Galleries: The true suffering of war

Goya: Fuerte cosa es! (That's Tough), No nay que da voces. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Battle's misery reminds us of value of peace.

With the anniversary last year of the beginning of World War I and this year's remembrance of the Gallipoli landings there has been much comment on war and its consequences. Two fine exhibitions from the Auckland Art Gallery's print collection provide a powerful visual commentary.

The first is an exhibition of prints by Francisco Goya called Folly and War. Goya documented the Peninsular War (1807-1814) with the Spanish, Portuguese and English armies against the invading forces of Napoleon. It was the war that made the Duke of Wellington famous; it also coined the term "guerrilla war" and was fought with terrible ferocity.

The show starts with an enlarged copy of a late etching called The Folly of Fear. People crouch in fear of a giant hooded figure. One man, identifiable as a French soldier, futilely waves a sabre at the giant. Goya had earlier drawn and printed a series of etchings titled The Disasters of War documenting what he had seen of death in full measure.

The first actual-size etchings are from a series of prints called Los Caprichos (The Caprices), which show the sharp psychological edge Goya could achieve as well as his vivid imagination that gave rise to these images of the follies of humankind. Look out, Here Comes the Bogeyman shows a mother enraptured by a hooded figure while her children shrink away. They Are Asleep shows a gaol where, in Goya's own words, "Sleep is the only happiness of the miserable." Trials shows a young witch teaching an awkward man to fly. It includes a giant goat and the cats that Goya always makes so sinister.

Goya: No nay que da voces (It's No Use Crying Out). Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

These are a preface to The Disasters. Goya describes no great battles. The series begins with a hideous crowd oppressing the figure of Truth and proceeds to a grim image of a captured guerrilla having his genitals hacked off. Executions follow. That's Tough! shows soldiers involved in hangings and rape. The mechanics of hanging are made clear as a victim has his feet lifted by a soldier because the tree is not high enough to strangle him effectively. The poor are not spared. A group of starving people are given the ironic caption, No Use Crying. It is only a small sample but the misery of war was never so powerfully drawn.

These etchings are followed by a sample of the series, Follies. Etching involves an image drawn on a copper plate, then acid is used to bite into the plate. Goya used a technique called aquatint, which allowed him to use tone as well as line. It can create dark atmospheric effects. Darkness gives a nightmare quality to Follies. Finally, the show includes examples of the last of Goya's series, Tauromaquia, in which he has much to say about courage and death.

Death is the subject of two moving poems that bracket the show by men both killed in war, Wilfred Owen in World War I, and Frederico Garcia Lorca in the Spanish Civil War.

The Goya exhibition is exceptionally well presented by the gallery's curators and the same can be said of the Expressionist prints The Age of Turmoil higher in the gallery. This exhibition covers 1900-1923, so includes the Great War.

Kathe Kollwitz: Die Gefangenen (The Prisoners). Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

A standout is examples of the work of Kathe Kollwitz, a committed socialist. Her depiction of war is inspired by peasant revolt; her lithographs of peasants is deeply sympathetic to the suffering of the poor in wartime. One of the most memorable is Ploughing in which peasants pull their plough without the aid of horses. The same sturdy peasants are victims roped together in Prisoners. Kollwitz's knowledge of suffering was intensified by the loss of her son, Peter, in the first weeks of World War I.

During this period, one of the effects of the war in Germany was a complete upsetting of conventional thinking. Some radical artists abandoned anything that smacked of the academic rules that governed art in the 19th century.

Artists who served in the war, such as Max Bechmann, had their vision twisted. His etching of a post-war celebrity has an almost maniac intensity. The dark mood is exemplified by an image as simple as Steamer by Emil Nolde in which boat, smoke and sea are combined as a strange apparition.

Several of these artists also adapt the ancient technique of woodcut but abandon fine detail. They are hacked out to make large areas of black, often leaving the grain of the wood fully apparent.

The melancholy Heads by Karl Schmidt-Rotluff is an excellent example. Again the war is inescapable. The rambunctious Lovis Corinth sees the army as an armoured knight defending German womanhood. George Grosz adopts a naive line to draw his vision of the incoherent mess of politics in Hinrichtung (Execution). It is clear why Expressionism grew up as the name for this new, often violent, art.

At the galleries

What:

Folly and War

: Etchings by Francisco Goya, to February 8; Age of Turmoil: Art In Germany, 1900-1923, to May 31

Where: Auckland Art Gallery, Kitchener St

TJ says: The Goya collection, on level 1, and the Age of Turmoil, on the mezzanine, are both exhibitions of graphic art which addresses war and its consequences in a moving way. They also reveal the richness of the gallery's print collection.