Memorials in Woodcuts : The Savagery of Wartime Is His Milieu

From the moment he first put knife and chisel to block and re-created images of war, Bruce Carter has defended his woodcut prints to those who would much rather forget the brutal, bloody past.

The 57-year-old Korean War veteran can’t forget: “My point is not to hold myself out as something that’s my pain, my loneliness, my frustration. I’m trying to look at the experiences I’ve had and trying to say, ‘What things are valid in my experiences that I can pass on?’ ”

His series on the Holocaust, exhibited worldwide, shows the tortured faces and broken bodies of those who survived Nazi death camps and those who did not. His more recent series on the Vietnam War underscores the mental toll.

“They are, one, a memorial to the people who were killed in the Holocaust and died in Vietnam. Two, they’re a warning,” said Carter, an art professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“I don’t want to take somebody out and hold their head down in the garbage bucket until they can’t breathe. I don’t want to immerse them in it. But I hope they can learn something about the misuse and abuse of power.”

In his cluttered campus studio, a map of Korea covers one wall, and a photograph from his Army days looks out from a desk. Stacked alongside his woodcuts, most of them cherry blocks measuring 12-by-24 inches, are dozens of magazines from years past. One, dated April 12, 1968, features the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on its cover.

Carter was drafted in 1952 and assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea. “In art school, they emphasized your own perception,” he said. “I went right from that into the Korean War. It was so brutal and so frank and so horrible.”

His Vietnam series was shown in Norway in March and at Pittsburgh’s Chatham College in November. Joe Franklin, 38, a coal miner from Saltsburg, Pa., served 1 1/2 years in Vietnam. He posed for one of Carter’s prints and gave him ideas for several others.

“We don’t want to be compared to Rambo. We’re not that way,” Franklin said. “What Bruce does is show the soft side.”