The approach of Goya, in his great series of etchings, “The Disasters of War,’’ is to thrust us into the sickening heat of war’s atrocities: “Yo lo vi,’’ he wrote in the caption beneath one etching: “I saw it.’’ Or: “Y esto tambien’’ (“And this too’’) and “Ai sucedió’’ (“This is how it happened’’).
Goya’s images have the force of eyewitness accounts (even when they are plainly invented) because he saw war, and his aim was to show us, with maximum immediacy, how awful and insane it is.
Stendhal, meanwhile, in the famous opening to his novel “The Charterhouse of Parma,’’ conveys another aspect of war that is overlooked by official histories. Describing the drawn-out, failed attempts of his hero, Fabrice del Dongo, to join up with Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Waterloo, he makes a mockery of the notion of decisive moments, heroic actions, and military grandeur.
Instead, he reminds us, in passages that directly inspired Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,’’ that there is something inevitably - and often comically - anticlimactic about war: the infrequency of action, the long periods of boredom, the arbitrary mobilizations, the toil and deprivation, the camaraderie, the loneliness.
What’s marvelous about the McMullen Museum of Art’s new show, “First Hand: Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection,’’ is that it somehow combines both these approaches without deliberately setting out to do either.
The exhibition presents us with drawings made by artist-reporters who had no wish to model themselves on either Goya or Stendhal (if they had even heard of them). But simply by being there and doing what they did, they produced unforgettable documents that were also, in many cases, searing works of art: drawings of soldiers killing time, washing their clothes, foraging for food, celebrating Thanksgiving, butchering and dressing cattle, moving materiel, building levees, and setting up camp; but also thrust into the chaos of battle, exhuming bodies from graves, executing deserters, humiliating cowards, and reading last rites to fallen brothers in the midst of all-out carnage.
