The Horror, the Beauty

It’s the good guys versus the bad guys and it shouldn’t be a pretty picture. But this is the Norton Simon Museum, so of course it is. One after the other, the works in the museum’s new exhibition, “To Do Battle: Conflict, Struggle and Symbol in Art,” prove that the most effective way to deliver an ugly message is to make it look beautiful.

Paradoxical as it may seem, artists have done exactly that through the ages, says curator Gloria Williams, who organized the show--mainly from the Simon’s collection, with a few loans from the J. Paul Getty Museum and UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Perhaps because human nature doesn’t change, themes of aggression are a staple in art from 5th century BC Greece to 20th century America, she says. They are used for political ends, as allegories of good and evil, to justify war, promote religion and establish a narrative of good versus evil.

Williams points out such themes in the eclectic assembly that fills the temporary exhibition space. A life-size Roman ruler, carved in limestone in the 3rd century, stands on guard near the entrance to the show. The Hindu god Shiva, stationed on a nearby pedestal, assumes his most terrifying stance to ward off demons in a 16th century bronze figure equipped with four weapon-bearing arms and a halo of flames. Other militant icons from Southeast Asia are installed nearby, including a temple guardian portrayed in an 11th century sandstone sculpture from Cambodia and a thunderbolt personified in a 10th century bronze from Nepal.

On the adjacent wall, the beat goes on in art from a different time and place: 17th century Holland. Jan van Bijlert’s painting, “Man in Armour Holding a Pike,” depicts a peacock-like soldier looking over his shoulder at his audience. He’s a symbol of virility, rather like today’s sports heroes, Williams says, but he probably delivers a political message as well. His orange sash and feathers likely signify his allegiance with the Prince of Orange, when the Netherlands was at war with Spain.

As the show unfolds, it presents pockets of works that are closely related in subject matter and media as well as time and place, but it also leaps over continents and centuries.

Orpheus is attacked by Thracian women in a painting on a 5th century BC ceramic bowl from Greece. The Hindu god Vishnu calmly disembowels an evil titan who tried to deter his son from worship in an 11th century stone carving. Two Japanese warriors carry on a duel in an 1881 color woodcut by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. With one of the protagonists airborne, it is certain to remind film buffs of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

All the artworks tell stories that can be interpreted in a contemporary light. An 18th century Indian chess set, for example, pits the Sikhs against the Afghans. Still other pieces seem to cover all bases. Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens’ circa-1630 painting of David slaying Goliath illustrates a biblical tale, but it also represents “light versus dark, Hebrews versus Philistines, St. Michael the archangel beating down the devil or Christ and the anti-Christ,” Williams says.

As she readily acknowledges, “To Do Battle” takes on a huge theme. Organized in six thematic sections--”Symbol,” “Battle Between Man and Animal,” “Battle of Love,” “The Battle Piece,” “Battle Between Good and Evil” and “Horrors of War”--the show offered Williams an opportunity to display works that have languished in storage and to take a fresh look at well-known pieces in the museum’s collection.

Still, her project is merely a slice of a subject that could be explored many other ways, she says.

So why is conflict such a persistent, nearly ubiquitous subject in art?

Art historians say it’s largely a matter of aesthetic traditions that have evolved from ancient mythology and literature. The stories may be told in heroic or fanciful terms, but they deal with issues that continue to plague ordinary mortals. The most enduring tales grapple with fundamental issues of family relations, religion and politics as well as outright war.

“The Greeks fall back upon myths that serve as archetypes when it comes to issues of violence and conflict,” says Peter Holliday, associate professor of the history of art and classical archeology at Cal State Long Beach. “They use these archetypes, both artistically and in literary terms, as catalysts for exploration of the human experience.

“There’s a richness in these myths that allows versatility; the myth is so archetypal that it’s generic to the point of being universal,” he says. “You see this even in some of the great monuments. The sculpture decorating the Parthenon celebrates the Greek victory over the Persians and yet the artists fall back upon themes of Greeks versus Amazons, gods versus giants or Lapiths versus Centaurs. They have the ability to see their specific history through these archetypes.”

Scenes of violence and conflict are portrayed as “opposing forces that are sketched very broadly so that they become light versus dark, order versus chaos, East versus West, civilization versus barbarism,” Holliday says. “And yet, going back to the epic tradition in Homer and continuing in the visual arts, the battles are rendered as duels between individuals. We are able to project into a very human experience of the hand-to-hand combat in war, and see the heroes and the gods as representatives of human traits and types. We see them in conflict.”

The Romans took a different approach.

“They show specific, recognizable contemporary humans,” he says. “In the Republican period, the Romans use art as a means of furthering their own political careers, not for the greater social good. This continues into the empire, except that the only patron then is the emperor himself. We always see the emperor fighting, the emperor having barbarians surrender to him, the emperor dispensing justice. Portraits depict recognizable figures, instead of gods and heroes. At the same time, the Romans appropriate Greek artistic types, so you find the emperor as Achilles or a Roman general as Hercules, in one-on-one combat as the forces of good versus evil.”

Similarly, in Indian art, “you don’t see historical violence represented; it’s the mythological counterparts, which have a timeless character,” says Pratapaditya Pal, a research fellow at the Norton Simon Museum, consulting curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and former chief curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Hindu art is concerned mainly with myths and the myths are about sex and violence,” Pal says. Both of the great epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are basically concerned with these two themes. They form the crux of the narrative, no matter how you gloss it with spiritual elements and interpretations. In the Mahabharata, two families of cousins fight for the kingdom. In the Ramayana, Rama’s wife is abducted by the king of Sri Lanka and he has to do battle to bring her back. The suspicion was that she was not just abducted but perhaps raped.”

The Bhagavad-Gita, a key religious text in the Mahabharata that relates the essence of Hindu philosophy, also has a violent theme, he says. Narrated by Krishna on a battlefield, the story explains “why it was correct for him to go and kill his cousins--the sort of arguments that are still put forth as the rationale for just wars,” Pal says.

Buddhism, which is often characterized as a particularly peaceful religion, produces equally violent images but “with a spiritual spin,” he says. “Demonic-looking gods are always fighting and posturing to rid the world of external demons and the demons within us. Take the very concept of Buddha’s enlightenment; he was literally attacked by the hordes of Mara, the evil genius of Buddhist mythology. The twist is that Buddha repelled him peacefully, simply by his own will power.”

Holliday contends that little has changed in terms of “how we mark out the enemy as the other” in art and elsewhere.

Renaissance depictions of battles often rely on traditional “artistic typologies, formal compositions or even the same themes. And it continues into the 20th century,” he says. One of the last works in the exhibition, a 1965 lithograph by Leon Golub, tackles the Greek subject of a gigantomachy, a struggle between gods and giants, he notes. “In some ways, the Greek archetypes become symbols through the ages. Certainly there is a reason Freud went back to the Greeks to find archetypes for human situations in the psyche,” he adds.

As to why we are drawn to depictions of violence, Holliday asks a few questions: “Why do we crawl to a standstill and crane our necks when there is an accident on the freeway? Why is hockey so popular, or stock car racing? Are we that different from the Romans who watched gladiatorial combats at the arena?”

Still, artworks that portray horrific events “have to be beautiful enough that we want to look at them,” he says. “Gloria and the Norton Simon have taken on an ugly theme, but there are not going to be ugly works of art in the exhibition.”

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“To Do Battle: Conflict, Struggle and Symbol in Art,” Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Ends July 8. Wednesday-Monday, noon-6 p.m.; also Friday, noon-9 p.m. Admission: adults, $6; seniors, $3; students and children younger than 18, free. (626) 449-6840.

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Three lectures are scheduled at the museum in conjunction with the exhibition: “Aggressive Demons and Avenging Deities in Indian Art and Myths” by Pratapaditya Pal, April 5, 7 p.m.; “Dutch Anti-War Art During the Eighty-Years War (1568-1848)” by David Kunzle, April 26, 7 p.m.; “The Battle Between the Gods and Giants: Ancient Symbolism and Artistic Legacy” by Peter Holliday, May 17, 7 p.m.

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Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.