Tag: World War I

Curated by Iria Candela at the Met Breuer, the exhibition is one of the last gasps of creative breaths the museum will have before its cyclopean building of granite rock becomes home to the Frick Collection next year. (Inspired by the belligerency of Futurism, he enlisted with the Italian army during World War I, from 1916 to 1918.) Others claim that his work — even when commissioned by Mussolini’s government — was too aesthetically radical to be considered a product of the far-right regime. Fontana permanently returned to his Milan studio in 1947, two years after the war ended. If Kazimir Malevich‘s “Black Square” (1915) pushed the canvas toward its endgame, then Fontana’s punctured paintings provide entryway into that apocalyptic void. The Cuts series developed in 1958, more than a decade after Fontana began encouraging his students in Buenos Aires to experiment with projections, lights, and mirrors under the doctrine of Spatialism. “He is really abstract, one of the young artists who have done something important.” Still, something about Klein’s work irked the artist. Nevertheless, he worked with the white monochrome from the beginning of his Cuts series to the end. Critics of Fontana have sometimes remarked that he loved modeling more than sculpting. I would go further and argue that the artist was more a model than a sculptor.

The lessons of World War I are many and varied for those who study warfare. But Schlieffen's strategy was disastrous as well, because it minimized the importance of violating Belgium’s sovereignty, something diplomats and politicians would have understood would trigger British involvement. The mindset that strategy is separate from politics also allowed Germany’s military to rationalize their defeat on the battlefield as a “stab in the back” by politicians’ lack of support, which shaped how the German military and society viewed the rise of fascism. This delegitimized the political class and kept the military from exercising institutional restraints as Weimar collapsed. But as Sir Lawrence Freedman demonstrates in his magisterial “Strategy: A History,” strategy divorced from politics leads either to irrelevance, because the strategy will not be employed, or disaster, when political leaders are confronted with the unexpected costs and consequences. It is the job of elected political leaders to determine which wars to fight, and what proportion of national effort to commit to the undertaking. Political leaders aggregate societal preferences, and there is simply no substitute for political judgments to guide strategy—no matter how much such a substitute is yearned for or what superior outcomes excluding that political judgment might provide. Thus do strategists propose technical solutions like “a Goldwater Nichols for the interagency” to streamline the cacophony of policymaking in a government created expressly to prevent consolidation of power, even though streamlining policy in the way the 1985 defense reform legislation did internal to the Defense Department would reduce the ability of Congress, think tanks, journalists and departments from influencing policy outcomes. The crafters of President Trump’s National Security Strategy heroically attempted to do just this, harnessing the president’s campaign agenda in developing the 2017 strategy. But their effort may now be judged a failure on the grounds of both irrelevance and potential disaster.

President Donald Trump has been forced to pull out of a service to remember those who gave up their lives in World War I after his bone spur injury reappeared. Bone spurs kept Trump from fighting in Vietnam and they’ll now keep him from standing up and talking at a war remembrance service in France. Trump’s bone spurs began to play up again after he was told that he wasn’t very popular in France – or anywhere else in Europe for that matter. The president will now stay in America this weekend where he plans to rehab his injury with a couple of rounds of golf down in Florida. ‘My foot is in bigly pain but I’ll tough it out because I’m a brave man. Much braver than those soldiers who died. I prefer soldiers who didn’t die,’ Trump told the media. France has expressed its relief that Trump won’t be making an appearance, saying they only asked him out of politeness in the first place. ‘Fake news. No-one is polite in France and you know it,’ Trump fired back.