But it’s not just this creepy parallel of palliatives that gives this show its resonance. It’s the art. In Grant Powers’s spookily semi-abstract watercolor (it looks like German expressionism circa 1910) “Battleship Arkansas Being Tossed in Giant Pillar of Water” (1946), you really feel the whooompf! of radioactive boiling water exploding beneath a flotilla of empty ships. R. Munsell Chambers’s surreal “Under the Mushroom at Hiroshima” (1945) drops you in the midst of the horror of Ground Zero. Chambers, who arrived in Japan well after the blast, based the imagery on descriptions from a Russian woman (that’s her in the foreground on the left) living in Japan. (“There were those people whining away, groaning and asking for help,” she told Chambers. “I thought I just might as well help them, because they were just people.”) “Mushroom” is corny as well as grisly, but its immediacy (Geiger counters were still clicking) makes it compelling. Charles Bittinger’s untitled oil of a Bikini blast, depicting the mushroom cloud at its 40,000-foot apex, looks like one of those roman-tic, majesty-o’-the-clouds Southwest landscapes of the 1920s: you almost expect to see singing cowhands below, instead of dark flecks indicating sacrificial warships.
Most of these painters weren’t just hobbyists. Bittinger (who also painted that Parsons portrait) studied with the fauves at the Academie Julien in Paris, and Navy combat artist Standish Backus was aligned with the “California abstractionists” watercolor movement. From 1942 on, artists like these were deployed as military personnel to cover every theater of the war. The pictures in “Atomic Front”–all government property and most never shown before–weren’t easy to get, says curator Denise Rompilla. “Yes, the military is reluctant to have some of these images out there,” she says. “But much of it is just the hugeness of the bureaucracy–the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.”
Painters’ impressions of calamity are, of course, less “real” than, say, Robert Capa’s photograph of the exact second of a Spanish Civil War soldier’s death, or Eddie Adams’s unforgettable footage of a Viet Cong suspect’s summary execution. Photography’s mechanical objectivity tells us that those events actually occurred in front of a lens. Painters since Hieronymus Bosch, on the other hand, have always made this stuff up. The trade-off is that paintings don’t come with a certificate of veracity, and that photography and video don’t notice with astonishment and emphasize with emotion the way a painter’s eye and hand do. In the grubby business of documenting war, each medium has its own function and value. If and when a war with Iraq comes, and if and when the military sends along artists of whatever media to record their impressions, will it take a half century for their images to reach us? We can only hope that this time–not just in the management of information but in the bigger picture, too–the right hand figures out what the left hand is doing.
