Chris Banyas
Life Editor
Beginning in 2014 and extending through the year 2018, the world will be casting its look backward and observing the centenary of World War I.
Unlike more modern conflicts, voices are the only personal artifacts that remain of those who participated and lived through the Earth-changing event, whether those be written or recorded through some other medium.
For many, the events that led up to the conflict as well as the horrendous conditions in which people lived and died are impenetrable and accounts of individuals such as Erich Maria Remarque, author of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” represent the most effective avenues whereby an individual may begin to understand, to construct a frame through which to reference the incomprehensible violence.
“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine guns, hand grenades—words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
Focusing more on visual representations of the war, “Les Misères de la Guerre,” or the miseries of the war, an exhibition of French magazine content from the World War I period, will be on display at the John B. Davis Gallery in the Fine Arts building beginning Feb. 2 and running through Feb. 20.
“I did have a kind of vision and there is a kind of message,” said Justin Dolan Stover, assistant professor in the history department at ISU. “That being that we must recognize a conflict such as this, and indeed all conflicts as of course having political goals, but as also having a lot of collateral damage and whether that be direct collateral damage of civilian casualties, or even indirect collateral damage such as a child who grows up orphaned or someone who is maimed.”
Several different publications are represented in the exhibition and are similar in nature to something like “Life Magazine” during World War II.
“Kind of like a popular magazine that’s showing a few stories about the war, something that can be published weekly, that doesn’t give too much information but has a lot of visual representation,” said Stover.
One magazine is entitled “La Guerre Documentée” or the war record, and another is entitled “Le Miroir,” or the mirror.
The exhibition grew out of two different origin points.
While studying in France in 2010, Stover stumbled across the magazines, which would later make up the exhibition, at a flea market.
“I happened upon a few flea markets, which are completely different than what you find in the states. They have treasures,” said Stover. “There are busts of Napoleon and ceremonial lamps and swords and ancient china and silver. I was at this flea market in Paris, and on this table there was this woman who had a trove of old [World War I] military magazines, and I didn’t really understand the value of them as I was looking at them, I just thought they were really cool.”
The magazines contained artwork that caught Stover’s attention, including sketches, photographs and reproduced watercolors, which led him to inquire as to the price.
“She said two for five euro, and I gave her all the money I had in my pockets and carried them all back to the train station.”
Stover eventually came to ISU in 2012, where the second stage of the story leading up to the exhibition began.
“My colleague Dr. Erika Kuhlman and I are both on the Committee for the Study of War, Violence and Conflict in Society, and we’re always looking for ways to bring the subject of war and violence in a positive way, if that’s possible, to the community for greater understanding of the dynamics of the war,” said Stover. “It’s the center of my scholarship, war and violence. Trying to understand the factors that drive people to commit violence and engage in war.”
Phi Alpha Theta also participated in the organization of the event.
The art from the magazines will be presented without translations of the original French captions that accompanied them. This is intentional.
“These images and these experiences don’t really need to be translated in language. They are translated through the image,” said Stover. “So you see an orphaned child, you don’t need to be told ‘that’s an orphaned child,’ that’s something that can be universally understood.”
The content of the magazines differs greatly from American World War II publications, which usually depicted soldiers or workers in confident and victorious poses or in very positive lights.
“That this would be released to the French public, I found very shocking, that they would show the miseries of the war, rather than the triumph, or the heroism, or things that you would normally associate with propaganda.”
Due in part to the time gap between World War I and the present, World War II has grown to dominate the American consciousness, but according to Stover, these events are far from disparate.
“They cannot be inseparable. The ways in which the First World War was fought, the outcome of the First World War, economically, politically, the ways in which the Treaty of Versailles were written, all lead us to kind of observe the causations of the roots and causes of the Second World War,” said Stover. “To paraphrase, it’s either General Ferdinand Foch of the French Army, or George Clemenceau, ‘I don’t know whether war is an interruption of peace, or peace is an interruption of war.’”
The exhibit will officially launch with a discussion on Thursday, Feb. 12 from 5 to 6 p.m. in the John B. Davis Gallery.
