Remembering Arnold Zadikow

Whilst boulevarding down the Ramblas des Googlers last night I came across the following image that stopped me in my tracks.

The piece is called 'Death as a Scottish soldier charging the battlefield.' A few moments of on-line searching and I found out the artist was called Arnold Zadikow.

A very brief biography reveals that Zadikow was a Jewish sculptor who worked in silver, stone, glass and metals. He died in 1943 in the infamous Theresienstadt concentration camp. The vast majority of his works were destroyed by the Nazis in 1942, a few small pieces were kept hidden until after the war and then ended up in private collectors hands.


The rest of this series of medals is equally compelling.

Death as a sailor with nets catching boats

 
Death as a soldier playing a flute

Death as the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Frieden (Peace): death drumming up support for war.

Death from the air.

Death sitting on a canon.


What occurred to me is that Zadikow and his contemporaries were not afraid to show that war is about fear and death. His description of death makes our generation of artists representing war rather timid by comparison. Somewhere over the last 60 years we've shifted from the superstitious representations that occupied us since the earliest days, to focussing on the heroics of men and women in uniform. The fear element representation of death has been replaced by sound-bites, laser guided rockets and coloured panic alerts.

War artists have traditionally shown the warts and all aspects of conflict, with nods to both heroism and visceral atrocities, for example Goya's  'The Disasters of War' series which depicted rape, torture, execution and hand to hand peasant combat. Then there was Picasso's incredible 'Guernica', controversially covered up by UN officials on the day they 'debated' Resolution 1441 as a precursor to the war in Iraq.

A search looking for contemporary war artists hits very few people. Twenty-five years ago I remember encountering the spotty faced Chapman brothers setting up an installation at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock of all places where they were making a Samurai warrior out of plastic soldiers and weapons. It's nearly 20 years since Peter Howson was the official war artist in Bosnia, and if truth be told his war scenes from Bosnia differed very little from his bar brawls in Bridgeton. Since Iraq there's almost an aspect of 'embedded artists', whereby official artists kept with the troops and are shown what they can record. 

The first hit I found for Michael Fay, an American war artist was a site devoted to the homo-erotic aspect of men in uniform..not quite what I was looking for. Although he does very pleasant watercolours of men in khaki, his work was nothing like the tragic realism I had anticipated. 

I then found Arabella Dorman who created the piece below. She seems to focus on the heroic bravery of the individual victim rather than the horrors they face. Her work is somewhat negated by her commission price list on her website and the plethora of aristocratic, aesthetically appealing faces that peer out at the viewer. 

The one artist I found that seemed to at least be pointing out the cerebral and satirical aspects of war, was Gerald Laing, the sixties pop-art artist, who returned to active service with his 1960's Vietnam era 'Starlets' to give voice to his disquiet about Abu Ghraib and the abuses taking place there. His re-engagement perhaps says more about contemporary arts unhealthy obsession with money and celebrity, rather than the search for truth and beauty in war. 

I'm delighted to have found Arnold Zadikow, sharing his images and part of his story here protects him just a little bit from oblivion and perhaps remembers that he and his work fell victim to the War.