It was supposed to be “the war to end all wars.” It wasn’t. And by the time the smoke cleared in November 1918, four years after the fighting began, over 17 million soldiers and civilians lay dead.
“World War I Beyond the Trenches,” the harrowing new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, gives us paintings, posters, music and more from the days before, during and just after the war. Sometimes it takes an artist to show us what hell is.
Take John Singer Sargent’s 20-foot-long painting, “Gassed.” On loan from Britain’s Imperial War Museum — and never before seen in New York — it shows an unsteady line of soldiers, injured eyes bandaged, being led off the battlefield.
One of the most surprising things about the show is how many artists agitated for America to end its neutrality and step into the fray. Childe Hassam painted flags, both American and Allied, while George Bellows, inflamed by reports of German atrocities, depicted gory scenes of maulings and assaults.
Here, too, are Horace Pippin’s paintings of Harlem Hellfighters; Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolor of a flag bleeding into the sky; and an eerie forest by Charles Burchfield, done just before he was deployed.
From the museum’s archives, guest curator Robin Frank selected dozens of posters with widely varied tones: from the patriotic urging to buy Liberty Bonds to the jingoistic hysteria of a gorilla in a German helmet.
Most poignant are the illustrated letters an Italian-born soldier sent his friends back home in New York. They start out cheery, filled with sketches of his “Bonehead Squad.” But as the months go by and his comrades die around him, all Salvatore Cillis wants is to return to New York Harbor and see “the old girl with her torch.”
How better to remember, this Memorial Day weekend, that liberty has its price.
“World War I Beyond the Trenches” runs through Sept. 3 at the New-York Historical Society, Central Park West at 77th Street