‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media images to shock the public were engravings documenting contemporary social ills pioneered by the Victorian magazine The Graphic, though the association goes a long way further back, to Jacques Callot’s etching series ‘Miseries of War’ (1633) recording atrocities perpetrated by both sides during the French invasion of his native Lorraine in the Thirty Years’ War.
The grisliest of those images, ‘The Hangman’s Tree’, is the earliest work in Bearing Witness? Violence and Trauma on Paper, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The prints and drawings on display are not all about war – social deprivation is the subject of Käthe Kollwitz’s 1922 sheet of drawings of German children, racial oppression the target of South African printmaker Ndabenhle William Zulu’s 1992 linocut ‘Peace Now!’ – but the role of the artist as witness is most neatly encapsulated in the title of Goya’s etching, ‘I Saw This’ (c.1810-11), from The Disasters of War.
Artist witnesses are thin on the ground these days. Where are the John Keanes and Peter Howsons of the Ukrainian conflict? Or the Don McCullins? No iconic images have come out of recent conflicts, only newsreel of reporters in bulletproof vests. Perhaps a Ukrainian or Russian artist-soldier will emerge to record his memories, like Otto Dix in Der Krieg after the first world war. Sometimes these things take a while to surface. Goya’s Disasters of War were only published in 1863, 35 years after his death – a howl of protest from beyond the grave by an artist who spent much of his career serving the court responsible for said disasters.
Unlike Goya – or Manet in his matter-of-fact close-up on a barricade strewn with bodies in ‘Guerre Civile’ (1871-73) – Marcelle Hanselaar wasn’t a witness to the events portrayed in her 2015-17 suite of etchings The Crying Game, 20 of which, recently acquired by the Fitzwilliam, dominate one wall.
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