University Daily Kansan, April 16, 1981
Exhibit depicts war horrors
The casualties of the Vietnam War remain ingrained in the memories of every American who sat glued to his television set for our most recent message of death. The war could be viewed firsthand as the sound of gunfire reverberated through the living room.
What began as a military maneuver will be remembered as a costly mistake.
Missing in World War I were the film technicians and journalists who recorded each advancement or retreat in painstaking detail. Newspapers saw few photographs of the War as it was be waged. No war correspondent was allowed anywhere near the front lines and only the most innocuous pictures ever reached the public eye.
An exception to this rule was the French artist Jean-Louis Forain, who at the age of 61 volunteered for service at the western front in February, 1915. His quick charcoal sketches in watercolor by the Spencer Museum of Art provide some of the only pictures of what the war was actually like.
"His charcoal sketches were quickly done on the spot and were not meant to be a studied product," Elizabeth Broun, curator of prints and drawings for the Spencer, said.
Many of the sketches concentrate on the conditions soldiers were forced to suffer at the front.
"For the fighting men in the trenches it was an overwhelming experience." Broun said. "The trench life was extremely grim—the mud, the blood, the rats and the cold."
"capturing the inhumane conditions is Forain's "Jerry Prisoner," where his quick hand sketched the death, the humiliation and the utter powerlessness of a conquered man who fails to understand a walnut."
Scribbled beneath the picture are the words:
"Finally! We going to eat! Watch out for the
dragon!"
World War I marked the beginning of the Twentieth Century, according to Broun.
"All of civilization was changed by the fighting experiences the men had with the Indians," he wrote of the modern art
movement were formed. The world no longer operated on gentle virtues. There was discontentment and illogic. It changed our perspective of how society would evolve."
While most of the works depict the conditions
at the front, a few were done as propaganda
plates.
"The sketches focus on German soldiers firing on ambulances, submarines attacking neutral boats. They were meant to really take the battle down," such acts as the bombing of churches." she said.
all of Forain's works are accompanied by captions that refer to specific events during the war.
A lot of time was devoted to deciphering the captions and placing them with the proper
"They are very off-handed, casual, short captions that are very difficult to understand if you don't have a knowledge of the day," Broun said.
The final portion of the exhibit is devoted to war posters of the time.
Inended to inspire moral and monetary support for the war effort, the posters became a key component of the propaganda campaign that led to the greatest compiracy to delude the public."
Perhaps the most famous example of the French war posters is Jules Abel Faive's "On Les Aurs", in which a soldier rushes into the battlefield and gets them!" —the battle cry of the French soldier.
The brutality of the war is just as graphic and hard to rendering on sketch paper as it is on the polychrome.
The cost of victory and destruction of human life is pictured in one of Foran's sketches where the soldiers hung low to the ground, keeping constant vivid over the battle field.
Perhaps the two lines beneath the picture were their actual conversation: "You aren't missing a one, Abbee! That doesn't prevent me from paving for them . . ."
The exhibit will run through May 24 in the White Gallery of the Spencer Museum of Art.
On Campus
TODAY
THE MINORITY AFFAIRS LECTURE SERIES will host F. Browning Pipestem on "Implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act"; at 11:30 a.m. on the Pine Bank of the Union.
LA MESA ESPANOLA (Spanish Table) will meet from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 in 9569 Wescoe.
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL TEA AND TALK
LECTURE will feature Aletha Huston on
"Television and the Lives of Children" at 3:30
d.m. in the Jawhawk Room of the Union.
THE KU GERMAN CLUB will hold the Kafé festivals at 4:40 p.m. in 2005 Wescott. All愈合
CAMPUS CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP will meet at 7 p.m. in the Christian Campus House.
THE LIFE-ISSUE SEMINAR ON SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES will discuss "Confession" at 7 p.m. in the Ecumenical Christian Ministries Center.
THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM will host Edward Rube on "Johnson and Milton & Completing a Patchwork Book" at 8 p.m. in the Jayhawk Room of the Union.
THE KANSAS REGENTS GLEE CLUB will perform at 8 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Union.
OPENING OF ART DEPARTMENT SCHOLARSHIP SHOW at 9:30 a.m. in the Gallery of the Kansas Union. The exhibit will run through May 1.
THE PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT COLLOQUIUM will host Harry McGurk on "Audio-Visual Speech Performances" at 3:30 p.m. in the Council Room of the Boom.
THE KU BIOLOGY CLUB will meet at 4 p.m. in the Sunflower Room of the Union.
THE SOCIETY OF PHYSICS STUDENTS will sponsor Thomas Armstrong on "Saturn: En encounter with the Ringed Planet" at 7:30 p.m. in 3139 Wescoe.
A STUDENT TROMBONE RECITAL by Al Martin and J. Ward will be at 8 p.m. in the Swarthout Recital Hall in Murphy Hall.
Choral centennial observed
Photos by John Eisele Story by Karen Schlueter
LNBSDNG—Sunday was not just another beautiful April day in this picture-postcard Kansas community.
The town of 3,000, or almost 4,000 counting the Bethany College students, is celebrating a special anniversary April 5-19; the centennial of the founding of the Bethany College Oratorio Society's Messiah Festival.
Performances of George Frederick Handel's famous oratorio are common during the Easter season, but few congregations or com-
The annual festival, involving almost 500 students and townspeople, is a cherished tradition.
This year's festival includes four performances of the "Messiah," several student recitals, performances of August Strindberg's play, "Easter," and a performance of the "St. Matthew Passion" by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The tradition began in 1831 when Carl Swensen, pastor of the Bethany Lutheran Church and founder of the College, and his wife, Margaret, helped establish a school to provide religious inspiration for the community of Swedish immigrants, located about 200 miles west of Kansas City near Salina.
THE EASTER SUNDAY performance of the 'Messiah' will be broadcast to 150 public television stations across the country.
The first performance was given in the spring of 1882 by 38 singers who had been rehearsing with Swenson's wife since the previous December.
Through the past 100 years, the Oratario Society has grown from 38 singers to a 400-member choir and a 70-piece orchestra.
The Society is the oldest such group in the United States to perform the "Messiah" annually.
The group is made up of members of the Bethany College Choir, and townpeople from Lindsborough and 22 bordering communities.
"They are people who love to sing, many from communities that don't even have a church choir, and this is a chance for them to sing." Elmer Copley, professor of music at Bethany College and the Society's director, said.
COPLEY HAS DIRECTED the Society since 1980, but he said he never had trouble finding a fresh approach when directing the "Messiah."
"The reason it isn't difficult is the implications of the text as far as my own and everyone else's religious contractions," he said. "This is one of the most significant changes."
Copley said that the hold the piece had over the community stemmed from the intense religious beliefs of the people in Lindsborg and the inspiring text of the work that traces the prophecy of Christ's birth through his death and resurrection.
"Handel wrote 32 oratorios," he said, "but you never hear of the others being performed with the frequency of the "Messiah," so it has to be taken as a fact."
And Sunday it was easy to sense that the afternoon performance was more than a concert to people of Lindsborg.
Several of the ginger-bread trimmed stores were open to sell souvenirs, including Messiah Festival T-shirts and hand-made Swedish Dala horses, symbols of good luck, the latter having been adopted in the 1960s as the town's mascot.
ALONG THE RED brick-paved main street, and in front of the church, clusters of people dressed in their Sunday best gathered to see them.
But by 2:15 p.m. the groups started drifting toward Presser Hall, visitors unfamiliar with the town and campus simply followed the crowd.
from the opening notes of the overture, through the "Halleujah Chorus," to the final "Amen" three-hours later, the crowd of 1,800 listened with pride as their relatives and neighbors sang the now-familiar sacred words. undaunted by the heat or the length of the work
And as the crowd drift up, after four curtain calls and a standing ovation, comments drifted from the groups lingering outside the hall.
ovation, comments drifted from the groups lingering outside the hall.
"That you even better than last year?" or "The female soldiers were
"That was even better than last year" or "the female solitaries the best I've heard yet", is praise undoubtedly heard every year.
Elmley Copper, director of the Bethany College Oratorio Society, leads members during the "Amen" in Handel's Messiah.
Bethany College students congregate outside Presbyterian Hall on the Bethany campus after Sunday's performance of the Messiah. They will perform the oratorio again Sunday for a national television audience.
The almost 500 members of the Bethany College Oratorio Society join in during the "Halleliujah Chorus" of George Frederick Handel's Messiah. The performance was part of the college's centennial edition of the Messiah Festival.