Art of the Republic-Pt III
This is the final installment. I hope you have enjoyed it and there is a PDF at the bottom for your downloading ease.
Art of the Republic
A month later, I sat on the stage at one end of Patriot Square. There were a few other artists present, Halpern and Erzberger, who were high-ranking members of the Academy, and officials including Cerny, the chief of the Department of Information. The sun was nowhere to be seen, gray clouds piling up over the city. Novak had been asked if he wanted an awning erected over the painting, but he refused saying that the weather couldn’t do anything to his painting that the crowd couldn’t do as well. Whilst those officials milled about in the capacities of their duties, Milat pulled me to one side of the stage.
“I just wanted to let you know, Phillip, because I do not know what will happen or how this work will be received, that I have done something extraordinary here. I have been to the front and seen the battle waged. Yes, yes,” he waved down my comments, “we don’t have time now to go into it. That man I met in the alley last year when we had met at the Guild. Ha, you think I hadn’t seen you, everybody thinks I wander about in a stupor of non-noticing but you forget, I am an artist, seeing is what I do, it is how I live. Anyway, that man provided me with documents that enabled me to get to where I wanted to go. No, I will explain more later if possible, but now I think it is time to start.”
The fitful wind tugged at the canvas covering the frame, wanting to get a peek underneath. The canvas was large, fully a man’s height tall and three times as wide. At the appointed time, Novak stepped forward to the microphone that had been set up to one side of the stage.
“I know in the past at times like this, I have gone on about what it means to create art and what its use is in our great society. But today I will forgo such twaddle, and let my new work speak for itself.” With no other words, Novak walked to the edge of the large frame and grasped the rope that held the cover over it. Rather than watching the painting I was looking at Milat’s face, and again there was that mixture of emotion: fear and exhilaration. When Novak pulled the rope, releasing the canvas cover, I saw a grim look upon his face, that of an executioner. As the curtain fell aside Milat’s visage became no less grim, but was mixed with a look of triumph, as though, no matter what happened this moment could never be undone, the djinn was out of the bottle and could not be put back. And then I heard a gasp from a thousand voices, and then a yell from Cerny, as screams came from the crowd. I turned towards to the massive canvas.
Even I was staggered at what I my eyes revealed to my mind. There were techniques I had not even seen before, some of which I knew went against the idea of the guild itself. It was indeed a battle scene, but one that had never been depicted before. All the combatants were covered in mud and filth and blood so it was impossible to tell whose soldiers were fighting for what country. On the left side, an infantry charge was being met by gun and bayonet, one soldier’s head half gone from the discharge of a muzzle only some few feet away, others were pierced by long steel blades, flesh torn and viscera exposed, building upwards to the right where the commander of the charge, atop his horse was bounding over the redoubt wall, whose forward motion had been stopped by the blast of a cannon at a range which rendered the animal and rider into a mass that made each indistinguishable from the other, the front leg of the animal being shorn off, and the rider, covered in masses of flesh from his animal, received the brunt of the explosion dispersing him as though he were a dandelion in a gale, chaos the only constant among the scene as at certain spots it seemed that the bodies of the soldiers devolved into animals, but still tearing at each other with hands/claws and teeth/fangs, this abysmal display was reflected even unto the sky, dark and roiling with thunderheads, a bolt of lightning striking a castle atop a picturesque mountain, causing both to tumble into the destruction below. In places, the layerings and glazings depicted a true realism, but in other places, paint stood up off the face of the canvas by inches, mounded up and sculpted, and then the mounds themselves painted over. Some of those depicted were misshapen—painted in an expression of anguish/horror/pain that each felt. I clamped my eyes closed, but it was too late, already the grotesque image seared upon my mind. The image, the painting, pricks my soul like a thousand needles—a thousand black needles pricking my soul—and out of it, out of my soul flowed the darkness of truth. I could only groan in agony that I had ever seen such a thing, and my fingers sought to wrench my eyes from their sockets—screaming, screaming mad. Somewhere far away I could hear the crowd’s growing reaction, and looking as if to supplant the last image I opened my eyes towards them. It was as though they had become a part of the mad painting, their faces glazed with confusion and heavy impasto strokes of fear and terror, loathing in deathly pigments of sfumato passed like a cloud darkening the crowd and at its passing there were fights breaking out, and the troops that had been stationed around Patriot’s Square for occasions such as this were hard pressed to restore any sort of order, that is those soldiers who were even able to react, who were not struck immobile by what they saw. Some in the crowd were vomiting, some being overwhelmed slumped incoherent at the feet of others who paying no attention but to their own anguish and terror trampled them trying to escape while others perhaps nearer the back surged forward trying to get a better view of the chaos canvas. Was this the true art that my mentor had spoken of? Was this what had been covered by the pasteboard that he had claimed to broken through? I looked to where Milat Novak stood at the far side of the stage, fierce and proud, with the angry eyes of a vengeful prophet. Cerrny’s rotundness assailed the implacable artist, grabbing at his lapels, but unable to move him. Unable to resist, I turned back towards the canvas. Amidst the cacophony of the canvas, I could see the ashes of the poem I had rendered unto the flame begin to reform.
