Eyewitnesses

"War is grim and war is horrible. It has always been the military man himself who has been the first to point this out, wisely leaving it to well-manicured civilians to sing sweetly of its lice and mud and torture and death. . . . This present tragedy of history is markedly different from its predecessors. In this war the artist is on the spot. Whatever his previous preoccupation with three plums in a silver dish or three girls in a grassy glade, the artist has now been wrenched out of it by the necessity of recording . . . man's reaction to the greatest crisis of all history. . . . No aggregation of the art of the future can fail to be profoundly altered by the record these men are making of the titanic times which go, in our trite vocabulary, by the name of Today."

Thus last week wrote lively, beak-nosed Francis Henry Taylor, director of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the catalogue of a highly unusual art show. The first big collection of eyewitness war paintings ever shown while the war was still being fought hung in Washington's huge, windowless, marble National Gallery. The 125 paintings, later to tour the country, were part of a large-scale venture unique in unofficial war recording: since before Pearl Harbor, LIFE has been sending artists--all easel painters of standing--to camps, to war fronts and to sea as accredited war correspondents. Their pictures will eventually be given to the Government, to be housed in some future museum of war art.

In Washington, varnishing-day guests saw oils, water colors and some drawings of subjects from a pre-Pearl Harbor defense plant (by Paul Sample) to Texas Artist Torn Lea's literal impressions during the Battle of the Solomons. Notable were a richly colored night scene by Chicagoan Aaron Bohrod of soldiers from Fort Benning, Ga. disporting themselves at an amusement park, and Peter Kurd's painting of B-17s returning at twilight from a raid on Rouen. Other artists shown: Henry Billings, Floyd Davis, Edward Laning, Fletcher Martin, Barse Miller.

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