Moonrise Over Mametz Wood by W. Thurston Topham, 1916, oil on panel.Canadian War Museum
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With Remembrance Day just behind us, and not yet being in the throes of the festive season, it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on the relationship of Art and War (or Art and Conflict, or Cultural Property and Conflict, depending on how one wishes to frame the subject). Is there such a relationship, you might ask — indeed there is. And while art and conflict may seem like uneasy bedfellows, they have marched alongside one another for nearly as long as both have existed. Not always in step, and not always from the same point of view, but together nonetheless.
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Historically speaking, we start seeing large-scale conflict in the region of Mesopotamia sometime before 4000 BCE, due in large part to the establishment of city-states there. With city-states came the need to protect and defend them, and a parallel rise of persons of influence and power who did the ruling and defending of said city-states in conflict. One of the earliest examples of a representation of war is the so-called “Royal Standard of Ur” of Sumer from about 2600 BCE, which has on one side (the “war side”) narrative bands depicting charioteers and infantry soldiers in battle trampling and capturing opposing forces, stripping them of arms and armour. On the opposite side of the Standard (the “peace” side), there are similar narrative bands showing the collection of war booty by the victors, and a victory banquet in progress in the top register. Like this object, many of the earliest examples of representations of conflict show the ruler of the conquering people larger than life and glorify their prowess in battle.
The depiction of the collection of war booty, which often consisted of the movable material wealth and cultural property of a defeated people, is significant, because the accumulation of art as the spoils of war is just one other aspect of the conjunction of art and conflict. One clear illustration of the practice can be seen in the “Spoils of Jerusalem” panel of the Arch of Titus in Rome (circa 81 CE), in which Roman troops loot the Second Temple there, which they afterwards destroyed. (The Second Temple replaced, as you might guess, the First Temple (a.k.a. Solomon’s Temple), which the Babylonians had looted and destroyed in 586 BCE.) War booty was sometimes used to enrich the treasuries of a conquering people and was also often used to pay troops for their service in war. The practice was condoned for centuries but was also questioned on moral grounds as early as the Classical Greek period. Nonetheless, the seizure of art as war booty continued into modern times — and likely continues, despite international treaties and policies against the practice — to the enrichment of many of the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums. One has only to look to the Louvre in Paris (the foundation of its vast collections consisting of war booty collected by Napoleon’s troops in the late 18th and early 19th centuries) and the scrutiny of many of the world’s galleries with respect to Nazi War Art and its possible repatriation to get an idea of the scope of the activity.
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There are, fortunately, efforts being made to repatriate some portions of art looted from one culture and in the possession of another, but it can be a thorny endeavour for a variety of reasons. For example, how does one return artwork to a culture or entity that no longer exists? And is the cultural property perhaps better off remaining in an institution that can care for it properly? The act of repatriation may also be politically motivated — just as the act of the destruction of cultural property in times of conflict may be. Think of the destruction by the Taliban of the seventh-century Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 — a means of demoralizing local cultures and causing outrage in the international community. The destruction of cultural property (often artwork, monuments or architecture) to oppress a people and erase cultural memory is a practice that goes back to ancient times, and is one that continues today.
Not that the association of art and war is all negative — indeed, conflict has been the catalyst for many new types of artistic expression and movements. In particular, many of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century (such as expressionism, vorticism, cubism, etc.) were more effective at capturing and illustrating aspects of modern warfare than were more traditional and staid styles of representation. In fact, it has been suggested that it is truly only artists who can accurately relate what being at war is actually like — visually, emotionally, psychologically and physically — through the power of imagery that words cannot begin to match. Canadian artist W. Thurston Topham’s impressionist painting “Moonrise over Mametz Wood” of 1916 has been described by veterans as an “eerily accurate impression of the Somme battlefield in 1916.” As well, starting in the First World War and continuing in the Second World War, many nations, including Canada, established Official War Art programs. Many of a country’s notable artists were sent overseas to record and represent the conflicts and were indelibly marked by the experience. It has been argued, for example, that the art of some members of Canada’s Group of Seven was influenced more by the blasted landscapes of war in Europe than by the austerity of Canada’s North, as has so often been stated. Canada continues to invite artists into theatres of conflict, with some moving imagery coming out of such collaborations as a result.
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While the subject of art and war may seem to be a gloomy one (and this essay has merely scratched the surface of the topic), many beautiful and even humorous objects have resulted from the association. Art produced as a result of war is a testament to the enduring human spirit and the act of creativity, which may help us to understand events and experiences of the past.
Kamille Parkinson earned a PhD in art history from Queen’s University and is presently a writer, burgeoning copywriter and art historian at large. You can find her writing at Word Painter Projects on Facebook and can contact her at wordpainterprojects@gmail.com.
The Vimy Memorial, designed by Walter Allward, in Vimy, France.Photo by Kamille Parkinson /Supplied Photo
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This afternoon in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, people walking along Mercer Street were surprised to find a trove of materials that once belonged to the late feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, all free for the taking.
Outside of Edelson’s old studio at 110 Mercer Street, drawings, prints, and cut-out figures were sitting in cardboard boxes alongside posters from her exhibitions, monographs, and other ephemera. One box included cards that the artist’s children had given her for birthdays and mother’s days. Passersby competed with trash collectors who were loading the items into bags and throwing them into a U-Haul.
“It’s her last show,” joked her son, Nick Edelson, who had arranged for the junk guys to come and pick up what was on the street. He has been living in her former studio since the artist died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Naturally, neighbors speculated that he was clearing out his mother’s belongings in order to sell her old loft. “As you can see, we’re just clearing the basement” is all he would say.
Photo by Annie Armstrong.
Some in the crowd criticized the disposal of the material. Alessandra Pohlmann, an artist who works next door at the Judd Foundation, pulled out a drawing from the scraps that she plans to frame. “It’s deeply disrespectful,” she said. “This should not be happening.” A colleague from the foundation who was rifling through a nearby pile said, “We have to save them. If I had more space, I’d take more.”
Edelson’s estate, which is controlled by her son and represented by New York’s David Lewis Gallery, holds a significant portion of her artwork. “I’m shocked and surprised by the sudden discovery,” Lewis said over the phone. “The gallery has, of course, taken great care to preserve and champion Mary Beth’s legacy for nearly a decade now. We immediately sent a team up there to try to locate the work, but it was gone.”
Sources close to the family said that other artwork remains in storage. Museums such as the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney currently hold her work in their private collections. New York University’s Fales Library has her papers.
Edelson rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the early voices in the feminist art movement. She is most known for her collaged works, which reimagine famed tableaux to narrate women’s history. For instance, her piece Some Living American Women Artists (1972) appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) to include the faces of Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Alice Neel, and others as the apostles; Georgia O’Keeffe’s face covers that of Jesus.
A lucky passerby collecting a couple of figurative cut-outs by Mary Beth Edelson. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
In all, it took about 45 minutes for the pioneering artist’s material to be removed by the trash collectors and those lucky enough to hear about what was happening.
Dealer Jordan Barse, who runs Theta Gallery, biked by and took a poster from Edelson’s 1977 show at A.I.R. gallery, “Memorials to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era.” Artist Keely Angel picked up handwritten notes, and said, “They smell like mouse poop. I’m glad someone got these before they did,” gesturing to the men pushing papers into trash bags.
A neighbor told one person who picked up some cut-out pieces, “Those could be worth a fortune. Don’t put it on eBay! Look into her work, and you’ll be into it.”
Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column.
In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones.
Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole lot more.
