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Orson Welles, 1937 (photo by Carl Van Vechten)
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Part One:
Wednesday afternoon at the Charles Allis Art Museum: Marquette professor explains how French propaganda posters arose from the hope & horrors of World War I.
The Alliance Francaise
de Milwaukee (AFM)
sponsored another fine cultural event on May 6th. This one took
place at the Charles Allis Art Museum, housed in a grand stone
mansion on Milwaukee's eastside. Along with a generous buffet of
bread, paté,
cheese, veggies, sweets & a variety of French as well as Italian
wines, AFM served its
five dozen guests an informative cautionary lecture on European
history & art. [Thanks to AFM
executive director Anne
Leplae for her
exceptional hospitality & charm.]
The 15
propaganda posters on display are sepia-toned artifacts of a proud
nation at war. They include two works by Théophile
Steinlen (1859-1923),
better known for his art nouveau
cat images. For example, Steinlen's spare Journée
de Regions Liberées
(1919) depicts a crow resting on a crucifix overlooking a graveyard
covered with spring greenery.
These 45-inch by
31.5-inch lithographs were gathered during the war by Milwaukee
philanthropist Harriet Earling Fitch, whose work focused on the care
& support of millions of fatherless children. They were donated
by the family of Thomas Van Alyea Jr. The art is on display in the
museum's Margaret Fish Rahill Great Hall.
Intended
to raise both morale and money (i.e. bond-based loans) for the French
war effort, these images are especially poignant in retrospect. An
untitled 1917 color portrait by August
Leroux (1871-1954),
depicts an idealized intimate family moment: a bearded, helmeted
soldier hoists & embraces a pale young girl whose almond eyes
implore the viewer, while a woman nurses an infant in the monochrome
background.
This
year marks the centenary of several brutal battles of the so-called
Great War (1914-1918). Marquette
University history
professor Julius R. Ruff
offered a harrowing glimpse into an earlier one that afternoon at the
Allis. The First Battle
of the Marne lasted from
September 5th until the 12th of 1914. Although it halted the
alarming German advance towards Paris, an estimated 250,000
French soldiers were either killed or physically wounded in that
bloody week alone. Countless others, including unlucky civilians,
were psychologically damaged for life by having witnessed the loud
furious gas-bomb slaughter.
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| Charles Peguy, French writer & combat casualty in 1915 |
Among the casualties was a noted poet, essayist & editor named Charles Péguy (1873-1915), who caught a bullet to the forehead. Over two million soldiers of various armies participated in the Battle of the Marne. It dampened hopes for a short & glorious war. Perhaps more ominously, the Battle of the Marne saw the first decisive use of reconnaissance aircraft in warfare. Small squadrons of those flimsy, vulnerable early bi-planes helped the Allies by discovering weak spots in the German lines.
If art can instruct as well as inspire us, we would be wise to heed the anti-war imagery of such humanistic artists as Käthe Kollwitz. Here is her simple post-war indictment in the form of of a lithograph, Mothers (1919): http://www.kaethe-kollwitz.de/werkschau-en_14.htm.
Part Two:
Saturday afternoon at the Kenosha Public Museum: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds 1938 CBS radio broadcast discussed by Michigan author, then re-enacted by a local amateur troupe.
To
commemorate the centenary of George Orson Welles' birth in Kenosha
(May 6, 1915), the Citizen
Welles Society of Kenosha
organized several events in honor of the multi-talented artistic
genius.
Mercury Theatre on the Air,
a CBS version of director/actor Orson Welles & producer John
Houseman's stage
company, broadcast the legendary War of the Worlds radio drama
on October 30, 1938. The Sunday evening (8:00 pm EST) show, an
adaptation of the 1898 British sci-fi novel by H.G. Wells
(1866-1946), had a vast national audience. It was such a
credible fake, structured as a live-music show interrupted by
increasingly scary news flashes, that it sparked a panic among
listeners who missed the introductory disclaimer.
Thinking the Earth was being destroyed
by creepy reptilian invaders crawling out of futuristic Martian
spacecraft, people fled the cities or called flummoxed authorities
for help. Michigan-based scholar A. Brad Schwartz, author of
Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art
of Fake News (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY: 2015), completed
the picture.
In response to my question, Schwartz said it's a myth
that the radio show caused several deaths. He said that no credible
evidence has yet been presented to prove a causal connection between
the War of the Worlds broadcast & any listener deaths. There followed, however, the deadly
case of the February 1949 War of the Worlds broadcast in
Quito, Ecuador. Enraged upon discovering that the show was merely an
artistic deception, an angry mob attacked & burned the radio
station, killing at least six people.
Welles painted spellbinding
word-pictures. His compelling baritone voice even convinced many in
his 1938 North American audience that the world was under Martian
attack. On Saturday May 9th, RG
Productions presented their re-enactment of that historic broadcast,
starring Ed Godula as actor-director Orson Welles. It was fun to
watch the sound-effects crew make auditory magic.
Enhancing
the Orson Welles celebration for adults, Public
Craft Brewing Co.
released Public Hysteria,
their refreshingly bold American Pale Ale (6.5% ABV), on May 8th.
Surely Welles, a notorious imbiber & gourmand, would have
approved of that tribute.
Movie Tip: Check out Me and
Orson Welles (2009), directed by Richard Linklater &
featuring an eerily spot-on performance by Christian McKay
as the 22-year-old Welles directing &
starring in his modern-dress, fascism-themed production of
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Based on the novel of the same
name by Robert Kaplow, this comedic drama exquisitely captures
Manhattan in autumn 1937. I found it more entertaining &
artistic than Linklater's Oscar-winning film Boyhood (2014).
I watched it at a special screening at the Kenosha Public Library on
May 13th, followed by a live telephonic discussion with Kaplow.
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