In 1915, returning from the military hospital in Berlin where he had served as a stretcher-bearer to the wounded returning from the battlefields of World War I, the German artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck conceived Der Gestürzte (The Fallen), an image of defeat and despair. that would end up costing him his life. A young man trapped in a position of humiliation and extreme vulnerability tries to crawl on the ground, naked, on hands and knees, his head resting heavily on the ground and his face turned backwards looking between his legs. One day he was upright and full of ideals, but it seems unlikely that he will rise again. The larger-than-life sculpture was intended for a war cemetery in his hometown of Duisburg, but the image of bent and powerless youth was heavily criticized and rejected. Too real. Nothing more eloquent about the madness of the conflict than the collapse of the human being. His creator, after fleeing to Zurich, a refuge for Europeans who opposed the war, committed suicide in 1919. He was 38 years old.
The vision of hell is always the same, what changes is the name of the wars. Two hundred years ago Goya represented scenes of women lying half-naked on the ground, apparently raped, or who, already dead, were dragged by a man, their dresses raised, revealing their stained underwear. The atrocities recorded by war reporters today are centuries old, and the artist’s relentless eye can make the experience as painful as any caught on camera.
The Swiss painter Miriam Cahn, 73 years old, who for decades has denounced the repeated violence and the suffering of bodies that speak of everything that happens to us, is the subject of a fierce lynching on Twitter, including death threats from her executioners. The motif is a painting about the war in Ukraine, fuck abstraction! , which is part of the retrospective dedicated to him by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The work shows the muscular, faceless body of a man forcing a smaller figure bent to his knees with his hands tied behind his back to perform fellatio. It was her reaction to the Bucha massacre, whose monstrosity she tries to approach in an enduring and compassionate way.
The problem is that those who, from their reason and their truth, are shocked, sentence and condemn, have wanted to see an incitement (?) to pedophilia. The text that accompanies the work in the room or the subsequent explanations of Cahn herself have been useless. “He is not a boy. This painting is about how sexuality is used as a weapon of war. The contrast between the two bodies shows the power of the oppressor against the underdog.” Another artist, Ukrainian Darya Koltsova, models tiny clay heads for every child killed in her country. She has close to 500. I hope no one accuses her of decapitating them.
