Images of War: The Artist's Vision of World War II Book

.While most of the world went to war with guns and ammunition, there were others who carried brushes and paint to the fray. Although little known at the time-and barely remembered half a century later-artists from all nations committed to paper or canvas their impressions of the immense events of which they were part. No war in history was as widely chronicled in art as was World War II.Some artists were commissioned by their governments or armed forces to record the battles, while others just felt the need to express their vision of the war. Some were already famous, and some became famous after-ward. Others made no subsequent mark on the art world, and still others never made it home at all.Ken McCormick and Hamilton Darby Perry, assisted by a team of researchers, have selected an exemplary sampling of these artworks-most of them never before published. The result is a powerful and moving look at a time when it seemed that war reached everywhere and touched everyone-from the front lines to the supply lines; from the foxholes and the gun turrets to the loading docks, mess tents, and hospitals; from bombed-out cities and refugee-swollen roads to home-front factories and war-bond raffles. This is a truly international collection-one that represents some 200 artists from a dozen countries-chosen from among the thousands and thousands of artworks hanging in museums and tucked away in archives. We see the war from every viewpoint. Of special note is a generous selection of paintings from the Soviet Union, most of them never before available to the West.Throughout, the art is married to a text of excerpted eyewitness accounts and dispatches-verbal sketches, that complement the immediacy of the potent images.This collection offers a highly charged look at the harshness of war, devastation of war, triumph, the fear, industriousness, sorrow, boredom, glory, stolen moments, waste, and grief of war-all as they've never been seen beforeRead More