I will be exhibiting at 365 & Counting, a group exhibit that examines the 1st year of the Obama Administration. Avenue 50 Studio in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles asked 15 artists to create artworks that provide insight into the president’s first year, and issues of race, class, war, health care, the environment and the economy, plus other global challenges - are explored in the timely exhibition.

"Bagram Prison, Afghanistan" - Mark Vallen. 2009. Oil on linen. On display at Ave. 50 Studio from Nov. 14 - Dec. 6, 2009.

Given the escalating war in Afghanistan, I painted a glimpse of the notorious military prison located in the U.S. Airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan.

The prison currently holds more than 600 detainees designated as “unlawful enemy combatants”; individuals that in some cases have been tortured and held for years without charge, legal representation, or due-process rights.

In February of 2009, the Obama administration began a $60 million expansion of the Bagram prison so that it could potentially hold as many as 1,100 suspects. As the Associated Press reported on November 1, 2009, as President Obama escalates the war in Afghanistan the U.S. Airbase at Bagram is being expanded even though it presently occupies over 5,000 acres and from a distance looks “more like a medium-size city than a military facility in a war zone.”

The 365 & Counting exhibition will be on view from November 14 to December 6, 2009. The exhibit also includes artists Alex Alferov, Yrneh Brown, Nancy Buchanan, Chukes, Carol Colin, Kathi Flood, Graham Goddard, Miguel Angel Murillo, CCH Pounder, Suzanne Siegel, Joseph Sims, Charles Swenson, Richard Turner, and Ted Waltz.

The Artist’s Reception for 365 & Counting takes place on Saturday, November 14, 2009, from 7 to 10 p.m. Avenue 50 Studio is located at; 131 N. Avenue 50, Highland Park, California, 90042 (map & directions). Phone: 323: 258-1435.

While on a visit to my local library as a nine-year-old in 1962, I randomly pulled a dog-eared picture book about the Second World War from a shelf, retreating to an isolated table to thumb through the digest in solitude. Flipping through the book’s tattered pages I received an unexpected surprise I would never forget. I had come to a full-page color reproduction of a painting portraying a horrifically wounded U.S. Marine, and I literally froze in disbelief, staring incredulously at the appalling image. The artwork depicted a gravely wounded soldier, still standing, but with half of his face blown away and his entire left arm reduced to a bloody pulp. All of my juvenile notions regarding war evaporated while gazing at that single image. I left the library shaken to my core.

It is difficult to describe how that painting unsettled me. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was still a year away and the horror of Vietnam had yet to creep into the American psyche. I had seen the shocking imagery of Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series, as my parents had a well stocked home library of art books, but Goya’s images were from a distant and shadowy past that I could not fathom. My experience in the library was something else altogether, the dreadful image of that bloody soldier was rendered in full color and it depicted fairly recent history. Despite the passage of time my memory of that painting never faded, though the work became lost to me in another way. As an adolescent it never dawned on me to write down the name of the artist and the painting, or the title of the book I had found the image in, so decades later those facts remained a mystery to me, that is - until just recently.

Last June I visited the Brand Library in Glendale, California, which has an enormous collection of books exclusively dedicated to the subjects of art and music. Meandering through the aisles my eyes suddenly caught the title of a large format book, The Art of War. I plucked it from its shelf and took it to a quite table where I could examine its contents at my leisure. I randomly opened the book towards its middle section and was astonished to see the very painting I had discovered forty-seven years ago as a boy; I had found it in a recently published book, but it was the same painting.

The Price - Tom Lea. Oil on canvas. 1944.

The artwork in question was painted by Tom Lea and titled, The Price. The artist created it while employed by LIFE magazine as a war artist in the Pacific Theater of war. Lea was attached to a Marine unit that assaulted the Japanese held island of Peleliu, and he was trained and equipped like every other Marine, except that he went into battle armed with a sketch pad and pens as his primary weapons. Lea had actually witnessed the soldier’s death during the bloody landing, and he sketched the soldier’s agony as it occurred. Back in the studio Lea transformed his black and white pen sketch into an unforgettable oil painting, which is now a permanent part of the U.S. Army Art Collection. In the battle for Peleiu, the U.S. Marines suffered 1,121 killed in action, with over 6,000 casualties. All 10,000 Japanese soldiers holding the island were killed. Reporting for LIFE magazine on the story of the invasion, Lea would write of the brutal landing:

“I fell flat on my face just as I heard the whishhh of a mortar I knew was too close. A red flash stabbed at my eyeballs. About fifteen yards away, on the upper edge of the beach, it smashed down four men from our boat. One figure seemed to fly to pieces. With terrible clarity I saw the head and one leg sail into the air.

I got up… ran a few steps, and fell into a small hole as another mortar burst threw dirt on me. Lying there in terror looking longingly up the slope for better cover, I saw a wounded man near me, staggering in the direction of the LVTs (Landing Vehicle - Tracked). His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick, as he bent over in his stumbling, shock-crazy walk. The half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I have ever seen. He fell behind me, in a red puddle on the white sand.

It was established later that the invasion of Peleliu as a stepping stone to the invasion of the Philippines had not been necessary - Gen. MacArthur had already bypassed the Palaus and landed at Leyte in the Philippines.”

In retrospect I have come to understand how Lea’s painting of that mortally wounded soldier influenced my own work as an artist. Lea’s painting was a successful attempt at encapsulating the unvarnished truth. Obviously The Price was not a pretty picture, but its journalistic approach effectively captured an unpleasant reality that was necessary for people to confront. That same journalistic methodology became integral to my aesthetic viewpoint.

Lea’s painting could be interpreted as war propaganda, but it is an odd style of state propaganda that depicts the terror, futility, and brutality of war. Lea was not alone in painting or sketching images that were bone-chillingly frank and uncompromising in the portrayal of war. The U.S. military employed over 100 soldier and civilian artists to record the events of World War II, and much of their output was extraordinary.

Field sketch for Tom Lea's painting.

They Drew Fire, the PBS gallery of artworks created by combat artists of World War II, gives ample evidence of this blunt forthrightness. It is instructive to review the entire portfolio. Tom Craig’s Bone Pile at Cassino, George Biddle’s Dead Civilians, Howard Brodie’s Execution, Richard Gibney’s The Last Full Measure, and Kerr Eby’s Helping Wounded Man, are just some of the artworks created by U.S. military artists that revealed the true face of war. That this type of imagery was at the time published in LIFE Magazine and other publications with official sanction begs the question – why do we not see equivalent artworks from today’s wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq?

The U.S. Armed Forces still employ soldier-artists, and today a number of them have been assigned the task of interpreting war experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Army Center of Military History maintains a website titled, Army Artists Look At The War On Terrorism, and the dissimilarity between the art produced by soldier-artists of the 1940’s and those now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan could hardly be more pronounced. The first apparent difference is artistic quality. The soldier-artists from the 40s were distinctive draftsmen well versed in composition, color theory, perspective, and the like; present day combat artists suffer from a lack of such proficiency while displaying a slavish over-reliance upon photography.

More importantly, today’s soldier-artists seem unable or unwilling to create works filled with the pathos, tragedy, and simple candor routinely delivered by their compatriots in the 40s. Artists working for the U.S. Armed Forces during the Second World War depicted civilians and soldiers suffering from wounds, madness, and death, as well as portraying shattered cities and devastated landscapes. While there were also a great number of images showing glory and heroism, these were generally accomplished with no small degree of honesty. “War is Hell”, so it is said, and no one knows this better than a soldier. But in Army Artists Look At The War On Terrorism, there are no paintings of horrifically wounded U.S. soldiers nor are there bloody field hospitals, there are no watercolors of U.S. troops with that shell-shocked look about them, no drawings of dead civilians or towns reduced to rubble – no suicide truck bombers, improvised explosive devices (IED), or U.S. drone missile attacks. The “big picture” has been reduced to a narrow peep hole, where only gallant and brave U.S. soldiers can be viewed.

At present some 10,000 U.S. Marines are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Helmand province in an operation dubbed “Strike of the Sword.” At the time of this writing, 26 U.S. soldiers have died in the campaign – so far. British soldiers are also fighting in Helmand, with 15 of them having been killed since the beginning of this month, eight in one day of fighting last Friday. It is not known just how many Afghanis have been killed but casualties are likely to be in the hundreds. Suffice it to say, President Obama’s Afghan war, or “Overseas Contingency Operation” as he puts it, will not likely employ an artist like Tom Lea to create anything approaching the profundity of The Price.

[ Incidentally: The book in which I recently rediscovered Tom Lea’s The Price, is titled
Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art from the Revolution through the Twentieth Century, by Col. H. Avery Chenoweth, USMCR (Ret.) ]

During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon released to American troops a wanted list of Iraqi leaders that came in the form of a deck of cards. The playing cards featured photos and information about various government henchmen, and were designed to help U.S. troops identify and capture members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Now, four years after the war began, the Pentagon has finally published a new set of cards - the Archaeology Awareness deck of playing cards. When the war began and American G.I.’s were hunting down members of the hated Baathist regime, the media made a great deal over the “Most Wanted” cards, but it’s not likely they’ll report much about the latest playing cards, for two important reasons; the Archaeology Awareness cards are about art, and it doesn’t exactly sound very gallant or heroic to have to council troops not to go about destroying a nation’s archaeological treasures.

Back in February of 2005, I wrote an article titled Mesopotamia Endangered, detailing a damning report made by the British Museum of London regarding the widespread destruction of Iraq’s archeological sites by U.S. troops - so I have to say, at first I thought the Pentagon’s Archaeology Awareness cards seemed a classic case of “too little, too late” - especially when surveying the enormous war damage already done to Iraq’s historic sites. But then I read a news story about the new deck of cards in The Telegraph, and realized that the Archaeology Awareness campaign represents a long term operation. The Telegraph reported: “Archaeologists working at Ford Drum, New York, where troops are trained for deployment in Iraq, hope soldiers will know what to avoid when it comes to bivouacking or setting up gun installations.”

Yes, the Pentagon is now employing archaeologists to instruct troops on their way to Iraq on how to avoid damaging that country’s precious archaeological sites. The new deck of cards are part of that training, with each playing card depicting a different archaeological site or antiquity, along with tips on how to preserve them. The seven of clubs card pictures the Ctesiphon Arch in Iraq with the caption, “This site has survived 17 centuries. Will it and others survive you?” The two of clubs card pictures the Nabi Yunis Mosque in Mosul, along with the caption, “Ancient Iraqi heritage is part of your heritage. Old stories say that Jonah of the bible was buried in this hill.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when thinking of young American soldiers learning about Iraq’s cultural treasures by way of a deck of playing cards. I suppose in the long run it’s a good policy, but maybe that’s what bothers me most, that it represents something unending - and there are many signals the U.S. intends to be in Iraq for a long time to come.

Of course, Iraq possesses the third largest oil fields in the world and the Bush administration is pushing for an Iraqi oil revenue-sharing law giving U.S. companies the lion’s share of profits. Major players in the Bush administration have been referring to a Korea model for Iraq’s future, alluding to the tens of thousands of U.S troops still stationed in South Korea 54 years after the end of the Korean war. In remarks made on June 18th, 2007, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, said it may take “at least ten years” to defeat Iraqi guerrillas. And then there’s that new Vatican sized U.S. Embassy being constructed in Baghdad at a cost of $592 million, a gigantic sprawl covering the equivalent of 80 football fields. If I were a gambling man, I would bet that the dealer in the White House and his high stakes game in Iraq will all go bust - and I won’t need a new deck of cards to win that wager.

I find an odd prescience in the “Target” paintings of Jasper Johns. While some gush madly over his works and others are simply indifferent - there is another story to relate, an untold chronicle that details the corporatization of American culture and the dumping of recent history “down the memory hole.”

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965, is a retrospective of Johns’s artworks running at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from January 28 to April 29, 2007. The exhibit displays approximately 80 artworks, including paintings, drawings and prints. While Johns’s works facilitated the rise of pop, minimalism, conceptualism, and other genres found in postmodernism, that’s not what I want to address in this article. Fifteen of Johns’s Target paintings are on view at the National Gallery, and arts writer for the New York Times, Holland Cotter, says they look “every bit as radical and mysterious as they surely did in New York in the 1950s, when, simply by existing, they closed the door on one kind of art, Abstract Expressionism, and opened a door on many, many others.” Eerily titled Bull’s-Eyes and Body Parts, Cotter’s review touches upon more than a few sensitive issues:

“Art and crass are all but inseparable. So it’s no surprise to find an exhibition that brings together a record number of Jasper Johns’s famous target paintings being bankrolled by Target. You pass the corporate bull’s-eye logo, small but vivid, on a wall on your way into ‘Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965‘ here at the National Gallery of Art. Mr. Johns’s targets, endlessly reproduced in the half century since he painted the earliest of them, have themselves become a form of advertising, a logo for American postwar art. Through sheer omnipresence they’ve become nearly invisible. What could change that now?”

It’s not a happy accident that the first image seen at the Jasper Johns show is a corporate logo that echoes the artist’s most celebrated series of paintings - blurring the distinction between advertising and fine art. No doubt the Target corporation is taking advantage of, and contributing to, the commercialization of culture. It should be remembered that the business practices of the Target corporation have attracted criticism, including its providing poor working conditions for American workers and using suppliers with links to foreign sweatshops. The company does not pay a living wage and of the over 1,400 Target stores in the U.S., not a single one has a union. Target is not only the official sponsor behind the Johns exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, it also sponsors the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, New York, underwriting MoMA’s “Target Free Friday Nights” - which provides free admission to the museum on Fridays after 4 p.m. Target also backs a similar program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called “Free after Five,” providing free admission to the museum throughout the week.

But it’s not my opposition to encroaching corporate control over the arts that drove me to write this article, it was the title of Holland Cotter’s review, Bull’s-Eyes and Body Parts, that triggered my response. Whatever meaning that tiptoed behind Johns’s evocative targets in the past has since been superceded by unhappy real world events in the present - dealings that have much to do with actual targets and body parts. For me, Johns’s paintings have become the phantom face of modern warfare - a wraithlike stand-in for a reality too horrific to cast one’s gaze upon. I had this epiphany regarding the works of Johns during the 1999 Kosovo/Serbia war - but it’s a certainty Cotter wasn’t thinking about that or any other war when he came up with his art review’s clever title.

My story brings to light a brilliant graphic symbol created and used in opposition to war, but it’s also a cautionary anecdote - as our collective amnesia has all but erased the compelling and historic symbol from memory. Voluminous studies exist that analyze the 1999 Kosovo war and attempt to sort out the politics behind it, but presenting such investigation here is beyond the purpose of this web log, suffice it to say - I was against the war. Nevertheless, I’m astonished and dismayed that a recent conflict of such magnitude could be so easily forgotten, which is what motivated me to write this dispatch.

First - just a fragment of background for context. The U.S. says it led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in order to force the late leader Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Serbian troops from the province of Kosovo, where thousands had been killed in a counter-insurgency war with separatist Albanian guerillas. Starting on March 24th 1999, NATO attacked Yugoslavia, carrying out 38,000 air strikes on the Balkan nation - roughly 700 sorties a day for 78 days. The U.S. was the dominant force in the NATO coalition, and it carried out most of the attacks. Around 20,000 so-called “smart bombs” were used - including dozens of cruise missiles and thousands of cluster bombs, which resulted in some 2,000 civilian casualties. Even as the bombs and missiles rained upon Yugoslavia, President Clinton responded to the April 22, 1999 murders of 13 students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, by saying “We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.” The very next day American cruise missiles slammed into the headquarters of RTS (Serbian state television and radio) in Belgrade (Beograd), the capital of Serbia - killing 16 journalists and technicians and maiming 16 others. Days later the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade would be hit by American cruise missiles, killing three embassy staff and injuring 20.

The image was quickly replicated by those without computers or printers, and the icon was hand-painted and scrawled on tee-shirts, banners and placards. Soon thousands of civilians wearing or carrying target symbols gathered on the ancient bridges spanning the Danube River in a defiant effort to save the structures from NATO bombs. International television crews filmed those vigils and beamed the footage worldwide. Once the aerial bombardment began on March 24th 1999, the crowds dispersed out of fear of being killed or injured - and fifty-five of Yugoslavia’s bridges would ultimately be destroyed by NATO bombs.

Eight years later the world has all but forgotten the brutal war over Kosovo, but every time I see one of Jasper Johns’s Target paintings, memories of that war’s savagery come rushing back - as well as anxiety over present-day belligerencies. Now that the West is embroiled in the even costlier bloodshed in Iraq, and with war on Iran looming over the horizon - it might be time to revive the antiwar target symbol.

In February of 2005, I wrote about artist Donald Shambroom and his Fatalities window installation assemblage in Boston’s Watertown area. Shambroom’s statement on the human cost of war seems more pressing today than when it was first conceptualized.

On November 19th, 2005, U.S. Marines went on a revenge killing spree in the western Iraqi city of Haditha after one of their own was killed by a guerrilla roadside bomb. In retaliation, Marines burst into civilian homes in the area of the bombing, killing up to 24 unarmed civilians in what will surely become known as Iraq’s My Lai massacre. One of those shot at close range was a 76-year old amputee in a wheelchair, other victims included little girls and boys ages 14, 10, 5, 4, 3, and 1. Time magazine obtained a video tape that was filmed immediately after the killings, a video that verified eyewitness accounts of the bloody slayings. A young Marine, sent in as part of a “clean up crew” in the aftermath of the shootings, took photographs of the victims and helped to carry their bodies out of bullet pock-marked homes. Those photos helped military investigators conclude that Marines had indeed killed women, children and elderly men. Last week the Pentagon announced that some members of the Marine unit may be charged with murder, and so the story of the massacre has finally reached the mainstream news.

On May 31st, 2006, two Iraqi women were shot and killed in their car after failing to stop at an American military check point. The U.S. military said in a statement that “repeated visual and auditory warnings” were made before shots were fired at the vehicle. After the shooting stopped, it was found that the two women were driving to a maternity hospital - one of them was pregnant and about to give birth. With mounting opposition to the war as a backdrop, Mr. Bush in his divine wisdom (God does talk to him you know), quietly gave the order for the deployment of more U.S. troops to Iraq. Some 3,500 soldiers from the 1st Armored Division stationed in Kuwait are now on their way to the killing fields of Iraq’s Anbar province.

Meanwhile Donald Shambroom has launched a new website where you can see his latest antiwar sculptures, works that continue to address the effects of America’s largest national enterprise - war. Hopefully, as the dreadful occupation of Iraq goes from bad to worse, Shambroom’s example will inspire other artists to create works of art in opposition to the folly of imperial wars and overseas colonial adventures.

“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.” So wrote the White Rose, a group of ardent young activists who opposed the reign of fascism in 1940s Germany. I first discovered the writings of The White Rose (Die Weisse Rose) in the early 1980’s, and have since read and re-read their stirring proclamations - which the group clandestinely distributed in public places right under the noses of the Nazis. Eventually the young heroes were caught, and key members of the pacifist group were executed by guillotine after a Nazi court found them guilty of “treason.” Sophie Scholl, one of the group’s leaders, directed her last words at her Nazi executioners, “… your heads will fall as well.”

Director Marc Rothemund tells the gripping story of the last six days of Scholl’s life, in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. The film opened in New York on February 17th and opens in Los Angeles on February 24th, 2006, with a nationwide release to follow. Not just another period piece on Germany’s disturbing past, this film should have deep resonance for today’s movie fans who are concerned about civil and human rights. Stephen Holden, in a review of the film he wrote for the New York Times, said: “In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?”

For those in Los Angeles, Director Marc Rothemund will conduct a Q&A after the 5:30 pm & 8:15 pm screenings at Laemmle’s MUSIC HALL 3 on Friday Feb. 24th and Saturday‚ Feb. 25th, and also after the 4 pm show & 7 pm show Sunday the 26th at the Laemmle’s TOWN CENTER 5 in Encino (click here for more info on these theaters.)

On February 16th Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) program Dateline aired previously unpublished video and photos taken by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The damning pictures show Iraqi prisoners - bound, naked, wounded, some covered in blood or excrement - undergoing abuse at the hands of their American jailers. Dateline executive producer Mike Carey said SBS obtained hundreds of images from Abu Ghraib, and that many of the pictures depicted “homicide, torture and sexual humiliation” too appalling to be broadcast on television. The station will not say how they acquired the images, but the Pentagon, despite trying to prevent the publication of the photos in America, verified their authenticity.

Philip Kennicott, staff writer for the Washington Post, wrote an article titled Painted in Blood: an Abstract Expression of Horror, in which he made a remarkable observation about one of the photos snapped by a U.S. soldier. The photo appears “to be a toilet floor covered with blood and litter, framed by a small glimpse of tiled walls. It suggests a bathroom turned into a holding cell, or perhaps a scene from a hospital or triage center, or a torture chamber.” After acknowledging that few American media outlets have published the new photographs, Kennicott went on to describe the aforementioned snapshot;

“The blood on the floor instantly suggests the splatter and drip paintings of the abstract expressionists. Newspapers have often turned to blood as a substitute for violence, showing photographs of the gore that lingers on streets long after the bodies — too graphic to show — have been cleared away. Here, in a photo that contains no particular information, no names, no certainty even about whether it shows what it seems to show, is the blood image in a new form. This is no substitute, no polite euphemism for what can’t be shown. Blood as a substitute for death deflects horror; this blood demands answers. Comparing blood to paint, violence to art, is dangerous, even repellent. But in one sense, the blood on this floor is exactly like the paint drippings of Jackson Pollock, who captured the visible traces of action, the visual memory of gestures. In Pollock’s painting, the gestures fixed on canvas were often graceful, melodic even, with paint obeying the law of gravity with a gentle quiescence. If this is blood, we can only imagine what the gestures were.”

No doubt Pollock would be appalled by the new school of “Action Painting” founded at Abu Ghraib prison, and while Pollock had to suffer being called “Jack the Dripper” by a hostile press - that was the only torment he was subjected to. Today’s anonymous American “Dripper” working at the infamous Iraqi prison, left us a magnum opus installation piece composed of found objects, human body fluids and blood - materials not unfamiliar to some postmodern conceptual artists. However, this tour de force work is no mere vacuous creation devoid of meaning or social impact - no, it is a grand tribute to colonial arrogance and the denigration of the human spirit. Unfortunately the artist will most likely not want to take credit for the work… but I would urge this modern master to step forward into the limelight. Such genius cannot go unrewarded.

[ UPDATE: On Feb. 16th, Salon.com became the first U.S. media outlet to publish the new Abu Ghraib photos. According to Salon, over 1,000 photos, videos and supporting documents were made available to them by a source who "who spent time at Abu Ghraib as a uniformed member of the military and is familiar" with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. Salon insists that "America - and the world - has the right to know what was done in our name." They also remind us that "no high-ranking officer or official has yet been charged in the abuse scandal that blackened America's reputation across the world." You can seen the Abu Ghraib files at Salon.com. ]

August 6th, 2005, marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. August 9th, marks the bombing of Nagasaki. Those who survived the blasts became known as hibakusha (Atom Bomb Survivors), and in 1974 the hibakusha began contributing artworks to an unusual project that would preserve for the world their memories of atomic fire.

The Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK - Japan Broadcasting Corporation), encouraged hibakusha to submit original artworks based on personal experiences of having survived the nuclear bombings. Soon thousands of drawings, paintings and woodblock prints began arriving at the offices of NHK, and an exhibition of the collected paintings and drawings was mounted at the Peace Culture Center of Hiroshima in 1975.

In 1984 I had the distinct honor of organizing an exhibition of these remarkable paintings in an exhibit I curated at a venue in Venice California. I received some 30 images from Japan that had at the time, rarely been seen in the United States. Since then the NHK/hibakusha artworks have been compiled into several books and traveling exhibitions. To commemorate the first… and hopefully last atomic war, I’ve recently expanded the archive of hibakusha artworks I maintain on my Art For A Change website. The artworks can be viewed at: www.art-for-a-change.com/Atomic/atomic.htm

Virtually unknown in the west, The Hiroshima Panels are as profound an antiwar work as Pablo Picasso’s famous mural, Guernica. The creation of Japanese artists, Iri and Toshi Maruki (both now deceased), the panels depict the atomic holocaust wrought upon Japan when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The monumental panels, which are actually painted upon traditional-style folding screens, took 30 years to complete, and provide a chilling look at the terror of nuclear war. The husband and wife team visited the city of Hiroshima three days after it was bombed. They carried the injured, cremated the dead, searched for food, and gathered materials to help construct shelters. Overwhelmed by the destruction they witnessed, three years passed before the couple decided to set upon the creation of artworks that would communicate to the world the need to banish nuclear weapons.

Using a poetic figurative realism partly based upon traditional Japanese aesthetics, the Maruki’s painted a series of monumental panels that graphically portrayed how the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came face to face with the atomic age on the 6th and 9th of August, 1945. By 1956 the artists had completed ten panels, adding two new screens; the eleventh in 1959 and the twelfth in 1968. Each of the panels dealt with specific aspects of the bombing, and were appropriately titled with names like Ghosts, Fire and Atomic Desert.

The murals were no mere castigation of the U.S. for having dropped the bombs on Japan. The Maruki’s savagely criticized Japan’s own war-time militarists for being cruel imperialists, and in the panel portraying the Japanese occupation and rape of Nanking, China - all the ferocity and arrogance of Imperial Japan is laid bare.

The artists also painted a panel called Auschwitz, where the Nazi atrocities committed against the Jewish people were depicted with unrelenting clarity. The Maruki’s also painted panels showing Korean forced laborers and U.S. prisoners of war as victims of the atomic bombings. One panel, simply title Crows, illustrated a grisly scene - flocks of Crows descending from the sky to feast upon dead Koreans. Painted with a traditional flourish, it is a heartrending and pitiful image. As the artists wrote, “Koreans and Japanese look alike. Mercilessly charred faces - is there any difference? Together, Asians were devastated by the bomb.”

Known in Japan as, Genbaku no Zu (Hiroshima Murals), the panels brought international recognition to the artists. In 1995 the Maruki’s were recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize for their ardent creative work towards world peace. Their artworks were exhibited overseas numerous times, and a museum was established in Japan to house them in 1967. Iri passed away in 1995, and his wife Toshi, followed in 2000.

The Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels is still open to the public today, and they maintain a website were you can get a glimpse of this world treasure. Part of the gallery is the actual studio were the artists worked and painted. However, in recent years attendance has been dwindling, and the gallery has put out an emergency appeal for funds so that it may continue operating. Visit the online gallery, view the works, and offer a donation to keep this vital project going (the gallery can also be telephoned at 0493-22-3266). Writer and gallery board of directors member, Teruko Yoshitake, put it this way, “The Maruki’s continued to paint, hoping to make the 21st century a period of peace. We want people to help out to ensure that the gallery continues to function as the base for anti-nuclear sentiments and protecting the peace Constitution.” Twenty years ago, the artists wrote:

 “We began making sketches and worked day and night, encouraged by friends of the same mind who offered to act as models. As we painted, we thought and remembered and wondered. What is a 17 year old life span to a 17-year-old? What is a three year life to a three-year-old? The 900 sketches were merged together to create the paintings. We thought we had painted a tremendous number of people, but there were around 260,000 who died in Hiroshima.

If we painted for years, we could not put on paper the number killed in that one second. We prayed for the blessing of the dead and prayed that the bomb would never fall again and destroy life. With these thoughts supermost in our minds, as one painting was completed - we began another. The long lasting radioactivity and the latent effects of the bomb are still, nearly forty years later, causing suffering and death. This was not a natural disaster - that is the unforgettable horrifying fact.”

An important antiwar mural painted in Mexico by famed Japanese modern artist, Taro Okamoto (1911 - 1996), has been rediscovered after thirty five years. In Spanish the work is known as Mito del Mañana (Myth of Tomorrow), and in Japanese, Ashita no Shinwa - but like all great works of art, Okamoto’s painting speaks a universal language. The gigantic mural depicts the exact moment of an atomic bomb explosion, with the focus of the work being an anonymous human reduced to skeletal form and burning under an atomic sun.

Okamoto’s mural was originally painted in the lobby of what was to be a high-rise luxury hotel in Mexico City, but the developer encountered financial troubles that prevented the building’s completion. Okamoto’s wall painting, dismantled and put into storage, eventually disappeared - and it remained missing until just recently. In 2003 the mural was found abandoned in a yard for building materials located in a suburb of Mexico City. The Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Japan sent a team of restorers to Mexico to evaluate the condition of the artwork, and found that it was suffering minor damage. Calling the piece “Taro’s magnum opus”, the institution obtained the rights to the mural earlier this year. The mural has been shipped to Japan where museum staff and experts began restoration work in July, 2005. Okamoto’s mural will eventually be placed on public display at the end of 2006.

The Taro Okamoto Memorial Foundation for the Promotion of Contemporary Art released a statement that in part read, “Okamoto believed that the myths of the future develop at moments of cruelty and tragedy. This mural speaks from his deepest thoughts, from his heart.” While the world’s first atomic bombing of civilian population centers occurred in August 1945 when the U.S. devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear fire… it would be a mistake to see Okamoto’s artwork as fixated on those terrible events. Rather, his striking mural is a warning to all humanity, and the message is more relevant today than ever before. That we’ve grown accustomed to living with a nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging above us all is really the core meaning of the mural’s title - and our continued apathy only assures that tomorrow is indeed a myth.

Painted between 1968 and 1969 and measuring some 18 feet high by 98 feet long, Okamoto’s artwork is a powerful indictment of war. While it may seem incongruous that such a disturbing and forceful work of art would appear in the lobby of a luxury hotel, one must remember that Mexican restaurants, hotels, commercial and government buildings have often made wall space available for the display of controversial large-scale public artworks. The Mexican Muralist Movement led by greats David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, set the standards for a progressive and internationalist school of art. The radical and populist artworks of these masters and the many others who worked shoulder to shoulder with them, enhance public space all across Mexico. There’s absolutely no doubt that Taro Okamoto was inspired and influenced by the remarkable Mexican school of socially conscious artists, and the discovery and restoration of his mural is cause for celebration.