Every period creates unique heroic imagery conforming to specific
events and needs. America’s most famous monument to heroism, the World
War II memorial at Arlington, Virginia, sculpted by Felix De Weldon, was
based on a photo of a flag-raising after the bloody battle with Japanese
troops for Iwo Jima. Just two days after the photo was published, the
United States Senate called for a national monument modeled on the
picture. Thousands of ordinary Americans wrote the President appealing
for a monument, and a clay replica was sculpted within seventy-two hours.
Although commemorating a real event, the original image was nonetheless
re-posed by the photographer to achieve the most dramatic stance, and
later the monument itself was based on a recreation in the sculptor’s studio.
Certainly one reason for such image management was to capture the most
opportune moment. But the monument’s theme, “Uncommon Valor Was a
Common Virtue,” like most heroic sentiment, is best expressed through the
absence of gore, and while heroes arise from adversity, revealing these
conditions does not make for the most effective heroic image. Imagery
showing the dead and wounded—heroes all—from that awful day’s battle
would have never become the indelible icon that it did. Arguably, the most
effective heroic depictions are sanitized.
Whether called Socialist Realism, National Socialist Realism,
Heroic Realism, or just plain Realism, the design of heroic imagery is
carried out with similar components for the same effect. While the Chinese
certainly have a unique visual culture, when Mao’s regime prevailed over
the Nationalists, the official art of Communist China was Socialist
Realism. On the one hand, Mao appeared on everything glowing like a
beacon of hope, the father of his nation. On the other, soldier, worker,
peasant—men and women—were cleansed of every blemish in sanctified
posters and banners that heralded the glories of the nation. Chinese
propaganda art also transformed people of all Third World nations—from
Cuba to Africa—into heroes of an international people’s revolution.
Indeed the Third World—Palestine, Vietnam, Angola,
Mozambique—was ripe for heroic representation. And in the 1960 s, there
was no more recognizable heroic figure than Che Guevara, the Cuban
revolutionary, whose Christ-like visage adorned stamps and posters, flags
and billboards as the exemplar of people’s revolt in countries outside Cuba.
Even in the United States, an avowed enemy of Cuba, the Che myth was
perpetuated by the Left through iconography—and notably American
illustrator Paul Davis’s 1968 iconic portrait of Che as cover and poster for
the left-wing magazine Evergreen Review(which prompted the bombing of
the magazine’s offices by anti-Castro loyalists).
Davis, in fact, made his method of heroic depiction into a style
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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