplified shapes that were so subtle and lively in the study are now merely mannered and inert. Background and foreground cohere now, but the effect is one of visual busyness and technical diligence, without excitement.

Seurat - "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" 81x121" 1884 (W'ped)

I should say that Seurat was the only transcendent practitioner until Chuck Close ( b. 1940 ), whose small pieces, especially, have a similar vitality.

Chuck Close - self-portrait in conte crayon (artnet.com)

Gail Chadell Nanao paints figures so freely and wetly that it’s surprising to see how much description there is. She maintains that exciting tension between image and paint where you see both at the same time, with neither overwhelming the other.

Flushed Figures 50 x 60 2011

Considering how freely she paints, it’s also surprising that she doesn’t go with the painterly notion that nudes are neutral objects for formal manipulation. Hers have a live presence. You wouldn’t name a piece “Wistful Figure” if you were shy about the emotional loading of your images. For a painter raised in the post-WWII disdain for anything suggestive of narrative, this is pretty racy. Also pretty confident. And convincing.

Wistful Figure 48x36 2012

The resulting images keep you on your toes. You never know quite   what to expect as you run your eye around one of Nanao’s pieces. Parts are thickly painted, others thinly. She paints till she’s made her point, and then stops. This leaves the thought both transparent and immediate, just as it ought to be.

for more images: gailchadellnanao.com