The U.K. Daily Telegraph confirmed the story in an October 4th article, reporting that McDonald’s “faces a groundswell of discontent among museum staff.” The article quoted an art historian who works at the Louvre, who spoke only under the condition of anonymity: “This is the last straw. This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odors in the context of a museum.” No doubt there will be an outpouring of displeasure from the French people as well, since many have regarded McDonald’s as the spear point of U.S. cultural imperialism.

The Daily Telegraph article mentioned the activist group Louvre Pour Tous (Louvre For All), an arts advocacy organization I have written about in the past. A spokesperson for the group said the following about the Louvre McDonald’s: “Henri Loyrette, president of the Louvre museum, just had to say one word to stop the whiff of French fries from wafting past the Mona Lisa’s nose. He chose otherwise.”

It should be remembered that French farmer José Bové became a national hero in France when in 1999 he used a tractor to bulldoze a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in the town of Millau. Bové acted in unison with thousands of other farmers who were angrily opposing - not just American junk food (”malbouffe” - “foul food”), but the juggernaut of corporate globalization and it’s crushing of national culture.

While the French people have become more accommodating towards the U.S. corporate giant since Bové’s protest, it is difficult to imagine their accepting the spectacle of Ronald McDonald in the palatial halls of France’s greatest museum. I have no doubt French citizens will view the Louvre McDonald’s as an affront to their palace of fine art and to their world renown cuisine – it is an unbearable insult that I too find wholly unacceptable.

"Blue Dogs" – Michael Dal Cerro. Wood block print. 2009.

With good reason, health care reform has become a major topic in the United States. Patricia Dahlman and a number of like minded artists have created an online exhibition, Art for Health Care Reform, which addresses just some of the issues.

"To Your Health" – Deborah Harris. Linoleum block print. 2009.

The Village Vanguard
178 7TH Avenue South.
Greenwich Village, New York City
1 to 3 p.m. RSVP: 212-346-9309

Philip Stein, aka Estaño, at a 2008 exhibit of his work in New York City. Photo by Robert M. Siqueiros.

I will never forget finding the biography SIQUEIROS - His Life and Works, in a Los Angeles bookstore in 2003. As an artist deeply influenced by the Mexican Mural Movement, I was fascinated by the book’s scholarly yet readable examination of the Mexican muralists, and of the life and works of David Alfaro Siqueiros in particular. I did not purchase the book, which was written by Stein, but I spent the next day kicking myself for not having done so. I was astonished when the very next day the publisher of the book contacted me, inquiring if I would like a review copy of the book. The publisher was kind enough to put me in contact with Stein and from that point on Philip Stein and I became fast friends.

Stein of course was an active participant in the Mexican Mural Movement, and he worked with Siqueiros as an assistant painter on eleven murals in Mexico City from 1948 to 1958. It was in those early years that Siqueiros gave Stein the nickname of Estaño, a moniker that stuck ever since. The insights Stein provided me regarding the social realist movement of the period – both in Mexico and the United States - cannot be found in any book, not even Stein’s. I conducted an interview with him in 2004 that affords some clear understanding and deep perceptions of the man and his times – but clearly much more needs to be written.

"Stop The War" – Philip Stein. 1976. Acrylic on panel. 36" x 48" In the artist’s own words regarding the subject of this painting, "There is no end to this call of the people."

I was surprised to learn of Estaño’s passion for Jazz. He spent much time in the early Jazz clubs of New York, maintained an absolutely massive collection of Jazz records, hosted Jazz radio shows in Mexico and Spain, and produced two albums on the Jazz Art label. In 1968 he painted a glorious mural on an interior wall of the legendary New York Jazz club, the Village Vanguard – which should explain why his memorial is being held at that historic venue. The New York Times wrote an obituary for Stein at the time of his death which included a rare glimpse of the Vanguard mural, New Man, New Woman.

Regrettably, I will not be able to attend the memorial at the Village Vanguard, but come the day and hour of the celebration, I will play my copy of John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard, as a last salute to the people’s artist, Philip Stein.

"Dia de los Muertos" – Mark Vallen. 2003. Oil on wood panel.

I will be exhibiting two of my oil paintings at the Bakersfield Museum of Art from September 17, 2009 through November 22, 2009, as part of the museum’s Dia de Los Muertos – Day of the Dead exhibition. The exhibit presents artworks past and present that celebrate the traditional Mexican holiday, including a number of orginal prints by the renowned Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada.

"La Muerta" (The Dead Woman) – Mark Vallen. 2006. Oil on masonite panel.

In addition, the exhibit includes life-sized paper-mâché Calaveras (skeletons) by the famed Mexican artist Miguel Linares, whose family is world renown for their traditional Dia de Los Muertos sculptures, as well as paintings from Paul McMillan, Dirk Hagner, Gage Opdenbrouw, Gregg Stone, Frederick Chiriboga, and Joaquin Patino.

"La Madre y el Nino" (Mother and Child) – Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1941. The wretched of the earth.

Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín was an important two-year long traveling retrospective of artworks by Latin American master, Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919-1999). The exhibit recently ended its scheduled tour last August 16, 2009 at the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) in Long Beach, California. Guayasamín, hailed in his home country of Ecuador as a national hero and widely acclaimed throughout Latin America and indeed the world – is scarcely known in the United States. What accounts for this near total lack of recognition? Emphasizing the magnitude of his omission from public awareness in the U.S., I overheard someone say while viewing the show, “I’ve never heard of Guayasamín before. I don’t mean to sound sacrilegious, but I think he’s better than Picasso.”

Expertly curated by Joseph Mella, Director of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, Of Rage and Redemption first premiered in February of 2008 at the Vanderbilt before moving on to four other national venues, including a run at the Organization of American States’ Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. The exhibit was laid out as a timeline, starting with the artist’s early figurative works from the 1940s, and culminating with his late period minimalist paintings from the 1980s and 1990s. Walking through the exhibit not only gave insight into Guayasamín’s artistic development over the decades, it presented an overview of history as it occurred in Latin America and throughout the world, since the artist was deeply concerned with real world events. In his own words:

“I have used a powerful weapon, the plastic, to denounce and protest the bad behavior of ‘man against man.’ I speak the truth of my time, without the picturesque or the anecdotal. I don’t look for beauty - but for truth. I use the body of humanity to show the present and historical reality, without academic euphemisms; this humanity – tortured by injustice, misery and horror, is present in The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon.”

"La Cantera" (The Accident) – Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1941. The artist’s depiction of an industrial mining catastrophe. Rich in minerals and metals, Ecuador’s miners were subjected to exploitation and poor working conditions for much of the 20th century.

While Guayasamín was undoubtedly influenced by modernist aesthetics, he wanted to move away from European traditions in art. One might see the German Expressionists in his agitated brushstrokes and figurative exaggeration, but Guayasamín’s unique late style was inspired by the ancient civilizations of pre-Hispanic America; it was Inca, Maya, and Aztec aesthetics that fired his imagination and guided his vision.

The Maya murals of Bonampak, Mexico painted in 790 AD and the Inkapirqa (Inca wall), built in Ecuador by the Inca in the late 15th century before the Spanish conquest – had more to do with Guayasamín’s artistic vision than anything offered by the European avant-garde of the late 20th century. In part it was this “indigenismo”, the utilization and further development of deep-rooted indigenous aesthetics that made Guayasamín’s art so greatly admired throughout Latin America.

"Napalm" – Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1976

I would like to remark on a number of paintings presented in the exhibit, for example, the oil painting titled Napalm. It condemned the incendiary weapon made infamous by its massive use in Vietnam by the U.S. military. Guayasamín’s terrifying canvas looks as if it were made from scorched flesh and coagulated blood. Painted in 1976, the canvas surely alluded to Kim Phúc, the little Vietnamese girl who was severely burned in a napalm attack that took place in 1972.

Photos and motion picture film of Phúc running down a village road, her clothes burned off and her seared flesh hanging in strips, became some of the most unforgettable imagery from the Vietnam War. But Guayasamín was also undoubtedly thinking of how napalm had been used in Latin America as well. In 1965 the Peruvian army bombed guerrilla fighters at Mesa Pelada with U.S. supplied napalm, and in 1968 the Mexican government used the U.S. furnished jellied gasoline against guerrilla groups operating in the southern coastal state of Guerrero.

"Los Torturados" (The Tortured) – Oswaldo Guayasamín. Triptych. Oil on canvas. 1976-77. Painted in commemoration of Victor Jara, the slain Chilean folk singer.

The canvas Los Torturados (The Tortured) alludes to another tragic moment in history. Painted in the years 1976-77, Guayasamín’s canvas at first glance seems a commentary on the torture of civilians at the hands of military regimes, which indeed it is - but the artist had something more specific in mind. Chile’s democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, in a brutal military coup backed by the United States. Some 3,000 civilians were killed and thousands more were detained by the military junta.

One of those arrested was Victor Jara, the famous Chilean folk singer and supporter of the deposed socialist government. He was taken by the army to Chile Stadium in Santiago, then being used as a torture and detention camp for thousands of prisoners. Once they realized the celebrated singer was in their custody, soldiers began to savagely torture Jara. Troops broke both of his wrists and crushed the bones in both of his hands with rifle butts before machine-gunning him.

"Los Torturados" (Detail) – Oswaldo Guayasamín.

Three years later Guayasamín would dedicate Los Torturados to the spirit of Victor Jara. In 2004 a new democratically elected government honored the memory of the slain singer by renaming Chile Stadium, The Victor Jara Stadium. In 2008 a Chilean government investigation and autopsy confirmed that Jara had been tortured and shot 44 times. Finally, in May 2009, a former low ranking army conscript was charged with the murder of Jara.

Another impressive oil painting in the exhibit was the monolithic, Reunión en el Pentágono I-V (Meeting at the Pentagon I-V). The five panels created in 1970 offer psychological portraits of fictitious U.S. military chiefs conspiring behind closed doors.

"Reunión en el Pentágono I-V" (Meeting at the Pentagon I-V) - Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1970.

While viewing the panel portraits it is difficult not to think of director Stanley Kubrick’s doomsday film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, not for any intentional connection Guayasamín made to Kubrick’s cinematic masterwork, but simply because the paintings so brilliantly depict men whose minds have become unhinged by militarism.

While Kubrick drove home his point with dark humor, there is little of a comedic nature to be found in Guayasamín’s rough semi-abstract caricatures of the militarists. His military chiefs are Machiavellian ideologues practiced at placing lives in the balance for the sake of political expediency and bellicose Cold War objectives.

"Reunión en el Pentágono I-V" (Detail) - Oswaldo Guayasamín.

One is almost tempted to chuckle at the men in the portraits for all of their pomposity and ridiculous jingoism, but quiet laughter seems inappropriate. Guayasamín and his compatriots had seen too many hearts and souls crushed by real jackbooted tin horn dictators to find anything funny about them or their shadowy benefactors.

The technique employed by Guayasamín in creating the panels added to the work’s powerful narrative. He literally troweled oil paint onto the panels, spreading and smoothing it in places, scoring and scraping it off in other areas. Repeated applications of paint applied in this manner resulted in a textured surface over which he applied glazes of color. His figures were painted on a black underpainting, and his finishing brush strokes of black were painted into wet color. The painting is a tour de force, full of lustrous transparencies, aggressive brush strokes, and remarkable textures.

"Reunión en el Pentágono I-V" (Detail) - Oswaldo Guayasamín.

Guayasamín’s masterful handling of paint bestowed upon his subjects a surprising if distorted humanity. One appears as a fleshy bureaucrat and another as a rhinoceros-skinned brute. One blue-eyed fellow hunched over at his desk with a look of consternation etched upon his face displays an unexpected vulnerability. The shred of morality he still possessed had been stirred; his eyes convey self-loathing – or is it extreme doubt – over something he has done or is about to set into motion.

The history of U.S. military intervention in Latin America is so extensive that one could devote an entire lifetime to its study. U.S. military invasions and occupations in the hemisphere pre-dated the existence and influence of the Soviet Union, often cited as the reason for the U.S. engineered coups and assassinations that took place in the 20th century.

"Tears of Blood: Homage to Salvador Allende, Victor Jara, and Pablo Neruda" - Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1973. Not displayed at the MoLAA exhibit.

Prior to the founding of the Soviet Union there were at least 25 major U.S. military interventions in Latin America, from the 1848 war of the United States against Mexico – one of the most shameless land grabs in world history – to several thousand U.S. Marines occupying the Dominican Republic in 1916.

Guayasamín’s Meeting at the Pentagon portraits adhere to the profile of military leaders from “El Norte” that Latin Americans have long held, and there has been little recent evidence given to make them change their minds. Despite President Obama’s assurances that there will be “no senior partner and junior partner” in U.S.-Latin American diplomatic relations, his actions speak otherwise. His near passivity regarding the June 28, 2009 coup d’état in Honduras have left many wondering if Obama tacitly approves of the military coup. Every Latin American nation has withdrawn its ambassador from Honduras in protest of the coup, and member states of the European Union have done the same – it is only the U.S. that has failed to do so. Worse yet, Obama has struck a deal with the right-wing government of Colombia, giving U.S. military forces long-term access to seven military bases across that country and allowing for an expanded U.S. military presence in Colombia. At an Aug. 28, 2009 emergency meeting of the South American Union of Nations (Unasur) held in Argentina, South American heads of state blasted the Obama plan as a threat to regional peace and stability.

"Rigoberta Menchú" - Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1996. Portrait of the Guatemalan Maya human rights activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Price.

It was Simón Bolívar who once intoned, “Nuestra Patria se llama América” (The name of our country is América); an axiom that gave expression to a vision of hemispheric unity so deeply- instilled in Latin Americans that many still take umbrage when citizens of the United States use the name “America” to mean U.S. national exclusivity and pre-eminence. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Bolívar (1783-1830) came to be known as “The Liberator” for his leading role in the independence movement against the Spanish. Revered throughout Latin America for having smashed Spanish colonial rule in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, it was Bolívar’s pan-American vision that inspired and inflamed Latin American patriots ever since his death. That same pan-national fervor permeates Guayasamín’s art, yet it would be a mistake to view him as an artist who was devoted only to the people of the Americas; the core of his art was a passionate universal humanism.

"Los Niños Muertos" (The Dead Children) – Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1941. A territorial dispute between Ecuador and Peru erupted into war in 1941. In this painting the artist depicted children who had been massacred by unidentified military forces.

Strolling through the exhibit was akin to reading the works of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, in that Guayasamín presented the region’s anguished history in a visual language similar to the hallucinatory verse of Galeano. I first read Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, an authoritative history of the Americas from 1492 to the late 20th century, in the late 1970s; I have followed his writings ever since. However, it was his magnificent 1985 trilogy, Memoria del Fuego (Memory of Fire) that remains a favorite work of mine. A non-prosaic chronicle of the continent’s history, Memory reads like an epic poem that begins with the creation myths of indigenous people before there was written history, and ends in 1984 with a peasant fiesta in Bluefields, Nicaragua, where; “however much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breathes them and the land plows and loves them.” Galeano’s trilogy is a remarkably powerful and insightful work, and Guayasamín’s art is the closest visual equivalent I can think of.

"Portrait of Leonor Estrada" - Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on panel. 1952. Not displayed at the MoLAA exhibit.

Despite its profundity, the Of Rage & Redemption exhibition had its flaws, the greatest of which was overlooking Guayasamín’s extraordinary power as a modernist portraitist. Save for a few realistic early works, the exhibition focused mostly on the artist’s mid to late period minimalist style, where he reduced the human figure to near abstraction. On the whole, the viewer was left with a rather narrow view of Guayasamín.

To fully appreciate the weight of Guayasamín’s art one must begin with his portraits, of which he created hundreds over the expanse of his career. Without sentimentalism or showiness, Guayasamín painted the likenesses of friends, relatives, associates, workers, and fellow artists. As time went on he would also paint celebrities and presidents, but of those who sat to have their portrait painted - whether campesino or luminary – all were painted as equals. There were no “natural rulers” in Guayasamín’s universe; the only sovereigns were those who struggled against cruelty and injustice. The list of those who had their portraits painted reads like a directory of Latin American notables; Atahualpa Yupanqui, Mercedes Sosa, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Fidel Castro, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand, and many others.

"Rosa Zárate, Flor Decapitada" (Rosa Zárate, Decapitated Flower) - Oswaldo Guayasamín. Oil on canvas. 1987. Latin America’s first call for independence from Spain was made in Quito, Ecuador, on August 10, 1809. Rosa Zárate and her husband Nicolás de la Peña were fighters in the independence movement, and when it was repressed in 1812 the two fled to Colombia. The Spanish eventually captured and executed them in 1813, cutting off their heads and sending them back to Quito where they were displayed to intimidate the population. Ecuador won its independence in 1822, and Zárate was remembered as a national hero. While not displayed at the MoLAA exhibit, this painting is part of the "Image of the Mother Country" mural that hangs in the Ecuadoran Congress.

Guayasamín’s style of portraiture was largely based upon exaggerated caricature, yet his portraits were never cartoonish. Portraits from the 1940s and 1950s were generally more realistic, but his later period primitivist approach in no way bordered on kitsch, and while he stripped away superfluous details he always succeeded in capturing the unique spirit of his individual sitters. In its totality the body of Guayasamín’s portraiture can be viewed as the collective face of Latin America’s people.

It is a shame that more people in the United States are not familiar with the works of Oswaldo Guayasamín, but his not being well-known in the U.S. is an issue of some complexity. The fashionable art world of today, transfixed as it is with the strictures of postmodernism, essentially does not know what to make of such an artist. Irony, cynicism, and lack of introspection, are the hallmarks of today’s trendy art – all notions antithetical to Guayasamín’s work.

One can imagine the nauseating kitsch of Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles on display at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – but it is impossible to imagine Guayasamín’s memorial to the spirit of Victor Jara hanging in the same institution. Despite my differences with the Museum of Latin American Art, it deserves credit for mounting the Guayasamín retrospective.

For more information on the work of Oswaldo Guayasamín, visit the official website of the Guayasamín Foundation. MoLAA offers a small illustrated catalog of the exhibit, which is available at the museum’s gift shop. However, a splendid and much superior collaborative book by Guayasamín and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda can be purchased through Amazon. Titled America, My Brother, My Blood, the book combines words and poetry by Neruda with paintings and drawings by Guayasamín. Image of the Mother Country, a colossal mural commissioned by the government of Ecuador, hangs in that country’s Legislative Palace (Congress) in the capital of Quito. The National Assembly of the Republic of Ecuador maintains an illustrated Spanish language .pdf file that explains the history and narrative of the mural – which was installed and officially unveiled in 1988.

"Imagen de la Patria" (Image of the Mother Country) - Oswaldo Guayasamín. Mural. 1987-1988. Mounted in the Republic of Ecuador Legislative Palace (Congress). The multi-panel acrylic mural is supported by an aluminum superstructure and offers a pictorial history of the Republic.

“Provide Health Care to Artists: Finding affordable health coverage has often been one of the most vexing obstacles for artists and those in the creative community. Since many artists work independently or have non-traditional employment relationships, employer-based coverage is unavailable and individual policies are financially out of reach. Barack Obama’s plan will provide all Americans with quality, affordable health care. His plan includes the creation of a new public program that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health care similar to that available to federal employees.

His plan also creates a National Health Insurance Exchange to reform the private insurance market and allow Americans to enroll in participating private plans, which would have to provide comprehensive benefits, issue every applicant a policy, and charge fair and stable premiums. For those who still cannot afford coverage, the government will provide a subsidy. His health plan will lower costs for the typical American family by up to $2,500 per year.”

While it is commendable that a politician would recognize the unique needs of the self-employed creative community when it comes to health care, I always found the words “affordable health coverage” to be problematic. Affordable to whom? What is reasonably priced to someone making more than $100,000 a year is prohibitive to someone making less than $20,000. The great majority of artists simply cannot afford a health plan, and in these tough economic times many artists are now faced with the challenge of either purchasing the supplies necessary to carry on with their work, or buying the basic necessities of life. In such a context, there is no such thing as “affordable.”

Mr. Obama told the arts community that his reform plan would allow arts professionals to either purchase health insurance from a low cost government-run “public option” insurance program, or from private insurance companies. He maintained that reasonably priced government insurance coverage would “force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest” - while inducing those companies to drop their rates. The public option concept was promoted as a cornerstone of Obama’s health care reform message, marketed not only to creative professionals, but to the wider U.S. public on a continual basis.

Obama-care has been an amorphous and ever-changing scheme; nevertheless loyal supporters of Obama and the Democratic Party attempted to rally the citizenry behind the public option banner. Then came crushing news from the Associated Press on August 16 – White House appears ready to drop public option;

“Bowing to Republican pressure and an uneasy public, President Barack Obama’s administration signaled Sunday it is ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system.”

Of the several health care bills currently being crafted in Washington, it is the one being worked out by the bipartisan Senate Finance Committee that seems to have curried favor with President Obama. The proposal from Republican and conservative “Blue Dog” Democratic Senators contains no public option; instead putting forward “medical co-ops” as an alternative. But if co-ops could actually act as an effective counterbalance to the dominance of multi-billion dollar insurance companies, then free-market conservatives and the health industry would oppose them.

On August 6, 2009, BusinessWeek published a penetrating article titled, The Health Insurers Have Already Won, detailing how “UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit.” As the article pointed out, on June 4, 2009 the chief executive of insurance giant UnitedHealth, gave a visit to Senator Kent Conrad (Democratic member of the Senate Finance Committee), and thereafter the good Senator:

“led an effort to create nonprofit medical cooperatives that would operate much like utility co-ops as a substitute for a federally run plan. With less heft than a proposed national plan, the state medical cooperatives would pose a far weaker competitive threat to private insurers. (….) The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business.”

On August 5, 2009, the New York Times ran an explosive article titled, White House Affirms Deal on Drug Cost, reporting on a secret deal made by President Obama with the pharmaceutical industry.  The deal placed a ceiling on the amount of money the U.S. government can save when using its enormous purchasing power to negotiate for lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Pfizer, and Abbot Laboratories. The opening paragraph of the New York Times piece was damning enough:

“Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.”

The disclosure that lobbyists for multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies swayed President Obama, who had promised his administration would be impervious to the machinations of special interest lobbyists – was a political bombshell to some. According to the Associated Press, the pharmaceutical giants are sealing their agreement by providing the White House with up to $200 million in advertising to “help” President Obama push through his health care plan. The AP reported that the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), launched a public relations campaign supporting Obama’s health plan that “includes television advertising under PhRMA’s own name and commercials aired in conjunction with the liberal group, Families USA.” The AP story also noted that PhRMA has so far already spent more than $6 million in nationwide advertising in support of Obama-care.

It is interesting to note that in his remarks delivered at the August 11, 2009 New Hampshire Town Hall Meeting on health-care, President Obama mentioned the $80 billion in supposed drug cost “savings” but failed to mention the deal he made with the pharmaceutical giants to help boost their profits.

In a July 6, 2009 article titled, Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying, The Washington Post reported that “the nation’s largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues.” The article observed that the lobbyists “are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight.” The Washington Post went on to note that PhRMA “doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million”, and that overall “health-care companies and their representatives spent more than $126 million on lobbying in the first quarter.”

Under President Obama’s plan, with or without the so-called “public option”, tens of millions of American citizens will be legally obliged to purchase health insurance, which presents nothing less than a colossal financial boon for the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants. The total compensation for insurance company CEO’s in 2008 was $67,859,239. Robert A. Williams, CEO of Aetna, made $24,300,112, H. Edward Hanway of Cigna brought in $12,236,740. What do these ridiculously extravagant salaries have to do with delivering quality healthcare to the nation’s citizenry? Real reform is impossible if private insurance companies are to play a role in the nation’s health care system.

The only logical remedy to the U.S. health care crisis is the implementation of publicly funded and privately delivered health care for everyone – Medicare for All - a “Single-Payer Health Care” system based upon need and not the ability to pay. Under such a plan every American would receive comprehensive services for all medical needs. Health care providers would be paid through a single non-profit fund that is run in the public interest, and billing, deductibles, and co-payments would be eliminated. Insurance companies would have no role in delivering health care. A proposal for such a health care system has been introduced in the U.S. Congress (H.R. 676), and it is backed by some ninety legislators. Physicians For A National Health Program (PNHP) have launched a campaign to pressure the Obama administration to adopt single-payer health reform, which Obama initially supported long ago as a Senator, but now consistently opposes.

At his August 11th Town Hall Meeting in New Hampshire, the only reason President Obama could give for not supporting single-payer health care was that, in his words: “we historically have had a employer-based system in this country, with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that, I believe, would be too disruptive.” In other words, President Obama can bail out Wall Street to the tune of some $23.7 trillion, or spend hundreds of billions on fighting a war in Afghanistan, but providing universal health care to the American people is “too disruptive.”

Meanwhile, here in my home city of Los Angeles, thousands of people have lined up at the L.A. Forum indoor arena to receive free healthcare from the volunteer doctors of the charity organization, Remote Area Medical (RAM). Initially created to bring free medical care to Third World countries,  RAM now provides essential health care to the working poor living in isolated rural areas of the U.S. like Appalachia. The L.A. Forum clinic was the first time RAM had operated in a major American city. Surely this is not what was meant by the slogan, “Change We Can Believe In.”

“I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.” - President Barack Obama, prime time news conference. July 22, 2009.

A Shadkhn - Bernard Zakheim. Costume design sketch for L.A. production of Sholem Aleichem’s, The Doctor, circa late 1920s. Shadkhn is Yiddish for “Matchmaker”, and in Yiddish Theater the matchmaker was portrayed carrying an umbrella. Image courtesy of Nathan Zakheim and A Shenere Velt Gallery. Photo by Kirsten Cowan.

Titled Bernard Baruch Zakheim: Paris, San Francisco and Beyond, the exhibition is made up of 24 paintings and drawings created by the artist from the early 30s to the late 50s. I attended the opening of the exhibit and was pleased to meet the artist’s son, Nathan Zakheim, who regaled me with tales of his father’s life and work. It was a fortuitous encounter that gave me further insight into the creative output of Bernard Zakheim. Consisting mostly of sketches, watercolors, and studies for murals never created, the exhibition presents works that have rarely, if ever, been shown in public.

Nathan Zakheim told me that his father lived in Los Angeles for a short time in the late 1920s, and at some point produced costume and set design sketches for the Yiddish theater. A number of sketches created for a production of The Doctor by the famous Yiddish playwright Sholem Aleichem, are included in the exhibit. The gestural and humorous nature of these drawings makes them a sheer delight, but they are also important in that they are documents of the vibrant Yiddish theater scene that once existed in L.A. The adaptation of The Doctor that Zakheim worked on took place at the Wilshire Ebell Theater – then a major venue of literary Yiddish plays in L.A. along with the Assistance League Playhouse in Hollywood and The Globe Theater (now the New Beverly Cinema).

Study for WPA mural - Bernard Zakheim. Tempera on paper. Circa 1935. This full color sketch was submitted to the Works Progress Administration for a mural on the subject of immunology research. Regrettably the WPA did not commission the work. Image courtesy of Nathan Zakheim and A Shenere Velt Gallery. Photo by Kirsten Cowan.

Two works on display in the exhibit, a finished sketch for a mural on medicine and immunology and a preliminary painting titled, The Donner Party, were submitted as mural proposals to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the mid-1930s, but unfortunately were never commissioned. Zakheim’s sketch for the immunology mural is related to the well-known 1935 mural he created on the history of California medicine for the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. Notwithstanding being a classic example of art from the 1930s, the mural sketch on display at the A Shenere Velt Gallery is a lost treasure of sorts. I can only speculate as to why the WPA did not approve Zakheim’s immunology mural, but the drawing certainly belongs in a museum collection.

The Donner Party is an especially moving painting based upon the doomed party of some 80 American settlers who attempted to reach California by covered wagon in 1846, but instead became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada – where they resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Painted with tempera on paper, the study has the look and brush strokes of a fresco mural, and no doubt Zakheim intended it to be a mural for a post office or school. The painting depicts two figures, a seated man in a state of torment, and the woman who comforts him with her merciful touch. The man’s left hand is clenched into a fist of anguish and he wears a look of dismay upon his face, having just realized what he must do in order to stay alive. The woman has placed her hand upon his in a gesture that conveys acceptance of the unavoidable. The profundity of Zakheim’s painting goes well beyond the depiction of a tragic event in American history, instead it speaks of the “human condition”; the needless suffering people everywhere must endure in life. The work was also prescient, as the couple Zakheim painted could have been – just a few years later – European Jews contemplating annihilation under fascism.

Student Scholar - Bernard Zakheim. Tempera on paper. 1931. Image courtesy of Nathan Zakheim and A Shenere Velt Gallery. Photo - Kirsten Cowan.

Bernard Baruch Zakheim’s life as an artist was set in motion when he was a young man in Poland, but one could say that his professional career actually began once he settled in San Francisco. In June of 1930 he organized the city’s First Yiddish Art Exhibition, a showing of Jewish painters, sculptors, poets, and composers from San Francisco. He had developed a fascination with the socially engaged artists of the Mexican Muralist Movement, and was particularly interested in Diego Rivera, and so he sent the Mexican muralist a portfolio of drawings for comradely appraisal – a deed that would end up transforming Zakheim forever. Rivera would invite Zakheim to his studio in Mexico City, and when the two met in 1930 Rivera praised Zakheim’s drawings of Jewish life, commenting that “every artist puts into his work something of his own soil, of his own people.” Zakheim worked with Rivera long enough to know that his future lay in creating public works of art that were challenging in nature.

After his encounter with Rivera, Zakheim would make a sojourn to Paris, France in 1931, where he created a number of sketches and watercolors. A few of these are included in the exhibit, like the spontaneously painted watercolor portrait, American Girl in Paris, and Student Scholar, which provides a depiction of Orthodox Jewry in Paris just prior to the Nazi occupation of 1940. Zakheim returned to San Francisco in ‘32, receiving his first mural commission a year later from the newly-built Jewish Community Center at the intersection of California Street and Presidio Avenue. While Zakheim was a secular Jew absorbed in socialist politics, he always thought it important to highlight Jewish culture and heritage in his art, and so his mural for the center was a celebration of Jewish life. The mural depicted a festive Jewish wedding celebration, with rabbis, wedding couple, musicians, dancers, and athletes. The press wrote good reviews about the mural, no doubt pleased that the bohemian left-winger had avoided doing something controversial - but that would soon change.

The Library - Bernard Zakheim. Coit Tower fresco mural. 1934.

In 1933 Zakheim and fellow artist Ralph Stackpole lobbied the government for a commission that would allow artists to paint murals on the interior walls of San Francisco’s newly constructed Coit Tower. Their efforts paid off when in 1934 the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) gave twenty-six artists – Zakheim and Stackpole included – the task of creating the Coit murals under the direction of Victor Arnautoff.

Zakheim chose to depict a U.S. public library in his mural - it would become his most well-known and contentious work. He painted a number of his friends into the mural, like the anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth, depicted on a ladder reaching for a book on a top shelf. In the upper-right corner of the mural Zakheim painted the modernist sculptor Beniamino Bufano reading a paper with the headline, B. Bufano’s St. Francis Just Around The Corner. It was a reference to Bufano’s 18-foot granite statue of St. Francis of Assissi; a sculpture finally set in place in front of the Church of St. Francis in San Francisco on August 27, 1955. Bufano was certainly a colorful character; thoroughly bohemian, but a devout Roman Catholic in addition to being an anarcho-pacifist. When President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany in 1917, Bufano chopped off the trigger finger of his right hand and mailed it to the president as a protest against America’s entry into the war.

The Library - Bernard Zakheim. Detail of Coit Tower fresco mural. 1934. Zakheim included a portrait of fellow artist John Langley Howard reaching for a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Zakheim also worked fellow Coit Tower muralist and friend John Langley Howard into The Library – reaching for a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Zakheim was twice asked by officials to obliterate the reference to Marx from his mural, and his refusal to do so almost scuttled the entire project. Ultimately Zakheim’s stubbornness prevailed and Das Kapital remained.

Starting in 1940 Zakheim began a series of remarkable easel paintings titled Jewish Patriots of the American Revolution. The works revealed and commemorated the historic role of Jews in the anti-colonial American Revolution waged against the British Empire. When American patriots began the Revolutionary War of Independence against Great Britain, there were fewer than 2,000 Jews living in the 13 colonies, and the majority of them championed and fought for the anti-colonial cause. Zakheim wanted people to remember that history, and so began his group of paintings. One of the canvases was titled, Revolutionary Patriot Chaim Soloman revealing secrets of Red Coat military activities to an American Officer.

Revolutionary Patriot Chaim Soloman revealing secrets of Red Coat military activities to American Officer - Bernard Baruch Zakheim. Oil on canvas. 1940. A wealthy broker, Soloman became a leading financial backer of the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.

Chaim Soloman was an early member of the Sons of Liberty, a secret mass organization of anti-colonial rebels in the Thirteen Colonies whose slogan was “no taxation without representation.” The Sons of Liberty attacked the property and symbols of British power, with the group’s most famous propaganda of the deed being the 1773 Boston Tea Party. More importantly, as a wealthy broker Soloman became a primary financial backer of the American Revolution. Zakheim painted a tableau in which Soloman appears as a revolutionary spy, passing on intelligence information about the Red Coats to an unidentified commander of the American Continental Army. In actuality the British arrested Soloman for spying in 1776. Though pardoned, he was arrested again in 1778 and sentenced to death. He escaped to the rebel capital of Philadelphia were he resumed his duel role as financial broker and pro-Independence revolutionary.

Mass Executions in the Stadium - Bernard Baruch Zakheim. Watercolor. 1939. Zakheim, an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republic, depicted the fascist troops of dictator Ferdinand Franco butchering workers in an amphitheater, the scene illuminated by an army searchlight.

Unfortunately the Zakheim exhibition at the A Shenere Velt Gallery is rather limited in scope, presenting only a small number of sketches and paintings from the artist’s enormous body of work. Perhaps a comprehensive retrospective of his art will someday be mounted by a museum; such a showing is certainly long overdue. In the meantime I have attempted to pique the interest of those unfamiliar with Zakheim by mentioning some of his paintings not included in the exhibit just reviewed. I also suggest visiting www.bernardzakheim.com, which handles the artist’s estate.

The Bernard Baruch Zakheim: Paris, San Francisco and Beyond exhibit runs until  October 23, 2009. A Shenere Velt Gallery is located on the Westside of Los Angeles at the Workmen’s Circle building: 1525 S. Robertson Blvd. LA CA 90035. Phone: 310-552-2007.

Commando – Movie poster for Director Mark Lester’s 1985 action film, Commando, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Life mimics art? "Somewhere, somehow, someone’s going to pay."

The California state assembly reached a bipartisan agreement to “resolve” the state’s $26 billion budget shortfall by implementing $15 billion in cuts to social services. These cuts represent nothing less than a human catastrophe for the working poor living in California. On July 28, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law, but used his line-item veto to make $656 million in additional cuts. As he signed the budget, Schwarzenegger warned that the state’s financial problems were far from over, and that further cuts may be forthcoming.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the “new reductions will affect child welfare and children’s healthcare, the elderly, state parks and AIDS treatment and prevention, going beyond the dramatic cuts that were part of the deal Schwarzenegger negotiated with legislative leaders.” In referring to the budget fiasco, the New York Times described California as “broke, embattled,” and “politically crippled.”

The new budget has slashed $8.1 billion from public education programs. President-elect of the California Association of School Business Officials, Renee Hendrick, remarked on the budget cuts; “I think you’re going to see larger class size, reduction in arts and music programs - I don’t think we’ve seen the full magnitude of the cuts yet.”

My line of reasoning has always found art to be inextricably linked to real world events and situations. Art and artists in California are undeniably impacted by the collapsing economy and budget cuts, but arts professionals cannot frame the crisis just in economic terms. While financial concerns are important, there is a much larger matter at stake that transcends whether or not art will be purchased in hard times or if galleries can stay open without altruistic patrons. The issue at hand has to do with art’s role in preserving and developing our collective humanity, especially in bleak days. Which is why stripping away or eliminating art and music programs for children in public schools is such a reprehensible and unpardonable crime - it is a symptom of spiritual rot.

In a video posted to his Twitter account, Gov. Schwarzenegger brandishes an enormous knife while talking about cutting government spending.

So far, press coverage of the current budget crisis has mostly neglected to mention the devastating effects the California state government cuts will have on the arts, a subject that has even been given short shrift by those web logs usually devoted to art news. The only solid report I could find on the subject came from a local television news story from the California State Capital of Sacramento, where a children’s theater class has written and performed a musical that protests the elimination of art and music programs in education.

If it were ranked as a country, California would have the sixth largest economy in the world. One might think such an economy would be “too big to fail”, which is how President Obama described Wall Street companies Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and American International Group before bailing them out with hundreds of billions in taxpayer’s money. The Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) recently told a congressional committee that the Obama administration’s bailout of the banks may reach $23.7 trillion. Those of us in California can expect no such equivalent bailout from Mr. Obama.

In a June 16, 2009 article, White House says no to California budget help, Reuters quoted Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs at a White House press briefing. Answering a question regarding whether the Obama administration would provide an emergency financial bailout for the state, Gibbs said: “It’s obviously not an easy time for the state of California. We’ll continue to monitor the challenges that they have, but this budgetary problem unfortunately is one that they’re going to have to solve.” That same Reuters article made note of another historic rebuff when a U.S. president denied federal money to a financially beset city or state. “In 1975 the New York Daily News ran the headline ‘Ford to city: drop dead,’ when then President Gerald Ford denied assistance to New York City that would have allowed the U.S. financial capital to sidestep filing for bankruptcy.”

The current California budget crisis is just the tip of the iceberg; the status of arts funding across the U.S. can only be categorized as deplorable. For instance, the state of Florida has slashed arts funding from $34 million in 2007 to just $3 million for this year. Mr. Obama’s much talked about $50 million in emergency funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, money that is currently beginning to trickle down to arts organizations across the country, can be equated to a few raindrops falling on a parched and arid region. A drizzle in federal and state arts funding will not revive the arts – what is required is a torrential downpour.

Sandinista – Mark Vallen. Linoleum block & serigraphic print. 1986. Nine color silkscreen print created to commemorate the anniversary of Augusto César Sandino’s death.

It was in 1984 that I originally carved the linoleum block from which I would pull the black and white print titled, Sandinista.

I created the print to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Augusto César Sandino, the legendary Nicaraguan patriot who was murdered February 21, 1934. Initially I mechanically reproduced the artwork as an offset litho flyer, of which thousands of copies were distributed in Los Angeles. Two years later I would rework the black and white artwork into a full color silkscreen print.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Sandino’s death, and having only a small number of my nine-color silkscreen prints remaining, I thought it would be appropriate to offer them as rare signed and numbered prints, as well as to make known the story behind their creation.

Just who was Augusto César Sandino? My interest in him began in the early 1970s, when I commenced serious study of Latin American history and found out that he was a celebrated figure in Nicaragua and throughout Latin America – even to this day; a man often compared to Simón Bolívar and referred to as the “General de los hombres libres” (General of free men). In the United States during the late 1920s, Sandino was villainized and condemned as a “bandit”, but by the late 1930s he was almost entirely forgotten in the U.S. Augusto César Sandino should be remembered as one who dreamt of, and fought for, a united Latin America that was free, sovereign, and independent.

By the late 20th century in Nicaragua, Sandino’s visage had been transformed into a popular, almost ubiquitous symbol of freedom. His silhouette was immediately recognizable to all, and the ten gallon hat that he wore in the 1930s became an ever-present symbol. This short-hand language of rebellion was to become so conceptually abstract that by the time of the 1979 revolution Sandino’s portrait was rarely seen: instead, minimalist and highly stylized depictions of his hat were etched or spray painted onto surfaces everywhere. Likewise, Sandino’s commanding silhouette was carved, daubed, and spray painted onto every available surface.

In my silkscreen print I portrayed an anonymous individual waving a flag marked with a silhouette of Sandino, his faceless outline a ghost that will forever haunt tyrants and invaders.

Signed and number copies of this print can be purchased here.

Sandinista
9 color Linoleum block & serigraphic print. 1986
(c) Mark Vallen. Hand pulled by the artist
Dimensions: 11” x 17”
Signed and numbered by the artist
Edition of 50
$50

“We do not protest against the magnitude of the intervention,
but simply against intervention.” - Augusto César Sandino

Augusto César Sandino was born May 18, 1895, in Nicaragua’s Masaya province, but his story actually began with the interventionist foreign policy of the United States. The U.S. was interested in Nicaragua as a potential site for a canal linking the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, expanding trade routes and extending U.S. control over the entire region. In order to guarantee that Nicaragua would remain under its domination, the U.S. directly intervened in the country several times starting in 1909. In 1912, Washington sent thousands of troops to wipe out a nationalist uprising – the beginning of a military occupation that continued until 1933.

When civil war broke out between Nicaraguan liberals and conservatives in 1926, Sandino joined and fought on the side of the liberals. In 1927 the U.S. intervened on the side of the conservatives “in order to protect U.S. citizens.” Initially landing some 5,000 U.S. soldiers in the city of Corinto, the Yanks then bombed the liberal-held city of Chinandega by airplane – it would be the very first air attack in U.S. military history to be conducted against a civilian population center. Liberal politicians and generals surrendered to the U.S. backed conservatives that same year, and Washington sent 800 more Marines to support the new regime, but Sandino refused to surrender. From his mountain jungle hideaway he issued a July 1st manifesto that read in part:

“My greatest honor is to have come up from the ranks of the oppressed, who are the heart and soul of our people. We have been at the mercy of those hired assassins who helped foment high treason: the Conservatives of Nicaragua who have destroyed the nation’s dream of freedom and relentlessly persecuted us as if we were not the sons and daughters of the same country. I accept the challenge to fight, and I myself am ready to initiate the struggle. My answer to the cowardly invaders and traitors to our country is my battle cry. My body and those of my soldiers will form walls against which the legions of Nicaragua’s enemies will be dashed to pieces.”

On July 16, 1927, the U.S. again used airpower against Nicaraguans, this time dropping bombs on Sandino’s forces in the city of Ocotal. It was another aviation first, the earliest known instance of U.S. ground forces directing an air attack. Five U.S. Marine biplanes managed to kill some 300 people, according to press accounts at the time. Newspaper editorial cartoons around the world expressed outrage and dismay over the carnage being inflicted by the U.S. air war. Soon after the air attacks, the U.S. worked with its client government in the capital of Managua on the creation of the National Guard – Nicaraguan troops that would be trained, armed, financed, and directed by U.S. commanders. In a March 28, 1928 article titled Expect Long Stay for Marines, the New York Times wrote about a comment then Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes made concerning the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua:

“Notwithstanding that Charles E. Hughes is quoted here as declaring at the recent Pan-American conference at Havana that the marines would be withdrawn from Nicaragua at the earliest possible time, it is improbable that any responsible person here believes they can be withdrawn for many months, perhaps for years, to come. The Nicaraguans themselves, Conservative and Liberals alike, declare unreservedly that anarchy would descend on the country again if the United States withdrew its forces.”

In November of 1932 Juan Bautista Sacasa won Nicaragua’s presidential election, and Sandino agreed to peace talks with Sacasa’s government. The U.S. Marines finally withdrew from the country in 1933, leaving their well trained and armed surrogates, the National Guard, to preserve order. On February 21, 1934, General Sandino, his father, and three aids were driven to President Sacasa’s home for dinner. By order of Anastasio Somoza García, head of the National Guard, Sandino and his party were seized by Guardsmen, taken to an open field, and fatally shot. Two years later Somoza overthrew the government of Sacasa and declared himself leader of the country. The U.S. government did not break diplomatic relations with Somoza’s regime, preferring instead to support military dictatorship in Nicaragua for the next four decades.

A 50 años Sandino Vive (After 50 years Sandino Lives) - Anonymous artist. 1984. Stencil artwork on the streets of Managua, Nicaragua, celebrating the nationalist hero, Augusto César Sandino.

The poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez assassinated Somoza in 1956, but power was immediately transferred to his eldest son, Luis Somoza Debayle. In 1961 nationalists and left-wing activists rallied behind the legacy of Augusto César Sandino to establish the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (F.S.L.N.), or the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Their intent was to bring down the Somoza dynasty. Luis Somoza Debayle would die of a heart attack in 1967, and the reins of government were then handed over to the youngest Somoza, West Point graduate Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Somoza the younger ran Nicaragua like it was his own personal fiefdom, his brutality and corruption shocking the international community, but the U.S. continued to support him until the very last moment.

Patria Libre o Morir (Free Country or Death) – Graffiti on the side of a bombed-out building in Managua, Nicaragua, 1979. A scribbled drawing of Sandino’s hat floats above and below the letters, F.S.L.N. (Sandinista National Liberation Front), the revolutionaries who overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. Photo taken by Koen Wessing.

By 1977 all of Nicaragua was swept up in strikes and insurrectionary violence against Somoza, and his feared National Guard unleashed a reign of terror across the nation. Pedro Chamorro, a critic of Somoza and the editor of the conservative newspaper, La Prensa, was murdered in 1978 – and the dictator was widely suspected of having ordered the newsman’s death. Sandinista rebels began to take over major towns and cities, and Somoza’s National Guard responded with the relentless aerial bombardment of civilian centers. Some 50,000 people died during this period, and since war conditions prevented burials in cemeteries, bodies were simply cremated in the streets.

On June 20, 1979, ABC news reporter Bill Stewart and his interpreter, Juan Espinosa, were stopped at a National Guard checkpoint in the capital of Managua. Troops ordered the two out of their car and escorted them a few yards from the vehicle. ABC cameraman Jack Clark remained in the car, filming the entire encounter. The soldier in charge made Stewart lie face down on the ground - moments later shooting him in the back of the head at close range. The Guardsmen then murdered Espinosa. Miraculously, Clark managed to put the car in reverse and evade the killers. That evening his film was broadcast on television news all around the world. In the U.S., there was so much public outrage over the killings that President Jimmy Carter was finally forced to cut military aid to Somoza. Less than a month later, on July 19, 1979, the dictator fled the country and the National Guard surrendered to the great-grandsons and granddaughters of Augusto César Sandino.

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.) ]