Art Enlisted to Serve History

In late September, while U.S. troops were scrambling to battle stations worldwide, Army Master Sgt. Henrietta Snowden was reviewing photos from the Army’s 55th Signal Company (a combat camera unit) and assessing positions on high ground near the Pentagon. Like 480,000 other active-duty Army officers and enlisted personnel worldwide, Snowden had a duty made more urgent by the attacks of Sept. 11. But her duty, unlike theirs, was to sketch.

Snowden is the Army’s only official soldier-artist, the pencil and the paintbrush her principal weapons. Her reconnaissance missions near the Pentagon led to an image unprecedented in the Army’s 13,000-piece art collection--a hazy pastel of the Pentagon by night, its shattered walls illuminated by a spotlight, the Capitol dome standing in the distance.

Snowden’s job description may sound like a throwback to the days before photography--and it’s certainly nothing she expected 25 years ago, when she was an assistant sportswear buyer for Bullock’s department stores in Southern California. But her position is part of an enduring tradition of art commissions and collecting in the U.S. military services, a tradition that took a direct hit on Sept. 11.

Along with the 182 lives lost (and seven people still classified as missing) in the Pentagon attack, two dozen works in the Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force art collections--some of which were conceived by Snowden’s predecessors under battle conditions--were destroyed.

More than 40 other works were damaged, mostly by smoke. Jack Dyer, curator of the U.S. Marine Corps art collection, calls them “cultural casualties.”

The keepers of this art are quick to say that these losses are nothing compared to the human toll. Most of the works were uninsured and might not have generated much bidding at auction. (By all accounts, the publicly and privately owned works destroyed or buried in New York carried a far greater market value, beginning with the $2.5-million Alexander Calder red metal sculpture “Bent Propeller,” about half of which had been uncovered as of Oct. 22.) But the military artists and their works occupy a singular role, showing soldiers, sailors and their equipment at work from Vietnamese jungles to the sands of the Middle East.

Last year, PBS unearthed a good chunk of this history when it aired “They Drew Fire,” a documentary on the combat artists of World War II, directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Lanker.

“The importance of our collection is not so much monetary as it is historical,” said Army art curator Renee Klish. “Since World War I, we’ve had artists going out in the field. Their mandate is to paint or draw what they see without restriction in terms of subject or medium. The only admonition they are given is that they are not there as the official portrait painter of the general. You are there to show the Army doing what the Army does.”

The idea, Klish said, is not only to sustain a tradition, but to gather images that deliver not the immediacy of photographs, but the perspective of an artist who frequently has synthesized information from multiple sources.

Of 296 Army artworks hanging in the Pentagon, seven were destroyed, including four in the office of Lt. Gen. Timothy Maude, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, who was killed in the crash.

Maude, 53, was the highest-ranked casualty in the Pentagon. Having recently moved from one office to another, he had chosen a new set of artworks with Klish in August.

“He was a people person, “ said Klish, noting how the general’s selections had emphasized individual soldiers, rather than machinery or landscapes. One 1967 work by Pfc. Gary Porter, “O.D. [olive drab], One Each,” was all olive drab brushstrokes, showing a soldier in Vietnam with duffel bag, helmet, sleeping bag and the rest of his kit. Another, “The Knucklebusters,” painted by Carl E. “Gene” Snyder in 1996, showed three soldiers in camouflage uniforms struggling to repair the tracks of an M-1 Abrams tank at a training site in Germany.

Of about 250 works in the Navy’s collection at the Pentagon, curator Gale Munro said, about 40 had minor smoke damage, one had major smoke damage, and two are unaccounted for.

Of more than 100 works in the Marine Corps collection at the Pentagon, Dyer said, seven are gone and seven damaged. Among the losses: “Machine Gunner,” a 1967 acrylic portrait of a Marine machine gunner in Vietnam by Capt. Leonard H. Dermott, a Marine Corps reservist.

“We had a little studio set up in Danang,” explained Dyer. “So a guy could go out with the troops, make sketches, then come back and paint. I think it was in an old French hotel.”

At the Air Force, which has about 2,500 artworks in the Pentagon, art program director Bob Arnold said 10 works were “burnt up,” all paintings of aircraft produced since 1955.

Only the U.S. Coast Guard escaped without cultural casualties: Public affairs chief Frank Dunn said none of the service’s 73 works in the Pentagon were damaged, and they were all reproductions anyway.

There were, however, some high-priced canvases that survived unscathed in the Pentagon, including “Score Another for the Subs,” by Thomas Hart Benton, a World War II oil painting that was commissioned by a private company, then donated to the Navy. Valued at $500,000, it hangs in the Secretary of Defense’s offices.

Another survivor is the Navy’s only artwork drawn from direct observation of the aftermath of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

Griffith Baily Coale, a New York muralist and founder of the Navy’s now-discontinued combat artist program, arrived in Hawaii about a month after the attack, looked at the scene and interviewed a sailor who was thrown into the sea from his ship, Munro said.

The result was “The Japanese Sneak Attack on Pearl Harbor,” a detailed work of charcoal and chalk on linen, now in storage. The work, which measures roughly 2 feet by 6 feet, shows several foundering ships. The draftsmanship, Munro noted, is impeccable. But then perhaps it should be: Coale, a notoriously slow worker, didn’t complete the work until the summer of 1944.

Together, the services’ art collections amount to nearly 50,000 works, most of them stored or displayed at military facilities outside of the Pentagon. The Navy counts more than 17,000 pieces; the Army, more than 13,000; the Marine Corps and Air Force, more than 8,000 each; and the Coast Guard, more than 3,000.

Many works are displayed at the Air Force Museum in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and the Museum at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. (The U.S. Marine Corps plans to open a National Heritage Center at Marine Base Quantico, Va., in late 2005. On Oct. 15, Army Secretary Thomas White announced selection of Ft. Belvoir, Va., as the site for a National Museum of the U.S. Army, to open in 2009.)

Some works come from volunteers, some from big-name painters, like Benton, on assignment, and some from reservists.

“We’re looking around now for artists to cover Operation Enduring Freedom,” said the Navy’s Munro. “The best candidate is a reservist. He [or she] doesn’t have another task, and we have a means of activating and paying them. And they’re subject to orders, so we can boss them around. I’ve talked to a couple of artists so far. I don’t want artists’ concepts of planes hitting the Pentagon. I need pictures of what’s going on now, the rebuilding.”

Added Munro: “There was a DM [draftsman] working in the area of the impact, and he lost friends there, and he wants to do something, but he doesn’t know what. So I told him that if he does a painting I’d love to see it. But I’m not going to pressure him. He’s in grief.”

Among all the services, only the Army still has a combat artist on staff.

In World War I, Klish said, the Army had eight artists. In World War II, it had 40 (of whom about half were military and half civilian, picked by museum directors around the country). The Army had no artists in Korea (though the Air Force, Marines and Navy did). In Vietnam, Klish said, the Army sent 12 teams of four or five, starting in 1966 and 1967, continuing through 1972 or 1973. Five artists were sent to Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s.

The Army’s current artist, Snowden, was born in Pomona, raised in San Dimas and got her bachelor’s degree in art at Cal State Long Beach.

Through her teens and 20s, she drew and painted, and never imagined a military career.

For nine years, she worked in management for Bullock’s department stores, from Westwood to Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza. But she burned out.

“Retail is very, very tough,” said Snowden.

So in 1982, at age 35, she joined the Army.

“I have to tell you I knew absolutely nothing about the Army. I just needed to travel, and I found out the Army had all these programs,” she said.

Snowden took courses in illustration, and served in various capacities, including public affairs offices. Assignments took her to Desert Storm and to Sarajevo for six months in 1997.

In 1999, she submitted a portfolio to the Army’s Center for Military History, and was selected to fill the service’s lone combat artist spot, which she calls “the kind of dream job that illustrators look forward to.... You cannot replace the experience of being on the ground alongside the soldier who’s working 24/7.”

In March and April 2000, she served in Kosovo, making sketches, taking photographs and beginning paintings, many of which are still in progress. She works in watercolor, colored pencil, sepia and ink, and has produced about 15 pieces this year. She plans to retire next year, having served 20 years

As for the Pentagon drawing, which got its first public exhibition on Oct. 25 at the Army’s Ft. McNair in Washington, D.C., Snowden wonders how it will be received. Last year, she did a work in Kosovo that showed U.S. soldiers bleeding after being injured in a protest, and she thought that might raise some eyebrows. But her general approved, she said, because it accurately reflected circumstances on the ground. She’s counting on the same response this time.

“It is rather dark and gruesome in a way,” Snowden said. “But there are a lot of images out there that are on the negative side.”

To research the work, Snowden found high ground near the Pentagon--one spot was in Arlington National Cemetery, another on nearby Navy property--and looked at the damaged building. (The artist works in uniform, whether in the studio or in the field.) After sorting through photographs by Army photographers with closer access, she drew heavily on one taken the night of the crash. For the hazy effect, she decided to draw in pastels, a medium she hadn’t work with in years.

“No one tells me that I have to do this or I have to do that, or I have to use a certain medium or subject matter,” said Snowden. “So I do have a great deal of freedom. And that is part of making this collection rich.”

She hopes to go to Central Asia soon, “as long as we are not in the way in the mission.” But when it comes to the prospect of revisiting the Pentagon as a subject, she’s thinking the way the Navy’s combat artist was thinking six decades ago.

“I think one is enough,” she said. ... So I do have a great deal of freedom.’