wrenching as War Is Not Healthy.. .or And Babies? But through comic
surrealism—the juxtaposition of a typical mass-market advertising slogan,
the familiar characterization of American patriotism, and the childlike
rendering of an air raid—the poster spoke eloquently of the criminal and
banal that was American Southeast Asia policy. It suggested that behind
the façade of Americanism, this nation was keeping the peace by engaging
in an unjust war in a distant land.
Furious that President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered American
B-52s to bomb Hanoi in order to pound the North Vietnamese leader, Ho
Chi Minh, into a humiliating submission, Chwast, like others within the
growing antiwar movement, believed that the immorality of such increased
U.S. intervention would have disastrous effects on both nations. This also
forced Chwast to explore ways in which a solitary citizen might somehow
influence government policy. A poster, a mere one-sided sheet of printed
paper, could not have the same destructive power as even an infinitesimal
fraction of the napalm used to defoliate the Vietnamese countryside, but it
could have a curative effect. Short of acts of civil disobedience, which were
increasingly frequent during the late 1960 s, a poster was the best means for
Chwast to express his own growing frustration. And just maybe, through
its visibility and recognition, the poster might reinforce the antiwar stance
of others.
End Bad Breathwas not the first antiwar visual commentary that
Chwast, who cofounded Push Pin Studios in 1956 , had created for public
consumption. Nor was it the first time he was involved in antigovernment
protests. In the early 1950 s Chwast was a member of SANE, a group that
advocated and demonstrated for nuclear disarmament and included the
support of artists and designers. SANE was the first well-organized
postwar effort in the United States to build grassroots support against
testing of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. In 1957 , a few years before
American advisers were deployed in Vietnam, Chwast wrote, illustrated,
and self-published The Book of Battles, a collection of woodcuts that
ironically represented historic battle scenes not as heroic but banal
events. The small, limited-edition book was in the tradition of artists’
commentaries that dated back to the seventeenth century and included
Jacques Callot’s collection of prints The Miseries and Disasters of War
( 1633 – 1635 ), depicting the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War; Francisco
Goya’s prints Disasters of War( 1810 – 1820 ), about the Napoleonic occupation
of Spain; and Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica, memorializing the
bombardment of a defenseless Spanish town.
But Chwast’s effort was even more consistent with a genre of
antiwar fables, exemplified in The Last Flower( 1939 ) by James Thurber,
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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