Drawing fire.(Scan)

New York City's contemporary art world has seen everything this season--from a "painting" made of dead flies to footage of JFK's autopsy. But perhaps nothing puzzled Manhattan more than an exhibition last October of 45 drawings and watercolors of the war in Iraq. Created by New York painter Steve Mumford, the works were largely unsensational, politically neutral scenes he witnessed while embedded in military units. "War art fascinates me" says the lean, slightly grizzled 43 year old. "Especially images of soldiers attempting to establish some normalcy in their lives."

"I didn't want to be polemical or admiring," Mumford says, "I just depicted what I saw." But his images struck a nerve in the notoriously left-leaning art world. Although critics praised their aesthetic merits, many criticized their content. "People attacked me for being objective, and not condemning the war" recalls the artist. One critic questioned whether Mumford had succumbed to the "military logic of the embed." Another decried his attempt to turn the Iraqi "slaughterhouse" into "tastefully smeared contour studies."

In many ways, the art world's reaction to Mumford's show reflected its general perplexity toward the post-9/11 era. Artists have generally avoided addressing the topic of war, Islam, or the Middle East. Or they've been unforgivably crass: A mere seven months after the Trade Center attack, international art star Maurizio Cattalan showed a work in New York consisting of two life-sized mannequins dressed as NYPD officers, turned upside down. The artist described this as "a new icon of subversion"--as if New York City needed one.

"After paying lip service to the heroes of 9/11, the art world has reverted to impotent anti-American whining," says critic Charlie Finch, one of the art community's few hawks. The 1990s hobbyhorses of gender, race, and postmodernism that 9/11 rendered largely irrelevant to the vast majority of the country are back as obsessions. Contemporary artists have simply recused themselves from today's most pressing national dilemma.

It wasn't always like this: Goya, Manet, Picasso, and others depicted the conflicts that rent their generations. Mumford's hero is Winslow Homer, who depicted Civil War scenes for Harper's Weekly. "Artists need to get out in the world, to grapple with the difficult issues of the day," he says.

Following Homer's precedent, Mumford went to Iraq in ...