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Arts
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Week of 5 September 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 2 |
Arts
Recollecting the Great War
by Marion Sawey
Internationally renowned artist John Walker's latest collection of work, inspired by his father's experiences as a soldier in World War I, will open at the Boston University Art Gallery at 855 Commonwealth Ave. on September 5.
A Theater of Recollection is described by Walker, professor of painting at the School for the Arts, as "a series of conversations" with his father, who was wounded at the Battle of the Somme and almost killed at Passchendaele. The works on canvas and paper also explore the war's artistic legacy -- visual art, novels, films, poetry -- and its historical texts.
"Walker creates theater from the Great War, not from direct experience, but from a complex merger of personal and privately held recollections," says John Stomberg, the gallery's assistant director and the exhibition's curator.
The family of the artist, who was born in Britain, lost 11 men at the Battle of the Somme, and as early as 1959, after leaving Birmingham School of Art, Walker began to use World War I imagery in his work. He soon, however, abandoned the theme, returning to it only in the summer of 1996, over 20 years after his father's death.
The exhibition's 9 paintings and 16 prints, all completed in the past year, feature new visual motifs -- most striking a soldier/father figure with a sheep's skull head -- along with the familiar visual vocabulary of personal icons that Walker has developed over several decades as he has explored his major artistic themes, Stomberg points out.
"Memory is the key to the exhibition," says Stomberg. "Walker never saw the World War I theater of war himself, so he creates a theater of recollection, of his father's memories of the war. His Somme and Passchendaele paintings are attempts to harness the powerful shared experience of World War I and to place his own experience in that context. Some of the smaller paintings are more personal, contrasting the dark, unknowable world of his father and his own world, the active, vibrant, rational world of the studio, symbolized by an easel."
Explaining some of the paintings' new elements, Stomberg suggests that the sheep's skull motif has many layers of meaning. "On a basic level, there were lots of skulls on the World War I battlefield, and the soldiers would play soccer with them. On a more poetic level, a common image of war is that of sheep being led to the slaughter. Yet another reference is to the Judas sheep used to entice other sheep into the abattoir to be slaughtered, much as the officers led their men to death, while escaping that fate themselves."
Another striking new feature is the incorporation of poetic text by World War I poets Wilfred Owen and David Jones directly into many of the paintings, the words scrawled across the canvas. "There is a mingling and merging of public and private themes and images here," says Stomberg. "In one Wilfred Owen poem for example, Owen -- who was himself killed in battle -- writes of a dying soldier kissing the mud. Walker has always been interested in the act of painting as basically a process of mashing mud across a surface, and in his more abstract work mud slides are emblematic of that act. The mud slides in these war paintings are red, suggesting blood and dying.
"Walker's goal, however, is not primarily to rail against the inhumanity of war, although some degree of protest always colors the work. His vision of the Great War is less direct, mediated by the remove of 80 years and seen through the lenses of other artists and writers. He is operating in a different arena from his predecessors: a theater of recollection generations removed from the theaters of war they experienced."
A number of events will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, all taking place in the SFA Concert Hall. The director of the Yale Center for British Art, Patrick McCaughey, will give a talk on Tuesday, September 16, at 1 p.m. Poet and Associate University Professor Rosanna Warren will give a poetry reading on Tuesday, September 23, at 1 p.m. She will read "Mud (for John Walker)," a poem she wrote in honor of the exhibition and that is printed in the exhibition catalogue. Stomberg will give a gallery talk on Saturday, October 4, at 1 p.m.
Following the exhibition at Boston University, the collection travels to the Knoedler Gallery in New York, the Lee Scarfone Gallery at the University of Tampa, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and the Yale Center for British Art.
BU Art Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.