William Blake Exhibition Catalog 2022 - Flipbook - Page 7
perforated by bullet holes—look on apprehensively. Behind, the troops
viewer to consider what led up to this moment, and asks us to ponder
and their horses quietly stand; there is a slight breeze, but otherwise all
the cost of victory.
is still. What will happen next? Of course in hindsight—even in 1866—
the ultimate outcome of the war is written into history. But in Homer’s
telling, that history has not come to an end: it is ongoing.
William Blake’s paintings in “A Great Battlefield” channel the spirit
of Winslow Homer’s war imagery into our own contemporary world.
Hardly imitations, and much more than echoes, Blake’s portrayals,
Thus, Homer’s paintings seem not to belong only to the past but
muted and grave, prompt us to dwell on the long-ago war that has
to live in the present. The artist’s genius lay in his refusal to deliver
yet to release its hold on memory and imagination. Blake modeled his
Prisoners from the Front | Winslow Homer | 1866
Blake with Marines at Gettysburg | Anthony Coplan | 2020
easy, or any, narrative closure. Instead, his Civil War works induce us,
representations of the 1922 Marines’ reenactment of Pickett’s Charge
compel us, even, to contemplate the ambiguous meaning or meanings
on the US Marine Corps Historical Company’s reenactment of that
the artist inscribed in his tableaux of the war. The Veteran in a New
reenactment in 2020. Thus, these scenes take place at several removes
Field is an unknown quantity; we cannot even see his face. What did he
from the Civil War—a fact the artist does not attempt to obfuscate. We
do in the old field, the battlefield? What happened to him? Is he a hero?
see commemorative monuments in the distance; the men’s uniforms date
Or, like The Sharpshooter, is he, or was he, a murderer? Does he bear the
from the early twentieth century; the Marine posing as a corpse in Good
burden of some indelible trauma precipitated by the disasters of war?
Friday wears a wristwatch. Yet Blake’s renderings bring the conf lict
What does he remember, and what is he trying to forget? What does
vividly before us, not as bloody battles but as stilled moments for somber
his future hold? So too does Prisoners from the Front leave us hanging:
ref lection. The Civil War haunts us to this day: its long shadow has not
there is confrontation but no resolution. Homer instead prompts the
lifted from the land. n
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