"Strength of the Hills" by Navy Lieutenant Farrell Collett. page ten Warpaint An Article by Beatrice Markham Both Hitler and Churchill paint. Artist Hitler has repeatedly declared his intention of becoming a great painter after the war. Artist Churchill has made no such declaration. But he has written: "When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting. But there I shall require a still gayer palette than I used here below. I expect orange and vermillion will be the darkest, dullest colors upon it." Art critics say Hitler's pictures are weak and sentimental. He often pays minute attention to unimportant details, and his expression resembles paintings of a picture post card variety. Churchill's work has been praised as being vigorous and free. He paints what he sees before him, quite as he sees it. The pictures are pleasant and conventional, an unsentimental record of the things he loves. These two leaders are symbolic of two types of painting, the old and the new, the repressive and the expressive, the imitative and the creative. Hitler's plan to dominate the world means he has to halt the creative, progressive activity. He has made use of the powerful effect of art in shaping the public opinion in his own and the occupied territories. The arts of these countries have become the property of Germany. Much modern painting and sculpture has been destroyed. Progressive schools and museums have been closed. Art which cannot serve the propaganda purposes of the army and the Fuhrer is not allowed to reach the people. In this process art has lost all but its technical shell. Creation needs must lie dormant in such a field. True art cannot be thus dictated. It must be a free and voluntary expression of the people and their culture. According to John Dewey, it is freedom of culture which brings political freedom, not the reverse. Surely Hitler knows this. Yet contrast the dictated policy of art in the Axis countries with what is happening to art and its war relationship in the countries of the Allies. Our soldiers sang themselves through the last war, but they are painting themselves through this one. They are being encouraged to decorate recreation and living quarters in camps and to make drawings or paintings of military life. Obviously the army recognizes that instruction in art provides a fundamental training in how to make intelligent use of one's eyes and hands in every day life. The arts can serve every student by stimulating and developing visual perception and manual skills. Training in art provides an alertness and a control which are essential on production lines and on fighting fronts. The U. S. Military Training Camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey, is just one example of what is happening in military camps. Fort Dix has four hundred part-time soldier art students few of whom ever colored a canvas or modeled a figure in their civilian days. In July of last year, forty-two of this country's ablest artists were chosen by the War Department to record the war directly at the fronts, at camps and at sea. Unfortunately Congress saw fit to withdraw the appropriation and cancelled their contracts a month later. However, leading magazines of this country came to the rescue and continued the support. The work these artists do while serving their contracts for their new patrons will eventually go to the government. These eye-witness war paintings may some day hang in a museum of war art alongside two hundred canvases already earmarked for the government by one leading magazine. Then, too, many a soldier not under contract is snatching a precious few moments now and then to record first hand his impressions of what he sees and feels. It is only reasonable that the art of this war differs from any paintings of previous wars we may have seen hanging in museums or reprinted in history textbooks and labeled as masterpieces. Paintings of this war are not of glorified generals dressed in shining and spotless uniforms, riding white chargers or commanding smooth columns of advancing soldiers. And even allowing for a modernized war, not all subject matter is concerned with sleek firearms, with silver-winged planes streaking through blue heavens, or with swift glances at exotic land or seascapes painted in strange places. Instead, the art of this war is more concerned with the emotional impressions of our soldier artists, their reactions to the greatest crises in all the history of warfare. The best pictures present this tragedy in the true light of its soldiers, fighting, suffering, dying. Cowardice, fear, hate, and homesickness, as well as strange bits of courage, are depicted. Paintings such as these bring close to us the truths that war is grim and war is horrible. In the realm of the arts, the right to portray our idealism or to protest against any prevailing inadequate social standards is accepted as an unwritten but none-the-less real principle of our nation. To be able to exercise this right insures the development of our national culture by a creative process. May we continue to have the vision to encourage the cultural resources of our creatively fertile democracy. page eleven