Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict review – war's bloody palette

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/17/ravaged-art-culture-war-leuven-review

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With commemorations to mark the centenary of the start of the first world war now under way across much of Europe, a surprising exhibition has opened in Leuven, Belgium, entitled Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict.

Leuven was the first town to fall victim to the war. German troops entered it on 20 August 1914. Five days later, shots were heard and the Germans thought they were being targeted by sharpshooters on the roofs. They shot hostages, fired on residents – killing 248 – and set fire to houses.

More than 1,000 homes were destroyed. The university halls and an adjoining wing that housed the library were deliberately set alight. Hundreds of valuable books, some of them dating from the middle ages, were destroyed. News of the disaster immediately spread worldwide, thanks to American reporters on the spot, who compared the destruction of the Flemish town to the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco.

This event earned the Kaiser's troops their reputation as barbarians, which persisted throughout the war. "The Hun is at the gate!" wrote Rudyard Kipling. Meanwhile the German propaganda machine perpetuated the story of murderous snipers.

So many war crimes have been perpetrated since August 1914 that only historians and the people of Leuven remember this particular atrocity. But it contains almost all the components of recurrences: a civilian population slaughtered by soldiers, historic and cultural symbols deliberately obliterated, immediate international reprobation and an official explanation soon disputed.

This is the starting point for Ravaged, which opens with terrifying photographs of the ruined Leuven. But the first work to really catch the eye is Cheval Arabe, a small sculpture by Adel Abdessemed. A horse on its back is tied with barbed wire to a copy of Colonel Gaddafi's Green Book.

The exhibition operates through a series of echoes, reaching back into the past with about 100 works, from the 16th to the 19th century, featuring destruction and ruin, and radiating out into the present with pieces by several contemporary artists including Mona Hatoum, Michael Rakowitz and Abdessemed.

The curators could have chosen completely different works or artists: Poussin, for instance, with the Massacre of the Innocents or the Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, or Picasso, Max Beckmann or Otto Dix. But they adopted another approach, focusing on strangeness.

As an illustration of iconoclastic destruction the exhibition features an anonymous 16th-century work, in which several men wielding picks and axes attack an Adoration of the Magi, and an extremely rare piece by Frans Francken II, an allegory with donkey-headed monsters trampling on marble sculptures and smashing a violin.

Then there are little-known sketches and etchings from the Reformation and the French Revolution, and 19th-century historical paintings, all of Catholic inspiration and violently satirical. For good measure a large canvas stigmatises the crimes committed by Spanish troops at Antwerp in 1576 during the Dutch war of independence.

If it was not already the case, visitors will certainly be convinced that their fellow human beings are inclined to take great pleasure in destruction and slaughter, on the grounds of the slightest religious or political pretext. Moving on from these considerations, rooted in the past, we shift into the present with events in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Examples of barbarity, illustrated by paintings, photographs and film, accumulate, ranging from the destruction of Sodom to the sack of Rome, through the shelling of Ypres and Beirut, the Wars of Religion and the Cultural Revolution in China. So the exhibition is driven by a sort of pendulum movement, back and forth in time, from one place to another. It is what makes it unusual, added to which some of the exhibits are little known.

But this comparative approach blurs the edges. Drawing a parallel between pictures of the Nazis burning books in 1933 and Iranian demonstrators burning official photographs of the Shah at the time of his downfall is unfortunate, to say the least. In one case the protagonists were murdering democracy, in the other they hoped to establish it.

All ruins are not the same and what happened in Dresden is not equivalent to the destruction of Reims or Leuven. We would have liked the history to be a little more accurate and the analogies less confusing.

Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict is at M-Museum Leuven, Belgium, until 1 September

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde