1 00:00:00,450 --> 00:00:04,590 At a meeting of the National Arts Club in New York City in 1918, 2 00:00:04,590 --> 00:00:12,000 the venerated printmaker Joseph Pennel addressed club members on the topic of lithography in his youth. 3 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:21,060 Several decades earlier, Pennel had been a protege of Whistler, and from that master he had learnt not only the print maker's art, 4 00:00:21,060 --> 00:00:26,160 but also Whistler famously called the gentle art of making enemies. 5 00:00:26,160 --> 00:00:33,920 On this occasion, Pennel took took the opportunity to spray to rival 25 years his junior, 6 00:00:33,920 --> 00:00:40,440 the painter George Bellows, who had recently entered the field of printmaking with alarming success. 7 00:00:40,440 --> 00:00:47,770 The point at issue was authenticity. Pennel insisted. 8 00:00:47,770 --> 00:00:55,610 Hi. Come in. Pennel insisted that artists should only paint or draw what they can observe. 9 00:00:55,610 --> 00:00:58,360 No direct face to face encounter. 10 00:00:58,360 --> 00:01:07,630 He denied that a true artist could, quote, could ever, with any safety, see and experience beyond the actual fact before him. 11 00:01:07,630 --> 00:01:12,220 With this, he wants to swipe at Bellows, who is in attendance that evening. 12 00:01:12,220 --> 00:01:18,220 The older artists singled out Bellows, much praised new oil painting showing the death of Edith Cavel, 13 00:01:18,220 --> 00:01:24,130 the British Red Cross nurse executed by a German firing squad in 1915. 14 00:01:24,130 --> 00:01:30,560 Bella's had based his painting on a lithographic drawing. All right. 15 00:01:30,560 --> 00:01:38,700 On a lithographic drawing he had completed several months earlier. If Mr. George Bello is, Pennel announced, 16 00:01:38,700 --> 00:01:45,750 had been himself present at the death at the execution of Edith Cavill and had seen the whole thing with his own eyes, 17 00:01:45,750 --> 00:01:51,360 he would have painted a far more authentic picture than the one he made up out of his head. 18 00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:59,180 And before telling you what what Bello said in reply, I should point out that this was a very strange comment to come from Joseph Pennel, 19 00:01:59,180 --> 00:02:11,160 who in that same year, 1918, produced what is certainly the most apocalyptic visual image to circulate in America during the First World War. 20 00:02:11,160 --> 00:02:18,510 Clearly, it, too, is a construct of the artist's imagination. It envisions a decapitated Statue of Liberty. 21 00:02:18,510 --> 00:02:27,420 Her headline, Half submerged in New York Harbour while enemy warplanes bombed Manhattan into a seething cauldron of smoke and flame. 22 00:02:27,420 --> 00:02:33,540 Two million prints. This poster circulated throughout the land and seised Americans with dread and 23 00:02:33,540 --> 00:02:39,900 indignation at the almost inconceivable idea of an airstrike on Manhattan. 24 00:02:39,900 --> 00:02:45,540 No, Bela's replied to panel. I was not present at the murder of Edith Cavel. 25 00:02:45,540 --> 00:02:51,780 Neither so far as I'd been able to learn. Was Leonardo present at the Last Supper. 26 00:02:51,780 --> 00:02:57,900 The appeal here is to a higher order of representation. The mere eyewitness literalism Bellows is. 27 00:02:57,900 --> 00:03:07,330 Supporters cheered his witticism, which was much repeated because it linked their man to the great Renaissance master. 28 00:03:07,330 --> 00:03:14,170 Who was at once a careful scientific observer of natural phenomena and an inspired visionary, 29 00:03:14,170 --> 00:03:19,360 one who never allowed the limitations of time and space to rein him in. 30 00:03:19,360 --> 00:03:27,870 There's something theological about bellows his remark and not simply because he alludes to the most famous religious painting of Western art. 31 00:03:27,870 --> 00:03:36,610 The theology inheres in the romantic view that the inner eye can see reality more clearly than the outer one does. 32 00:03:36,610 --> 00:03:40,840 That artistic inspiration trumps empirical fact gathering. 33 00:03:40,840 --> 00:03:49,120 And that in the making of true art, neither the hand nor the eye nor the brain of the artist ranks as high as the heart. 34 00:03:49,120 --> 00:03:57,520 The Bellows and his admirers would take to this lofty ground and the fact in the face of Pennells criticism is nonetheless surprising. 35 00:03:57,520 --> 00:04:05,170 Bellows, after all, more than any other American artist of his era, was celebrated for his skills as a visual journalist. 36 00:04:05,170 --> 00:04:12,860 An eyewitness reporter of the seamy side of life as seen in images such as these. 37 00:04:12,860 --> 00:04:20,240 One of which shows three homeless men inspecting a rancid scrap of meat retrieved from a garbage can. 38 00:04:20,240 --> 00:04:26,750 The other, the execution of a prison inmate by recently invented technology of state dispense death. 39 00:04:26,750 --> 00:04:40,510 The electric chair. His most famous picture, Stag at Sharkey's from 1989 makes a direct allusion to his self-appointed role as a witness. 40 00:04:40,510 --> 00:04:45,100 It shows the head of the balding painter on the lower right hand side. 41 00:04:45,100 --> 00:04:50,690 That's him beneath the arm of the referee, peering over the edge of the ring. 42 00:04:50,690 --> 00:04:53,970 Everybody got him. Going don't have a pointer. 43 00:04:53,970 --> 00:05:04,030 So the position suggests an analogy between two types of canvas, the kind on which boxers box and that on which painters paint. 44 00:05:04,030 --> 00:05:11,050 Indeed, the self-portrait serves as an artist's signature and proudly declares, I was there. 45 00:05:11,050 --> 00:05:19,960 I saw this event with my own eyes. In the days before World War One, Bellows was America's Gustaaf Corps Bay, 46 00:05:19,960 --> 00:05:27,640 a sharp eyed observer of working class life and labour who had no truck with sentimental bourgeois idealism. 47 00:05:27,640 --> 00:05:35,890 Here I am comparing Corps Base The Stone Breakers from 1849 with Bela's as Blue Morning from nineteen oh 48 00:05:35,890 --> 00:05:43,450 nine and a ferial and yet gritty depiction of manual labour during the construction of a railway station. 49 00:05:43,450 --> 00:05:50,320 When asked to paint an angel for a mural in a church, Courbet had facetiously replied, 50 00:05:50,320 --> 00:05:58,030 I have never seen an angel show me an angel and I will paint you one in principle, Bellows agreed. 51 00:05:58,030 --> 00:06:09,790 In 1918, however, he changed his mind about such matters, and with Edith Cavel, he painted his angel his nation now at war. 52 00:06:09,790 --> 00:06:18,610 He turned to a different 19th century master for inspiration. He exchanged Courbet for Goya, adding, as the Spanish artist did. 53 00:06:18,610 --> 00:06:24,060 Elements of the fantastic two. His depiction of modern life. 54 00:06:24,060 --> 00:06:32,260 And these are both GooYa images, especially because Bela's did not have the opportunity to see the fighting in Europe firsthand. 55 00:06:32,260 --> 00:06:37,390 He was compelled by circumstances to forsake the eyewitnessed ethos. 56 00:06:37,390 --> 00:06:42,070 He did, after all, make an effort to join the army and see action at the front. 57 00:06:42,070 --> 00:06:49,030 But at 36, he was rejected because of his age, unable to bear arms against the Germans. 58 00:06:49,030 --> 00:06:53,170 He fought them with chalk and paintbrush instead. 59 00:06:53,170 --> 00:07:01,690 His change of heart with regard to the war, as well as to his role as an artist observer, shocked some of his associates. 60 00:07:01,690 --> 00:07:07,870 We can understand this when we consider his earlier political leanings. 61 00:07:07,870 --> 00:07:13,910 After leaving Columbus, Ohio for New York in 1984 to seek his fortune as an artist, 62 00:07:13,910 --> 00:07:18,850 the young Bellows had embraced the Greenwich Village version of socialism and art. 63 00:07:18,850 --> 00:07:29,710 Anarchism that historians have dubbed the lyrical left a version of leftism congenial to artists, poets and professors. 64 00:07:29,710 --> 00:07:40,330 The raw, muscular, energetic brand of urban realist painting The Bela's Perfected was an amalgamation of Core Bay Manet and Jacob Reise, 65 00:07:40,330 --> 00:07:45,940 The Turn of the Century documentary photographer of New York City's Poor Here, 66 00:07:45,940 --> 00:07:58,690 along with two photographs by Reese from about a decade earlier, we see Bela's paintings, 42 kids from nineteen oh seven and cliff dwellers from 1913. 67 00:07:58,690 --> 00:08:03,820 The painters visual verve perfectly suited the lyrical left. 68 00:08:03,820 --> 00:08:11,680 The house organ of the lyrical left was a lively and controversial illustrated monthly magazine called The Masses. 69 00:08:11,680 --> 00:08:17,830 It featured art, poetry, fiction and political reporting by the era's leading left wing artists, 70 00:08:17,830 --> 00:08:24,250 intellectuals and activists as seen in the cartoons and magazine covers assembled here. 71 00:08:24,250 --> 00:08:35,560 Bellows was amongst them. When hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914, the magazine unleashed a torrent of editorials, 72 00:08:35,560 --> 00:08:41,620 cartoons and opinion pieces denouncing the imperialist origins of the war and redock, 73 00:08:41,620 --> 00:08:43,840 ridiculing the self-righteous bankers, 74 00:08:43,840 --> 00:08:55,480 clergymen and press appearance on both sides of the Atlantic who profited shamelessly from the war's continuation. 75 00:08:55,480 --> 00:09:06,670 Having their fling, showing the capitalists is basically they're all fat capitalists or clergymen celebrating the war. 76 00:09:06,670 --> 00:09:15,010 Profit making the war, although Bela's, unlike many of his fellow socialists, did not actively impose U.S. intervention in the conflict. 77 00:09:15,010 --> 00:09:22,630 He worried that it would lead to the curtailment, if not downright suppression of democratic civil liberties. 78 00:09:22,630 --> 00:09:30,230 Still, I think it's safe to say that during the Build-Up to the war and even in his first days, Bela's was not a super patriot. 79 00:09:30,230 --> 00:09:38,470 And as he was not keen on going to war in this, he was quite unlike the pro-war activists child Hassam, who, 80 00:09:38,470 --> 00:09:48,250 together with the aforementioned Joseph Pennel, hailed from an earlier generation and a more privileged social class and like panel. 81 00:09:48,250 --> 00:09:58,240 He was Bellos, his artistic nemesis. You're welcome, Simon. 82 00:09:58,240 --> 00:10:01,780 Here I show you Hazard's 1917 impressionist painting. 83 00:10:01,780 --> 00:10:09,730 Early morning on the avenue in May 1917, the avenue in question being Fifth Avenue at Fifty Fourth Street, 84 00:10:09,730 --> 00:10:15,490 with flags of the allied nations dancing beneficent Ali across the skyline. 85 00:10:15,490 --> 00:10:26,300 Haslam's uptown views of Manhattan are altogether different from those of bellows such as New York from six years earlier 1911. 86 00:10:26,300 --> 00:10:34,180 Bela's his depiction of a downtown square is dense with crowds thick with pigment, laden with atmosphere. 87 00:10:34,180 --> 00:10:40,750 The paint handling like Mean Streets it depicts is rough, muscular and abrasive. 88 00:10:40,750 --> 00:10:50,080 Bellows insists on the multiclass, multi-ethnic, multi layered nature of New York and by extension, America itself. 89 00:10:50,080 --> 00:10:57,460 Haslam's intent much the opposite is to celebrate unity, homogeneity and social order. 90 00:10:57,460 --> 00:11:03,100 Indeed, early morning on the avenue, painted at the dawn of America's entry into the war, 91 00:11:03,100 --> 00:11:10,960 could even be understood as retort against Bellows as 1913 painting cliff dwellers where it's not 92 00:11:10,960 --> 00:11:16,420 ceremonial flags of America and its allies that snap in the breeze over the heads of pedestrians, 93 00:11:16,420 --> 00:11:20,500 but rather the laundry of immigrants from around the world. 94 00:11:20,500 --> 00:11:29,200 Hassam, who was a staunch advocate, a staunch preparedness advocate, began making patriotic flag paintings in 1916. 95 00:11:29,200 --> 00:11:37,620 About a year before America went to war. Bellows at that time treated war mongering satirically. 96 00:11:37,620 --> 00:11:45,330 A drawing that he first published in a West Coast anarchist magazine and then sent to the masses for wider circulation, 97 00:11:45,330 --> 00:11:54,240 depicts Jesus as a convict, manacled, clad in prison stripes bound by ball and chain. 98 00:11:54,240 --> 00:12:01,410 The Prince of Peace has been jailed for preaching the seditious words Thou shalt not kill during wartime. 99 00:12:01,410 --> 00:12:09,690 Blessed are the peacemakers, as the drawing is called appeared in the Monthly's issue for July 1917. 100 00:12:09,690 --> 00:12:20,160 Bellows was looking closely at. In those days at Goya's early 19th century series of etchings known collectively as the Disasters of War, 101 00:12:20,160 --> 00:12:23,330 which had recently been exhibited in New York. 102 00:12:23,330 --> 00:12:34,710 And note how Christ in chains in this in his drawing echoes the stooped posture of the Spanish insurgent tied to an execution post in play. 103 00:12:34,710 --> 00:12:38,540 Fifteen of the disasters. 104 00:12:38,540 --> 00:12:49,190 Under the newly legislated Sedition Act, the July 1917 issue of the masses was barred by the Postal Service from being circulated by mail. 105 00:12:49,190 --> 00:12:53,410 This blockage eventually resulted in the demise of the publication, 106 00:12:53,410 --> 00:13:00,800 and several of Bela's his fellow artist illustrators were threatened with prosecution for their more incendiary imagery, 107 00:13:00,800 --> 00:13:05,060 such as the notorious to a show here in one, 108 00:13:05,060 --> 00:13:14,760 the Prince of Peace faces execution by an international firing squad comprised of soldiers representing the major combat nations in the other. 109 00:13:14,760 --> 00:13:21,470 This is the one that particularly outraged people. A skeleton measures a young Army recruit for his coffin. 110 00:13:21,470 --> 00:13:28,100 This was deemed particularly offensive by authorities who considered it a direct challenge to military conscription. 111 00:13:28,100 --> 00:13:36,170 The artists had to flee to Mexico. Bellows, however, was not threatened with jail time, nor was he radicalised, 112 00:13:36,170 --> 00:13:42,140 as were other members of Elev Lyrical left by the heavy handedness of the wartime government. 113 00:13:42,140 --> 00:13:53,690 To the contrary, he became increasingly pro-war in his attitude, enraged by reports of German atrocities that streamed across the Atlantic. 114 00:13:53,690 --> 00:14:00,590 In keeping with his commitment to artistic activism against cruelty, corruption and injustice, 115 00:14:00,590 --> 00:14:09,020 as seen in the numerous political cartoons and social satires he had contributed over the years to the masses and other leftist publications, 116 00:14:09,020 --> 00:14:14,960 including Blessed Are the Peacemakers. He felt the need to take a stand. 117 00:14:14,960 --> 00:14:20,930 Breaking ranks with his anti-war Conrads, some of whom never forgave him for it. 118 00:14:20,930 --> 00:14:30,310 He announced his support for American intervention. It was at this point that he volunteered for combat service and was turned down. 119 00:14:30,310 --> 00:14:39,370 His subsequent campaign of art against the enemy is extraordinary in its ferocity, with Goya's disasters of war as his model. 120 00:14:39,370 --> 00:14:40,150 He feverish. 121 00:14:40,150 --> 00:14:49,960 Lee churned out a series of lithographs that describe in ghastly detail the German army's march through neutral Belgium in the late summer of 1914, 122 00:14:49,960 --> 00:14:56,560 raping, pillaging and torturing civilians whose insurgency they sought to contain. 123 00:14:56,560 --> 00:15:03,670 When these lithographs were exhibited in late 1918, a reviewer described them as, quote, brutal. 124 00:15:03,670 --> 00:15:09,850 Full of horror but reeking with truth, which adds to their poignancy. 125 00:15:09,850 --> 00:15:17,620 The artist's primary source of inspiration was the Brice Committee report, which appeared in May 1915. 126 00:15:17,620 --> 00:15:25,120 Viscount James Bryce, former British ambassador to the United States and a member of the international court at The Hague, 127 00:15:25,120 --> 00:15:32,860 headed up a war crimes commission that took depositions from twelve thousand twelve hundred witnesses and studied 128 00:15:32,860 --> 00:15:40,660 the captured war diaries of German combatants to determine the truth of allegations against the occupiers. 129 00:15:40,660 --> 00:15:49,750 The 61 page report makes for excruciating reading all the more so because the matter of fact manner in which it is written, 130 00:15:49,750 --> 00:15:54,520 printed in 30 languages and sold in the US for 10 cents a copy. 131 00:15:54,520 --> 00:15:58,480 The document was readily available and widely circulated. 132 00:15:58,480 --> 00:16:06,520 Less than a week after the sinking of the Lusitania, as reported here on the front page, The New York Times on May eight, 1915. 133 00:16:06,520 --> 00:16:15,840 Less than a week later, that newspaper devoted three full pages to an abridgement of the Brice report. 134 00:16:15,840 --> 00:16:25,110 It doesn't take training in critical research methods to question its rigour, names of witnesses are withheld in respect for their privacy. 135 00:16:25,110 --> 00:16:32,460 But without proper attribution, some of the more fantastic claims seemed like hearsay were outright invention. 136 00:16:32,460 --> 00:16:37,260 After the war, the Bryce Report was subjected to scathing criticism, 137 00:16:37,260 --> 00:16:43,410 and it has even been blamed for causing rumours of the Nazi mistreatment of Jews in the 1930s. 138 00:16:43,410 --> 00:16:54,810 To be scoffed at as exaggerations by those who wish to avoid those who wished to avoid being duped again by government and news media propaganda. 139 00:16:54,810 --> 00:16:57,030 Nonetheless, contemporary scholarship. 140 00:16:57,030 --> 00:17:05,460 Scholarship today indicates that despite its flaws and probable exaggerations, the Bryce Report was essentially accurate. 141 00:17:05,460 --> 00:17:11,490 The German occupiers did commit atrocities of the type and gravity described. 142 00:17:11,490 --> 00:17:16,080 Now I have to say again, this is controversial and people are debating this. 143 00:17:16,080 --> 00:17:26,190 To this day, at least seven of Belize's were lithographs show how he imagined crimes outlined in Brice works of technical finesse, 144 00:17:26,190 --> 00:17:30,960 informal beauty with rich gradations of tone and dynamic compositions. 145 00:17:30,960 --> 00:17:42,840 They attract the eye, but punish it for what it sees. One Belgium farmyard depicts a dark outdoor setting where a German soldier pulling on his 146 00:17:42,840 --> 00:17:51,720 clothes stands over the supine body of a young female whom he has raped in the last victim. 147 00:17:51,720 --> 00:17:58,650 Three lowish Germans loose German soldiers in a middle class parlour stare hungrily 148 00:17:58,650 --> 00:18:03,360 at a distraught young woman who has entered the room to discover her mother, 149 00:18:03,360 --> 00:18:11,640 father and brother sprawled dead or dying on the floor. The corresponding passage in Brice report declares, quote, 150 00:18:11,640 --> 00:18:20,940 An air of some 50 men escaping from the burning houses were seised taken outside and shot at Malen, a hamlet west of F. 151 00:18:20,940 --> 00:18:25,740 Forty men were shot in one household alone. The father and mother. 152 00:18:25,740 --> 00:18:32,130 Their names withheld. Were shot. The daughter died after being repeatedly outraged. 153 00:18:32,130 --> 00:18:40,860 And the son was wounded. These are amongst the more reportorial of Bela's, as were lithographs. 154 00:18:40,860 --> 00:18:46,710 Others in the series seemed downright phantasmagoric in the back and all. 155 00:18:46,710 --> 00:18:53,790 For example, the back. An owl, for example, depicts German soldiers guzzling wine in the open space of a village. 156 00:18:53,790 --> 00:18:58,410 While guards bring in a young mother whose hands are bound tightly behind her, 157 00:18:58,410 --> 00:19:04,110 a couple of small naked children have been impaled on Barnetts and are being waved in the air. 158 00:19:04,110 --> 00:19:09,390 But no one takes notice. As if this were a common everyday experience. 159 00:19:09,390 --> 00:19:15,840 According to one of Brice's unidentified witnesses, a drunken German soldier in the town of Marleen, 160 00:19:15,840 --> 00:19:20,280 quote, drove his Bhanot with both hands into a child's stomach, 161 00:19:20,280 --> 00:19:29,190 lifting the child into the air on his band net and carrying it away on his band that he and his comrades still singing. 162 00:19:29,190 --> 00:19:35,220 Here, Bela's has combined two common themes in northern Renaissance painting the massacre 163 00:19:35,220 --> 00:19:40,620 of the innocents and the indifference of soldiers who torture holy martyrs. 164 00:19:40,620 --> 00:19:50,410 But he's updated the costumes and setting. In quite strong, the England. 165 00:19:50,410 --> 00:19:54,010 England. England. God punishes England. 166 00:19:54,010 --> 00:20:06,460 German soldiers now captured allied soldiers to doors made of rough wooden planks while a crowd looks on and jeers in the cigarette. 167 00:20:06,460 --> 00:20:13,210 A solitary soldier seated in the shadows on the right side of the image scowls while smoking on the left, 168 00:20:13,210 --> 00:20:21,610 the corpse of a man sags in a window frame beside a broken shattered in the centre, Incan death incandescently lit. 169 00:20:21,610 --> 00:20:24,880 A naked woman writhes in agony and shame. 170 00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:32,590 Her left arm, drenched in blood, extends high above her head, a spike driven through the palm to fastened her to the wall. 171 00:20:32,590 --> 00:20:39,300 A gaping hole where her left breast should be indicates that the smoker has torn it from her body. 172 00:20:39,300 --> 00:20:44,830 Bryce does not specifically describe this incident, but provide several accounts of sexual mutilation. 173 00:20:44,830 --> 00:20:48,970 As, for example, two young women were lying in the backyard of the house. 174 00:20:48,970 --> 00:20:54,300 One had her breasts cut off. The other had been stabbed. 175 00:20:54,300 --> 00:21:04,350 Could such nightmarish events really have occurred, or was Bellows famously plunging into the depths of sadomasochistic fantasy, if not his own, 176 00:21:04,350 --> 00:21:09,660 than that of the collective unconscious as it periodically bubbled up in the martyred same 177 00:21:09,660 --> 00:21:18,710 paintings of the old masters as here in Sebastiano as martyrdom of Saint Agatha from 15 19. 178 00:21:18,710 --> 00:21:24,890 As already mentioned, Goya's disasters of war etchings provided Bela's with the most compelling 179 00:21:24,890 --> 00:21:32,830 antecedent for his febrile imaginings of corporeal distress and dismemberment. 180 00:21:32,830 --> 00:21:41,660 So these are both Bela's from Syria. I mean, Guedes. 181 00:21:41,660 --> 00:21:51,500 That the Germans systematically committed atrocities against civilians cannot be disputed in war time, rape, pillage and murder are common. 182 00:21:51,500 --> 00:21:53,720 But what about banning babies, 183 00:21:53,720 --> 00:22:03,290 nailing prisoners to doors and cutting off the breasts of women Bello's believes were allowed himself to believe the worst of the enemy? 184 00:22:03,290 --> 00:22:11,210 He wanted to bear witness to the torture and killing, even though he had not seen those with his own eyes. 185 00:22:11,210 --> 00:22:19,580 It was an artist's responsibility, he insisted, to use the creative imagination to expose real world crime and injustice. 186 00:22:19,580 --> 00:22:23,750 Even when his knowledge of those was only Second-Hand, 187 00:22:23,750 --> 00:22:30,920 reversing standard artistic practise in which original paintings provide the source for lithographic copies. 188 00:22:30,920 --> 00:22:37,490 Felt so strongly about the work that poured out of him in the spring of 1918 that he 189 00:22:37,490 --> 00:22:43,370 set about turning five of his war lithographs into large and richly coloured oils. 190 00:22:43,370 --> 00:22:48,980 The barricade, composed in the manner of a neoclassical frieze, 191 00:22:48,980 --> 00:22:59,780 shows German troops firing from behind a human screen of naked civilians whose nudity symbolises their other vulnerability. 192 00:22:59,780 --> 00:23:05,210 The most disturbing of the five paintings, The Return of the Useless, 193 00:23:05,210 --> 00:23:10,130 alludes to the well-documented fact that the German occupiers had forced Belgian 194 00:23:10,130 --> 00:23:16,880 non-combatants into slave labour on the French front in Belgium and in Germany itself. 195 00:23:16,880 --> 00:23:22,790 When these prisoners became too weak and broken down to work productively, hence useless, 196 00:23:22,790 --> 00:23:30,050 their captors shipped them home in boxcars, bathed in queasy red hues and theatrically lit. 197 00:23:30,050 --> 00:23:36,560 The painting shows a frightened young blonde woman faltering out of the shadows of a cattle car interior, 198 00:23:36,560 --> 00:23:40,550 which holds her sick and dying fellow passengers to her. 199 00:23:40,550 --> 00:23:48,920 Left, our right. A German guard herds dishevelled, bloodied prisoners and to her right, 200 00:23:48,920 --> 00:23:54,470 another guard stomps on a fallen young man and beats him with the butt of a rifle. 201 00:23:54,470 --> 00:24:00,170 Stiff Okkult to look at this painting today without thinking the Holocaust that lay ahead. 202 00:24:00,170 --> 00:24:05,870 Bellows may not have been an eyewitness to the sort of crimes he depicts to the crime he depicts. 203 00:24:05,870 --> 00:24:16,390 But to judge from occurrences that became commonplace in Europe less than a generation later, he got the iconography of deportation just right. 204 00:24:16,390 --> 00:24:28,580 Of the five paintings he made from his war lithographs. The most acclaimed, despite Joseph Pennells disparaging remarks was Edith Cavel. 205 00:24:28,580 --> 00:24:34,130 Drawing on motifs borrowed from an array of sources, including old master religious art, 206 00:24:34,130 --> 00:24:39,820 contemporary recruitment posters, the Broadway stage and the Hollywood melodrama, 207 00:24:39,820 --> 00:24:48,260 Bela's gave viewers a heightened sense of the reality of the scene depicted by calling to mind other types of visual artefacts that are ready, 208 00:24:48,260 --> 00:24:54,950 worked for him, worked for them as conveyors of truth about the external world. 209 00:24:54,950 --> 00:25:03,830 Indeed, we might say that the painting privileges referential realism over eyewitness realism by referential realism. 210 00:25:03,830 --> 00:25:10,250 I mean that it refers the viewer to other previously acquired data, visual and otherwise, 211 00:25:10,250 --> 00:25:17,720 providing a sense of familiarity and rightness, hence authenticity to the scene depicted. 212 00:25:17,720 --> 00:25:23,750 The execution of Nurse Kabal was one of the most widely publicised stories of Great War and in death. 213 00:25:23,750 --> 00:25:30,890 Kabul became its iconic female victim at the time of her arrest by the Germans in 1915. 214 00:25:30,890 --> 00:25:39,210 She was a 49 year old English Red Cross nurse supervising a hospital in Brussels. 215 00:25:39,210 --> 00:25:46,380 The Germans accused her of secretly helping hundreds of wounded allied prisoners to escape into Holland. 216 00:25:46,380 --> 00:25:55,200 She admitted to the charges against her and the Germans sentenced her to death despite a worldwide outcry for clemency. 217 00:25:55,200 --> 00:26:01,290 A firing squad dispatched her at dawn on the morning of October 12, 1915. 218 00:26:01,290 --> 00:26:05,640 Sir George Frampton's sculptural memorial was unveiled in St. 219 00:26:05,640 --> 00:26:13,710 Martin Square in London on that date in 1920, directly across the National Portrait Gallery. 220 00:26:13,710 --> 00:26:20,580 Experts in international law agreed that the Germans were well within their rights to execute Nurse Cavel. 221 00:26:20,580 --> 00:26:26,970 But the wizards of British propaganda deserved a golden opportunity in her sentencing and made the most of it. 222 00:26:26,970 --> 00:26:32,130 At least 28 books and pamphlets about her were issued in the period, 223 00:26:32,130 --> 00:26:37,370 as well as commemorative coins and stamps and special illustrated press editions 224 00:26:37,370 --> 00:26:44,010 and licence was occasionally made to envision her as a murdered young beauty. 225 00:26:44,010 --> 00:26:50,880 Americans were particularly distressed by nurse cavils death, according to one historian of wartime propaganda. 226 00:26:50,880 --> 00:26:55,690 Quote, She was middle class Americans made an aunt. 227 00:26:55,690 --> 00:27:00,180 The profession of nursing is one for which Americans have only the greatest respect. 228 00:27:00,180 --> 00:27:05,580 The Germans could not have outraged this country more if they had executed Florence Nightingale. 229 00:27:05,580 --> 00:27:10,410 She was the ideal heroine given the relentless assault, 230 00:27:10,410 --> 00:27:15,630 a provocative propaganda that circulated in America about the death of nurse 231 00:27:15,630 --> 00:27:21,090 Kabul Bela's his depiction might have seemed especially real and authentic, 232 00:27:21,090 --> 00:27:26,670 especially because of its low key, non sensationalist manner. 233 00:27:26,670 --> 00:27:36,050 The artist chose, after all, to show the nurse neither dead nor dying, but rather in a quiet moment preceding execution. 234 00:27:36,050 --> 00:27:36,770 In other words, 235 00:27:36,770 --> 00:27:48,570 the depiction may have seemed real because it did not venture into the histrionic territory of previous images and depictions of the event. 236 00:27:48,570 --> 00:27:53,160 Instead, Bellows shows nurse Cavel radiant in white, 237 00:27:53,160 --> 00:28:03,300 stoically descending a prison staircase into a courtyard in which guards engage in nocturnal conversation or lose themselves in slumber. 238 00:28:03,300 --> 00:28:10,230 The subject calls to mind. Old master scenes, martyrdom and salvation, such as Rafaela's Deliverance of St. 239 00:28:10,230 --> 00:28:17,490 Peter from prison, in which a saintly figure withstands the oppressive darkness of captivity, 240 00:28:17,490 --> 00:28:22,800 and Piero Della Francesca's resurrection with its sleeping guards. 241 00:28:22,800 --> 00:28:29,490 And yet, even though the painting a Shu's melodrama, harking instead to the sort of stoicism. 242 00:28:29,490 --> 00:28:36,470 Oh, I have a few of my students from this morning here. So you'll get this painting. 243 00:28:36,470 --> 00:28:39,650 Heartening instead to the sort of stoicism memorably, 244 00:28:39,650 --> 00:28:50,810 memorably embodied by Benjamin West's famous 18th century history painting Agrippina landing at Brown Diesem with the Ashes or Germanicus. 245 00:28:50,810 --> 00:28:53,630 Despite that, it nonetheless, I would say, 246 00:28:53,630 --> 00:29:04,010 described a sort of rebound energy from the most harrowing of the era's propaganda posters to well-known examples of These are El's with Young. 247 00:29:04,010 --> 00:29:10,610 Remember Belgium and Fred Spears' in list? Composed in a vertical format. 248 00:29:10,610 --> 00:29:19,670 The poster on the left silhouettes a pair of figures against a brownish green sky flecked with burning cinders on the low horizon, 249 00:29:19,670 --> 00:29:24,680 a conflagration consumes a town somewhere in a mythical Belgium. 250 00:29:24,680 --> 00:29:35,150 The silhouettes reveal a dance of opposition between a moth, a walrus moustached, spiked helmeted German soldier and the young pubescent girl. 251 00:29:35,150 --> 00:29:40,040 He drags behind him, presumably with sexual intent. 252 00:29:40,040 --> 00:29:48,170 The poster on the right shows a ghostly wreath like young mother sinking to the bottom of the sea with an infant cradled in her arms. 253 00:29:48,170 --> 00:29:56,030 Bubbles rise from her lips, indicating she is not yet dead. And a fish floats by as an impassive onlooker. 254 00:29:56,030 --> 00:30:02,330 Dark and murky. Grey, green and brown. The oceanic depths surrounding the mother and child. 255 00:30:02,330 --> 00:30:07,250 Child viewers who required no supplementary text to understand the painting. 256 00:30:07,250 --> 00:30:13,730 The pictures allusion to the sinking of the Lusitania. 257 00:30:13,730 --> 00:30:22,130 Edith Cavel is not nearly as Directors' either of these in its appeal to the viewers emotions, but because viewers came to it already, 258 00:30:22,130 --> 00:30:30,380 having seen posters like these which arouse their enmity against the Germans for desecrating female purity and innocence, 259 00:30:30,380 --> 00:30:35,750 because that the Bella's painting could only ever have been seen by his contemporaries. 260 00:30:35,750 --> 00:30:45,920 Against the backdrop of those other far more inflammatory images, figuratively, if not literally, it was framed by them. 261 00:30:45,920 --> 00:30:52,340 I want to point to another implicit framing or enveloping of youth cavel this time by Bella's his own image, 262 00:30:52,340 --> 00:31:00,320 making his 1919 painting the studio based on an earlier Christmas card lithograph 263 00:31:00,320 --> 00:31:06,050 shows the Bellows family at home on Christmas morning a domestic idyll in progress. 264 00:31:06,050 --> 00:31:10,820 The artist's two daughters play together in the lower right foreground. What to the left? 265 00:31:10,820 --> 00:31:19,250 The artist paints a portrait of his wife, Emma. Various other members of the extended family occupy the middle ground and the mezzanine. 266 00:31:19,250 --> 00:31:28,720 In Edith Cavel, Bellows transforms his cheery home on 19th Street into the dank Belgian prison where the British nurse was executed. 267 00:31:28,720 --> 00:31:38,090 And he uses Emma Bellows, the mistress of his home and mother of his children, as the model for Miss Cavel. 268 00:31:38,090 --> 00:31:47,030 Thus, we see that the war in Europe, which he could only no second hand, nonetheless resonated for him in a highly personal manner. 269 00:31:47,030 --> 00:31:52,100 Shortly after bellows his untimely death in 1925, 270 00:31:52,100 --> 00:31:59,960 one of his defenders excused the excesses of Bellows his war paintings by claiming that the art that artists, quote, 271 00:31:59,960 --> 00:32:06,980 are able to visualise atrocities have more completely than most men can and thereby, quote, 272 00:32:06,980 --> 00:32:15,230 He suffered from a kind of indwelling excitement during the war that disturbed artists to a point not yet admitted in print. 273 00:32:15,230 --> 00:32:26,230 Bellows, the friend explains, came to refer to his war paintings as his hallucinations, but he was not ashamed of having drawn and painted them. 274 00:32:26,230 --> 00:32:36,520 Later, champion of Bellows, my Henry Sharpe Young reminded his readers that the artist's fanatical outrage against the Germans was by no means unique. 275 00:32:36,520 --> 00:32:44,320 Quote, This was not a private obsession. It was as contagious as Spanish flu for that generation. 276 00:32:44,320 --> 00:32:49,680 The war was the end of the world and there was no doubt that it was the Germans fault. 277 00:32:49,680 --> 00:32:55,950 According to Young, the artist's work was compromised by his participation in the orgy of animosity. 278 00:32:55,950 --> 00:33:02,190 Quote, This was the most violent motion of his life. And it had a bad effect on his art. 279 00:33:02,190 --> 00:33:10,590 His war pictures are the worst he ever painted. And this is like the great champion of billers in the 1930s. 280 00:33:10,590 --> 00:33:16,020 The journalist Gilbert Selders, looking back at the earlier period, ruefully noted. 281 00:33:16,020 --> 00:33:23,280 I now realise that we were told nothing but bunkum, that we were shown nothing of the realities of war, that we were, in short, 282 00:33:23,280 --> 00:33:28,830 merely part of the great allied propaganda machine whose purpose was dis was to 283 00:33:28,830 --> 00:33:37,490 sustain morale at all costs and help draw unwilling America into the slaughter. 284 00:33:37,490 --> 00:33:42,210 To return to earlier in this talk, we need to ask ourselves who was ultimately right? 285 00:33:42,210 --> 00:33:49,740 Joseph Pennel, who faulted Bellows for making things up, even though he too did so under the pressure of war. 286 00:33:49,740 --> 00:33:57,330 Bellows, who claimed for himself a higher authority based on his empathetic response to atrocities. 287 00:33:57,330 --> 00:34:01,590 He only read about. He only read about the vividly imagined and made. 288 00:34:01,590 --> 00:34:08,520 Plasticky, real. I'm not answering that question for you. 289 00:34:08,520 --> 00:34:14,510 I'm just posing. Once the war was over, large numbers of Americans, perhaps not a majority of them, 290 00:34:14,510 --> 00:34:19,850 but quite a few nonetheless came to believe they had been bamboozled by government 291 00:34:19,850 --> 00:34:25,940 sponsored misinformation that had been widely disseminated by artists and writers. 292 00:34:25,940 --> 00:34:30,860 Bellows amongst them as the Bellow scholar Carol Troyen observes, quote, 293 00:34:30,860 --> 00:34:39,020 The discrediting of the Brice report caused many Americans to feel that the bestiality of the Germans had been greatly exaggerated and that the 294 00:34:39,020 --> 00:34:47,660 United States had been tricked and manipulated into entering the war because they placed so much emphasis on the Germans abuse of civilians. 295 00:34:47,660 --> 00:34:55,300 Bela's war series came to be regarded as part of the deception. 296 00:34:55,300 --> 00:35:03,370 By 1920, Bela's war images were largely largely withdrawn from view, and by the time of his sudden premature death, 297 00:35:03,370 --> 00:35:09,370 five years later, they were considered an embarrassment, a stain on his reputation. 298 00:35:09,370 --> 00:35:17,230 Only recently have they come again to the fore, perhaps as curiosities, fossils of a long vanished mindset. 299 00:35:17,230 --> 00:35:24,670 On the other hand, today it is a new era of popular hysteria against enemies regarded as inhuman monsters. 300 00:35:24,670 --> 00:35:29,260 They take on frightening relevance. As a matter of contrast. 301 00:35:29,260 --> 00:35:34,750 Let us look at a nearly contemporaneous work by Bella's generation older countrymen. 302 00:35:34,750 --> 00:35:40,930 The Anglo American portrait painter and landscape artist John Singer Sargent Sergeant 303 00:35:40,930 --> 00:35:45,040 produced when the most poignant artistic images to come out of World War One, 304 00:35:45,040 --> 00:35:50,270 an unusually large frieze like composition called gased. 305 00:35:50,270 --> 00:35:59,420 Unlike any of Bela's his war paintings, this was based on firsthand observation under the auspices of the British War ARD office. 306 00:35:59,420 --> 00:36:04,550 Sergeant had visited the front and been moved to see groups of blinded soldiers leaning on 307 00:36:04,550 --> 00:36:12,650 one another for support as they proceeded to a field hospital with on his wry understatement. 308 00:36:12,650 --> 00:36:18,380 The mature sergeant provides an account of war's devastation, and beyond that, 309 00:36:18,380 --> 00:36:27,620 he puts forward a metaphore that could be understood as criticising the incompetence of political and military leadership. 310 00:36:27,620 --> 00:36:31,670 War for sergeant is a matter of the blind leading the blind. 311 00:36:31,670 --> 00:36:41,270 A point he makes clear with his allusion to the Flemish artist Peter Breugel is legendary 19th AR 15 50s painting of that title. 312 00:36:41,270 --> 00:36:46,160 So, too, is an inescapable illusion there. 313 00:36:46,160 --> 00:36:51,470 By comparison, Bellows, his reactions were brash and strident. 314 00:36:51,470 --> 00:36:59,720 Those of an artist in early middle age who had already drifted past his greatest accomplishments as chronicler of the urban stage. 315 00:36:59,720 --> 00:37:02,720 Sargent relied on firsthand observation, 316 00:37:02,720 --> 00:37:11,600 a craft to craft a very detailed if someone allegorical view of war and its corrosive effects on the human spirit. 317 00:37:11,600 --> 00:37:19,550 Bellows, it seems, was flailing, trying to recapture some lost spark, some naked honesty that had faded from his life. 318 00:37:19,550 --> 00:37:26,720 With the coming of middle age material success, critical acclaim and a happy marriage, in my view, 319 00:37:26,720 --> 00:37:35,300 he substituted polemical outrage for his earlier commitment to careful observation and clear eyed insight. 320 00:37:35,300 --> 00:37:46,180 And this did not lead to a good result. His in his righteous indignation at atrocities that he read about but did not witness, 321 00:37:46,180 --> 00:37:51,370 prompted him to imagine static in cartoon like depictions of violence. 322 00:37:51,370 --> 00:37:59,800 These lack. On one hand, the raw, invigorating, vibrant beauty of his earlier New York City urban landscapes and the sharp, 323 00:37:59,800 --> 00:38:11,360 incisive humour of his drawings, a metropolitan streetlife. To be sure, physical violence, brutality even was always a key component of Belize's work. 324 00:38:11,360 --> 00:38:14,330 It's part of what makes him stand out today as the best, 325 00:38:14,330 --> 00:38:21,050 the most viewable of the early 20th century American artists known collectively as the Ashcan School. 326 00:38:21,050 --> 00:38:25,400 This is obviously apparent in his boxing paintings. 327 00:38:25,400 --> 00:38:33,050 According to a friend from Columbus who reported a year after the artist died, he once remarked, I don't know anything about boxing. 328 00:38:33,050 --> 00:38:38,120 I'm just painting two men trying to kill each other in his prime. 329 00:38:38,120 --> 00:38:45,500 Bela's was great because his art epitomised a hammer blow against the so-called genteel tradition. 330 00:38:45,500 --> 00:38:52,880 He was doing in the field of art something equivalent to what his one time roommate, Eugene O'Neill, 331 00:38:52,880 --> 00:39:01,760 was doing in that realm of theatre, overturning its obsessive concern with social propriety and neatness of form. 332 00:39:01,760 --> 00:39:11,120 The peak of Bela's is holy war, if you will. Unholy violence comes in his extraordinary series of excavation paintings in which the bowels of 333 00:39:11,120 --> 00:39:18,170 Lower Manhattan are ripped open by men with sledgehammers and robotic earth devouring machines. 334 00:39:18,170 --> 00:39:26,440 These are paintings of menacing beauty. And I just have to say, there's so much more beautiful than when these reproductions in this light give you. 335 00:39:26,440 --> 00:39:31,610 They're quite raw and powerful, less overtly. 336 00:39:31,610 --> 00:39:38,000 So his depictions of New York City winter are also laced with a terrible, violent beauty. 337 00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:47,330 Take, for example, the lone tenement, a stunning architectural portrait of an isolated and dilapidated tenement building stranded 338 00:39:47,330 --> 00:39:52,520 at the edge of an icy river and overshadowed by the rusty span of an iron bridge. 339 00:39:52,520 --> 00:40:01,780 While puny, ill clad figures little more than urban ciphers huddled for warmth around small fires in the snow. 340 00:40:01,780 --> 00:40:11,890 The brushwork shows Bellows as best as a pugilist with a paintbrush slashing and jabbing at the canvas with a flurry of bold, decisive strokes. 341 00:40:11,890 --> 00:40:19,600 Other urban landscapes, such as rain on the river, were even the at first glance anodyne blue snow. 342 00:40:19,600 --> 00:40:25,900 The battery ring. Extraordinary beauty from tumultuous brushwork, harsh colour contrasts. 343 00:40:25,900 --> 00:40:33,130 And in the latter, painting the eye assaulting glare of bright sun on crisp white snow. 344 00:40:33,130 --> 00:40:42,040 But these are only violent in an implied or metaphoric way, having to do with the cacophonous rhythms of life in the big city. 345 00:40:42,040 --> 00:40:50,260 They were stylistically violent as well, at least in the eyes of genteel viewers more accustomed to bland urban imagery. 346 00:40:50,260 --> 00:40:58,080 The war series, however, is overtly, even hyperbolically violent with these works. 347 00:40:58,080 --> 00:41:07,360 Belo set aside his commitment to eyewitnessed realism because his greater goal was to shake Americans out of their moral lethargy and force them. 348 00:41:07,360 --> 00:41:13,300 As the title of a book by Susan Sontag puts it, to regard the pain of others. 349 00:41:13,300 --> 00:41:24,730 Sontag remarks of Goya's war etchings quote that the atrocities perpetuated by the French soldiers in Spain didn't happen exactly as pictured. 350 00:41:24,730 --> 00:41:30,250 Hardly disqualifies the disasters of war. Goya's images are a synthesis. 351 00:41:30,250 --> 00:41:37,240 They claim things like this happened. Belize's war images do the same. 352 00:41:37,240 --> 00:41:46,480 Does that justify them? In his case, what was gained and what was lost by his imagining atrocities he could not verify. 353 00:41:46,480 --> 00:41:55,780 Drawing on unreliable sources and thereby playing into the hands of the propaganda machine, the job of a writer or an artist, 354 00:41:55,780 --> 00:42:05,610 Sontag observes, quote, is not to have opinions, but to tell the truth and to refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. 355 00:42:05,610 --> 00:42:12,250 Similary. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway once said a writer's job is to tell the truth. 356 00:42:12,250 --> 00:42:16,600 His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention of 357 00:42:16,600 --> 00:42:22,630 his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. 358 00:42:22,630 --> 00:42:25,840 He continues, for facts can be observed badly. 359 00:42:25,840 --> 00:42:35,760 But when a good writer or artist is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth. 360 00:42:35,760 --> 00:42:45,720 Edith Cavel demonstrates a level of tranquillity of non-violence that sets it apart from the overheated atrocity lithographs, 361 00:42:45,720 --> 00:42:56,850 the bellows made under the influence of Goya, images that a Bela's admirer later apologetically characterised as, quote, reckless emotionalism. 362 00:42:56,850 --> 00:43:00,810 The painting of Kaval approaching her death has an eerie cast to it. 363 00:43:00,810 --> 00:43:06,690 A sickly grey green tint gives the viewer an anxious, queasy feeling. 364 00:43:06,690 --> 00:43:16,860 Three types of nocturnal lighting suffused the image the harsh yellow flare of gas lanterns which rhythmically stab out of the shadows, 365 00:43:16,860 --> 00:43:22,200 the aethereal glow moonlight behind the stone stone archway in the upper right corner, 366 00:43:22,200 --> 00:43:30,530 and the beatific radiance of nurse Cavel as she calmly descends the staircase toward her martyrdom. 367 00:43:30,530 --> 00:43:35,900 Here Bellows, a painter of modern life who is by turns romantic, sardonic, 368 00:43:35,900 --> 00:43:41,360 satiric and hotheaded steps back from the tendentious politics of his other, 369 00:43:41,360 --> 00:43:51,920 more polemical war imagery to produce a complex rumination on the nature of bravery and self-possession in a world of stone cold indifference. 370 00:43:51,920 --> 00:44:00,970 Instead of attacking the Germans as subhuman sadists and thus forsaking artistic truth for a roundhouse swing at the enemy of the day, 371 00:44:00,970 --> 00:44:11,090 Bela's uses them as markers of life that goes on in its crude, unremarkable way while suffering occurs unnoticed in its midst. 372 00:44:11,090 --> 00:44:16,640 The painting is about war, yes, but much more than war in Sontag's terms. 373 00:44:16,640 --> 00:44:23,840 It is not an opinion piece. It is a meditation on suffering on selfhood at the moment of extinction. 374 00:44:23,840 --> 00:44:35,330 In that regard, it is one of the most truthful of Belize's short, the one most truthful works of Bela's, a short, brilliant and tempestuous career. 375 00:44:35,330 --> 00:44:40,040 In the end, Bela's is Belgium was a construct of his imagination. 376 00:44:40,040 --> 00:44:48,530 This construct was due in large part to British propagandists who distorted and exploited German misdeeds for political gain and also, 377 00:44:48,530 --> 00:44:56,480 of course, by the Germans themselves who authorised criminal behaviour against the civilian Belgian civilians. 378 00:44:56,480 --> 00:45:03,230 If we look for verifiable truth in these paintings, drawings, lithographs will not find it. 379 00:45:03,230 --> 00:45:11,670 But perhaps they bring other levels of truth to the fore. Let's end by juxtaposing two famous quotations from the era. 380 00:45:11,670 --> 00:45:15,240 Both of them issued not long after the war was over. 381 00:45:15,240 --> 00:45:25,960 One is from the British politician Arthur Ponsonby, who published a post-war diatribe against propaganda, which he entitled Falsehood in Wartime. 382 00:45:25,960 --> 00:45:30,340 When war is declared, writes Ponsonby, truth is the first casualty. 383 00:45:30,340 --> 00:45:41,350 To this, he adds, there must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history. 384 00:45:41,350 --> 00:45:51,130 The other quotation is from Bela's is contemporary Pablo Picasso, who observed, Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth. 385 00:45:51,130 --> 00:46:00,280 As we've seen this afternoon, Bela's is incendiary. War pictures fall somewhere into the abyss that separates these two comments in our 386 00:46:00,280 --> 00:46:06,640 world today in which civilian populations are again subject to extreme brutality. 387 00:46:06,640 --> 00:46:13,270 It's hard to know now. It's it's hard to know now, as it was back then, how to work our way through this abyss. 388 00:46:13,270 --> 00:46:20,410 Who to listen to, whose word to trust in which course of action we as individuals and as a collective society 389 00:46:20,410 --> 00:46:27,430 can take without ultimately doing ourselves and those we wish to save more harm than good. 390 00:46:27,430 --> 00:46:36,070 Belize's his drawings and paintings of wartime atrocities. In Belgium a little more than a century ago are worth resurrecting for. 391 00:46:36,070 --> 00:46:42,790 They remind us all too clearly how unclear things become in the wake of war. 392 00:46:42,790 --> 00:46:51,790 Rather than condemn him for his blind acceptance of the atrocity reports with their difficult to disentangle, blend of fact and prevarication, 393 00:46:51,790 --> 00:46:54,820 let us ask ourselves how easily we too, 394 00:46:54,820 --> 00:47:04,150 in the present day can be duped by news and fake news and wars and rumours of wars and information and misinformation. 395 00:47:04,150 --> 00:47:12,880 Bellows is us in this regard. An early victim of large scale, systematic and lethal fact bending. 396 00:47:12,880 --> 00:47:23,860 We need somehow to find a better way than he had to dedicate ourselves to that ever elusive and yet absolutely indispensable entity known as truth. 397 00:47:23,860 --> 00:47:30,435 Thank you very much.