‘It’s the best art collection no one has ever heard of,” says curator Renée Klish of the Army Art Collection. Small wonder: almost all of the 16,500-plus works are stored below ground level on 14th Street in Washington, DC, available for viewing by appointment only. A few hang in the Pentagon or occasionally go on tour, but for the most part, these striking original images of war—the brutality, the boredom, the tragedy, the humor—hang on massive sliding panels, hidden from view. One thinks of the warehouse scene in the closing frames of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark.
This may be changing. CBS Television correspondent Rita Braver interviewed Klish last year, and the segment aired on the network’s Sunday Morning. As one result, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia decided to stage an exhibition titled “Art of the American Soldier”—running now through 10 January 2011—featuring exclusively more than 200 Army works. They range from Kerr Eby’s haunting eyewitness etching of World War I American Expeditionary Force Soldiers moving into the St. Mihiel salient to a contemporary painting by Army artist-in-residence Master Sergeant Martin Cervantez, showing Charlie Company, 1/26, infantrymen on a precipitous mountain road in eastern Afghanistan with nowhere to go if ambushed.
The collection includes pieces dating to before the Mexican War, but its strength lies in World War II and Vietnam to the present. Most of the images were created by U.S. Army artists, but Norman Rockwell is represented, as is Adolf Hitler. The collection includes 1,100 works from Life magazine’s World War II coverage donated by Henry Luce, all the Army-related art from Abbott Laboratories’ World War II art program, Yank magazine cartoon art, original World War II Army poster art, and 456 pieces of captured German art from World War II.
Originally these numbered 8,000, but most have now been returned. The Army retained Hitler’s four watercolors, framed and stored horizontally in a large file drawer, plus any images featuring a swastika, prominent leaders of the Third Reich, or overt propaganda. These Hitler-related images total 200. Another 256 are part of a special section showing the war from the German perspective. They include paintings of the Russian front by Rudolf Lipus and Willfred Nagel.
The entire collection, according to Director of Army Museums Dr. Charles H. Cureton, is moving to a state-of-the-art storage center at the new National Museum of the U.S. Army, scheduled to open in 2015 at Fort Belvoir near Washington. While the new locale would seem an ideal venue for displaying many of these works, in military museums art competes for space with hardware.
Klish has worked for years to convince the brass to bring the collection to the public eye; she remains skeptical that significant portions of it will make the cut. But Judson Bennett, director of the new museum, assured me that he plans to use original art throughout the museum to help tell the Army story. “Most will come from the Army Art Collection,” he said. In addition, the museum’s special exhibits and art section will function as an art gallery much of the time.
I discovered the treasure trove in 1994, while searching for art to illustrate a Naval History article on Tom Lea, one of seven artists selected by Life to bring World War II home to Americans. Eighty-two of Lea’s paintings are in the Army’s collection, including the powerful series he made after landing with the 7th Marines on Peleliu. His iconic Two Thousand Yard Stare is temporarily on display in Philadelphia, along with The Beach and Sundown on Peleliu. All are destined to return to storage after the exhibit finishes a proposed national tour.
A better alternative is available: Display them in the new Marine Corps Museum at Quantico, on loan from the Army. If this proves difficult administratively, the Commandant and Army Chief of Staff can resolve any issues over a cup of coffee. I suggest adding Lea’s Going In and The Price. Jim Lea, the artist’s son, agrees. “I believe that Dad’s Peleliu art work should be out and shown in the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico,” he wrote me. “It is certainly the most appropriate place, and I believe that is where Dad would be honored to have it.”