Tags
Conscription, Correlli Barnett, Draft, Duchess of Alba, Francisco Goya, Horror, Jagiellonian University, John Canaday, Medieval universities, Morris Bishop, Vietnam War
The cover of this issue shows the portrait of the Duchess of Alba by Francisco Goya:
It illustrates New York Times art critic John Canaday’s ‘Goya and Horror’, an extract from his soon-to-be-published The Lives of the Painters, following Goya’s journey from court painter to creator of the ‘swirling, screaming apocalypse of Black Painting’:
Of all the great masters of the past to be claimed as ancestor by modern artists, Goya is easily the favorite. Romantics are nourished by his violence; realists point out that in a time of artificialities he found his point of departure not in formulas but in the streets; social rebels or painters of social consciousness feel that they are descendants of Goya the liberal thinker, who drew and painted his indictments instead of writing them down; fantasists recognize a kinship with a master of nightmare. And even artists who have renounced the pictorial image, or at least one large school of them, can seize upon passages in his late work as approximations or prophecies of the abstract-expressionist aesthetic.
And yet Goya is also the antithesis of all these modernisms. He was a first-rate rococo decorator; in many portraits he revealed himself as the natural follower of Velázquez’s baroque tradition. It is never safe to stand in front of a Goya and exclaim over its beauties, its power, and its significance from any standard preconception of what his art is all about.
The article includes a portfolio of Goya’s works tracing his interest in the fantastic:
Saturn Devouring One of His Children…must stand as Goya’s ultimate vision of ravening evil: time itself. For Saturn, or Cronus, the god of time, ultimately consumes all creatures. The painting was done on a wall in Goya’s dining room.
Also in this issue:
In ‘On the Raising of Armies’, Correlli Barnett gives a historical perspective to the controversy of the United States sending conscripted soldiers to Vietnam:
The essential point about volunteers in major wars is that there have rarely been enough of them. Only some great patriotic cause, some dearly held – if poorly understood – principle, draws a mass of volunteers from the whole social body of the nation; thus the citizen armies of France in the Revolution, the Union and Confederate armies of 1861, and the British ‘New Army’ of 1914-16. Even the spur of great principles is of limited duration. Wars last longer than anyone expects; mud, dust, and disease dim the enthusiasm; the possibility of death or mutilation becomes increasingly apparent. The flood of volunteers dries up; the demand for men does not. Compulsion in some form follows: compulsion sanctioned or condoned by national opinion.
Small wars constitute an entirely different problem, and it is this problem that the United States now faces in recruiting for Vietnam. The war in Vietnam, like the earlier French war in Indochina or the British war with the Boers of South Africa in 1899-1902, is not a life-and-death struggle against a great power. It divides rather than unites home opinion. It is essentially a war on an imperial frontier, although ‘empire’ has ceased nowadays to be manifested by direct annexation and rule by governors general, and the word itself is much out of fashion.
This description of the Vietnam war does not imply an ethical judgment; it is simply a military definition. It is the small wars in Korea and Vietnam and the continuing commitment they represent, rather than the great but brief crises of the world wars, that really mark America’s emergence from isolation; the abandonment of the Founding Fathers’ hope of an inward-looking nation of citizen farmers. Since 1945 America has faced for the first time the far-off permanent involvements of a great power, and the current agonizing over Vietnam and the draft are symptoms of a profound and painful adjustment.
The British experience in the years after the Second World War probably constitute the nearest parallel to the present American situation. A combination of the Cold War and colonial unrest kept the British army at full stretch all over the world. During that time there were, in particular, the terrorist troubles in Palestine, Kenya, and Cyprus, the long struggle to smash the communists in Malaya, and participation in the Korean War. National servicemen saw active service in each of these military involvements, and no public disquiet or resistance to call-up was evinced.
However, none of these emergencies much stirred or divided British public opinion; on the other hand, had the Suez operation of 1956 developed into a long campaign involving drafts of national servicemen, there would have been the bitterest opposition in Britain.
In ‘Scholares Medii Aevi’, Morris Bishop outlines the daily life of students at major medieval universities such as Paris and Bologna.
There is a portfolio of pictures of medieval universities from both the past and the then-present of 1968. Along with Oxford, Padua and Bologna there is Cracow: