Turning Tragedy Into Art.(artistic self-expression and war in history)

Within minutes of the attacks on the World Trade Center, one artist- photographer, whose show of arctic landscapes sold out last year, rushed into the smoking ruins to take pictures of the hellish scene. His photographs will presumably find their way, for sale, onto gallery walls. A New York painter with an exhibition already on view worked through the night to produce a huge American-eagle banner to hang, patriotically, from his downtown building. And just two days later another artist--an abstract painter with a studio-window view of the horrific events--sent me a letter asking me to come see her "evolving" new series of paintings "expressing my response to this catastrophe."

In these three instances--and perhaps countless more to come--you have the motivational range of the contemporary artists' response to carnage and tragedy: plying one's trade, making a public statement, jockeying for a higher place in the critical hierarchy and, of course, simply expressing oneself. Self-expression is, of course, the appointed task of contemporary artists. Now many of them will choose to deal with an enormous tragedy caused by great evil. Whether they succeed artistically may depend as much on what their forebears can teach them as on their own talents.

Contemporary artists are the inheritors of a modernist tradition of dealing passionately with calamity that goes back to the romantic Spanish painter Francisco Goya. In 1808 Goya traveled from Madrid to Saragossa to witness the awful consequences of the French siege. The result was his unequaled suite of etchings, "The Disasters of War," in which we see three nude men strung up on a dead tree. Goya also painted the second most famous outcry against the consequences of merciless war, the 13-foot-wide "The Third of May, 1808," which depicts, in slashing brushstrokes and dramatic color, the massacre of defenseless civilians by a ruthless military. By comparison, Eugene Delacroix's reputation-making "The Massacre at Chios" (1824), an even bigger painting about the slaughter of 30,000 Greeks in a revolt against the Turks, is almost stately. Delacroix knew of the war only through newspaper accounts, which may be why the suffering figures in the foreground look dreamy and the sky gorgeous.

The most memorable works about the first world war were done by shell- shocked, grieving ex-soldiers such as the German painter Otto Dix. Dix- -who fought in the hideous Battle of the Somme, was wounded in the neck and was awarded an Iron Cross--produced wildly, even dementedly expressionistic paintings of agonized soldiers in the muck. The most famous painterly protest against atrocity is, however, Picasso's "Guernica" (1937), a hurriedly painted, mural-size canvas in stark monochrome. It protests the terror-bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi airplanes under Franco's command during the Spanish Civil War, in which more than one fifth of the town's 7,000 inhabitants were killed. No one who has seen the painting--which now hangs in Madrid's Reina Sofia museum--can forget the wailing mother and her dead, rag-doll infant, or that most powerful symbol of death, the impaled, screaming horse.

The American sculptor H. C. Westermann (1922-1981) didn't reveal his shock and horror at war until 20 years after he endured kamikaze attacks as a shipboard Marine toward the end of World War II. A deceptively folk-artsy craftsman, Westermann protested quietly, but powerfully, in small pieces depicting a toylike airplane piercing a rudimentary ship. He wrote in a letter, "To [such artworks] I'd like to add the horrible SMELL of DEATH but that's impossible dammit! Of 2300 men."

Westermann is gone, but if anyone can produce a new "Guernica," many are guessing it might be Leon Golub, another artist who cannot get the 20th century's--and now this one's--predilection for carnage out of his mind. Working on huge, unstretched canvases, Golub, now nearing 80, applies paint like a man fighting for his life, even with a meat cleaver, to construct big menacing mercenaries, naked vulnerable victims and scenes of coldblooded brutality in Vietnam, South Africa and the American South.

Some critics (including this one) don't think that Golub paints all that well. But I also wonder whether the question is beside the point. After all, what does beauty have to do with being effective as ...