It is hard to believe that America has held a war without artist Hans Burkhardt being around to shock the conscience, perhaps with a signature painting of black, brooding crosses, blood red background and real human skulls embedded in the canvas.
Swiss-born Burkhardt, who died at the age of 89 in 1994, was an Abstract Expressionist who specialized in symbolically portraying the pain of war, a man whose first major work was inspired by the Nazi bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, a subject more famously chosen by Picasso.
While living in the sunny, even bucolic Hollywood Hills, where he had emigrated in the 1930s, Burkhardt went from painting the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War to painting other battles and cataclysmic events: World War II, the unleashing of the atomic bomb, the Korean conflict, Vietnam, El Salvador and Operation Desert Storm.
PHOTO: REUTERS
A friend and student of New York City abstract master Arshile Gorky, Burkhardt was an odd duck as far as California painters go -- a man grimly wrestling with the devil while others concentrated on happier, lighter subjects such as cheerful red, white and blue American flags for example.
By contrast, Burkhardt's American flags are painted in blacks and greys with blood dripping from them.
And ultimately, Burkhardt was also a pretty well forgotten man by gallery goers though not by critics who came to value him more and more as the years passed.
But as America managed its brief war in Iraq and its even longer occupation, Burkhardt's long-time friend, Los Angeles gallery owner Jack Rutberg, thought it was time to mount a retrospective and remind viewers that the past is but prologue to the present.
Following footsteps
So up on the walls of his spacious gallery in Los Angeles' Fairfax District went 50 large canvases done by the man described by the late art historian Eugene Anderson as "Goya's spiritual heir."
The exhibition, which was to close in September, was extended through October, and has won some renewed critical attention for Burckhardt plus spirited discussions at the gallery.
Rutberg said one by-product of the show was a decision by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to rehang in its permanent collection a Burkhardt it had taken down in 1945 amid complaints that the painter's use of deep reds made him a communist sympathiser.
(He always maintained he was non-political although he once attacked Ronald Reagan through his work when Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild. One 1945 painting called Studio Scab, Ronald Reagan shows a deformed figure standing in a corner clutching a bag of money.)
With many of the nation's poets, writers and artists vying with each other for new ways to condemn the Iraq war and occupation, some are finding a kindred spirit in Burckhardt.
During the Vietnam War, he embedded skulls into the surface of his paintings in what the art historian Peter Selz called "extending the art of assemblage to an apotheosis." Another critic, Donald Kuspit, said Burkhardt's images were "among the greatest war paintings."
The skulls were first embedded in giant 1966 and 1969 protest pieces, Lang Vei, My Lai and Last Judgment, Dark Shadows, the Burial of My Enemies.
Rutberg said the skulls came from Burkhardt's time as an artist living in Mexico in the early 1950s.
"In Mexico at that time, if you didn't pay for the grave, they dug you out and left your bones on the ground. Hans would be in the graveyards painting when he would see the skulls just lying about, sometimes even people playing soccer with them.
Images of skulls
"He felt he would love to have some to draw from and never intended to put them in his paintings. But years later he was so deeply moved by the Vietnam War, he put them into his work and broke new territory. The skull is the most charged image in Western culture."
Skulls were not the only objects that Burkhardt placed in his paintings. His last series, called Black Rain and dealing with feelings of his own mortality as well as atrocities in the guerrilla war in El Salvador, used bits of charred wood installed in them, forming crosses along with a sculpted head of Christ he had found in Mexico.
"Personally he was far from being a bleak man," said Rutberg. "In fact, he could not have been more cheery and often he would paint celebrations, lovers, nudes. But he said he had to paint war as well."
Burkhardt once explained his work this way: "The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of truth."
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