01 Work, The Art of War, Claggett Wilson's Symphony of Terror, with footnotes

Claggett Wilson, born Washington, DC 1887-died New York City 1952

Symphony of Terror, c. 1919

Watercolor, pencil and varnish on paperboard

19 × 23 in. (48.2 × 58.4 cm)

The Smithsonian

The more muted palette here does not detract from the power of the explosion. The sickly yellow glow at the centre, at first, disguise the masked faces rising up on the horizon; a choir invisible, bringers of death. More on this painting

Within months of the armistice that ended the First World War, the American artist Claggett Wilson (1887–1952), who had fought in France as a combat marine, produced a riveting portfolio of two dozen watercolors based on his wartime experiences. Wilson had trained in Paris at the progressive Académie Julien, exhibited at the Armory Show, and been an art instructor at Columbia University. Now he combined modernist techniques with popular visual culture in an effort to render visible the atrocities he had seen and the physical and mental wounds he had sustained. These paintings, long kept in storage and little known today, are vital testaments to an artist’s disturbing recollections of military violence. Reminiscent of the prints in Francisco de Goya’s early nineteenth-century Disasters of War series, they are tragic, appalling, and bitingly ironic. More on Claggett Wilson

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