Artists in a Time of War, Castello di Rivoli — hallucinatory landscapes of horror

In the poem “September 1939”, written within days of the outbreak of war in Europe, WH Auden hoped art would be an “affirming flame”:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:

Artists in a Time of War, an impressive, dramatic exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, the castle-museum outside Turin, assembles such an exchange of messages. They span centuries, beginning with Goya’s mangled, maimed bodies in “The Disasters of War” (1810-1820) and concluding with Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan’s claustrophobic, tomblike installation “Shelter II”. The upper part of this thick, tall wall is crammed with books stacked against a window, blocking light/enlightenment — culture used merely as physical protection from glass fragments during explosions. The lower section is a mass of earth inset with a truncated bronze hand — an image taken from a photograph after the Bucha massacre near Kyiv in 2022.

Opening the show, Goya’s etchings are assembled in an apparently haphazard display, some overlapping others, random as the impact of war itself. In “With or without reason”, two Spaniards gesture hopelessly, in anguish, at the viewer as they face death from French soldiers, lined up like a firing squad. “The Same” reads the equivalent image in which Spaniards execute Frenchmen. A Napoleonic soldier leans back surveying a trio of men hanging from trees whose tops have been cut — an eerie, unnatural landscape. Another plunges a knife into the pristine white figure of a collapsing monk.

Tonal density, dark ink engulfing the figures, hatching running in opposite directions, coarse aquatint and rough burnishing offset by very refined passages, all build the sense of human frailty amid violence and disintegration of order. There are no heroics: Goya was the first visual chronicler of war to focus on the dying, wounded, starving — secular victims often depicted, however, in the extreme poses and movements of a St Sebastian or a Pietà.

“I saw it,” Goya wrote beneath a caravan of fleeing civilians. Surely he did; but it is the expressive quality and graphic intensity, above the documentary value, that makes the series seminal — unrivalled as a portrayal of modern warfare’s effect on ordinary people until “Guernica”, which it significantly influenced.

The show makes the connection by displaying nearby Picasso’s beautiful grisaille painting “Tête de femme” (1942), Dora Maar’s features distorted into the mournful mask of “Weeping Woman”, based on a figure from “Guernica”, and etchings of the same motif for Paul Éluard’s poems in Solidarité (1938) and Au rendez-vous allemand (1944). Highlights are also Joan Miró’s contribution to these volumes: dusky, phantasmagorical, spinning constellations where moons and stars cast glimmers of hope across Europe’s dark confusion.

Insightfully curated by Castello’s director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this show is the climax to her recent, excellent series of exhibitions on Expressionism. The broad theme, developing from Goya, that war urges an art of the fantastical and grotesque, is persuasive and compelling. Inevitably, choices for so vast a subject are somewhat arbitrary, and quality is varied — the contemporary pieces feel more provisional — but almost everything has elemental force: an expressive imperative, going beyond bearing witness. Although sombre, most of the works are inventive, unexpected, occasionally even displaying comic energy.

Michael Rakowitz’s stop-motion animation “The Ballad of Special Ops Cody” (2017) stars a toy model of an American soldier who climbs a vitrine in a museum to reach the Mesopotamian votive statues within it, and offers them an apology for the US’s involvement in Iraq.

For “Every Tiger Needs a Horse”, Rahraw Omarzad, an Afghan artist whom Christov-Bakargiev helped flee his country in 2021, blew up his own canvases with a bomb at a military base in Piedmont. Blazes of white light pierce these painting’s overall gloom — creation from destruction.

Installed in the museum’s dark attic, Omarzad’s video “New Scenario” (2022-23) features characters ranging from a Taliban representative to a businessman, a soldier, a man in traditional Sudanese dress, who float across the screen like ghosts to a score of slow movements and the thud of an eerie repetitive soundtrack, filling the entire museum. Omarzad evokes, says Christov-Bakargiev, “cyclical reversals of roles throughout history, where those in power lost and gained, over and over senselessly”.

Salvador Dalí’s crumbling fortress and solitary arch adrift on a bleak Spanish plain, “Composition with Tower” (1943), is a war landscape as desolate and uncanny as any Surrealism could invent. Surrealist Lee Miller’s instinctive sense of life’s incongruities and weird juxtapositions was employed devastatingly in her war photographs. The image, made with Life magazine correspondent David Scherman, of Miller sitting in Hitler’s shining white bath, the dust of Dachau on her boots, is shown alongside her close-ups of corpses at Dachau and furnaces at Buchenwald. Her goal was “to document war as historical evidence” but it was Miller the surrealist who shaped these striking chiaroscuro compositions of an unimaginable reality.

It’s a truism that, in painting, abstraction emerged after the 20th century’s two world wars — Kandinsky and Malevich in Russia after the first, Pollock and American Abstract Expressionism after the second: as if the project of humanist figuration could barely survive the slaughter. But it did, and Christov-Bakargiev marvellously contrasts two European painters whose approaches were shaped by their different experiences of war.

In Slovenian painter Zoran Mušič’s “We Are Not the Last” (1970), based on drawings made during his internment at Dachau, dead bodies are piled high or lie rigid side by side, heads with gaping mouths, limbs a massed heap like infinite sprawling tentacles. Everything is fading, pinkish-earthy hues dissolving into raw canvas — life cannot hang on, the mind can’t make sense of the horror. I thought of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Mušič’s trembling scenes appear and disappear, unstable as memory, yet together form a hallucinatory landscape of death — mountains and rivers of corpses.

The opposite of Mušič’s fragility, Alberto Burri’s canvases from the 1950s convey trauma through dense materiality. In “Sack and Red”, jute, torn and stitched like a wound, is threaded into the canvas; in “Sack”, plastic bulges like blistered skin. Burri, a doctor in the Italian army in Libya, was taken as a prisoner to Texas, where he abandoned medicine for art. Castello is showing “Texas” (1945), his first painting, a red and ochre landscape dotted with two stark trees and a rough rendering of the prisoner-of-war camp’s fence, a canvas already thick with painterly matter.

Back in Italy, Burri’s work became more abstract, and also more physical, the red and black scorched surfaces evocative of war-ravaged landscapes and damaged bodies, and at the same time radiant — daring to suggest art’s capacity for transformation, Auden’s “affirming flame”.

To November 19, castellodirivoli.org