AA hanged man in a white shirt dangles from a pole; a soldier lolls in front of it, leaning back in a relaxed manner, seemingly enjoying the scene. In the next picture, men in uniform grab women, apparently intending to rape them. Then there are women who seem to attack men who are lying on the ground, plundering and scavenging. And again and again images of executions: men being dragged onto the ladder under the gallows, some being shot there.
It is truly the horrors of war that Spanish artist Francisco Goya vividly portrays in a series of etchings from the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The Albertina in Vienna has now brought out its holdings from the “Desastres de la Guerra” series and hung them alongside photographs from the war in Ukraine. The pictures were taken by Mykhaylo Palinchak, a Ukrainian photographer who used the means of his art to create something like a portrait of his country in peaceful times, as his website bears witness to. Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, his subjects have been bombed-out houses, people fleeing, burnt-out tanks, graves and mourners, relief supplies stacked in a church, wrecked cars on crater-strewn roads and ruins again and again. Some of the pictures are recognizable: They went to news agencies and were printed many times.
The idea came from the Ukrainian embassy
The dead that Goya so drastically portrayed can only be guessed at in Palinchak – all the more horrible when you then realize that it is a hand sticking out of the ground. Or when you realize that it must be corpses that stand out against a backdrop of bare trees under a tarpaulin. Of course they exist, those drastic images of dead people lying on the streets, often still tied up. You can find them on the Internet, and Palinchak also took such photographs. However, the selection of the images for the Albertina was based on the criteria used by most of the media. Here as there a difficult balancing act between documentation on the one hand and respect for the dignity of the dead on the other.
“It’s not an exhibition, it’s a statement,” says Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina. By this he means, on the one hand, that the pictures are presented without any scientific analysis, which one might expect in an exhibition. On the other hand, Schröder told this newspaper, it is “a statement against the war itself and against this war in particular, which is now raging in Ukraine”. It is always the civilian population that has to make the greatest sacrifices, whether 200 years ago or now. “It shows that war can only be had at the price of bestializing society.”
The tyrant expects submission
The impetus and the idea for Goya came from the Ukrainian embassy, says Schröder. Within fourteen days, the photos were brought in, developed, framed – and the gallery, which was of course originally intended for something else, was cleared. “This exhibition is not for the art connoisseurs,” said the Ukrainian ambassador in Vienna, Wassyl Wassylyovych Chymynets. “These photos tell of the terrible war that Russia is waging against Ukraine, against the Ukrainian population.” The only explanatory texts are biographical outlines of Goya (1746 to 1828) and Palinchak (born in 1985). In any case, Goya’s graphics bear programmatic or sarcastic captions such as “Barbarians!”, “Why” or “You don’t want to”. The photographs are only labeled with the place and date of the photograph.
A single text was contributed by Doron Rabinovici at Schröder’s request. Schröder notes – almost astonished – that they both, he and Rabinovici, had been convinced pacifists for decades and now “surprisingly found themselves in the same camp”, namely those who, without any ifs or buts, supported Ukraine in its struggle for sovereignty supported. In his contribution, Rabinovici, without naming Putin, deals with the tyrant who does not declare the war he has unleashed. For whom the annihilation of a nation is the means to the end of being a world power. Expecting submission and not wanting to tolerate a free Europe beyond its arbitrariness. And who hates the art that reflects what happens to the victims: “The tyrant knows their strength and fears their courage.”
The horrors of war. Goya and the present. Albertina, Vienna. Until August 21st.
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