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<\/a><\/div>\nThe tableaux is so beautifully rendered — the delicate strain of the woman’s arm, the mournful forbearance of the kneeling man — that I can’t help thinking the instruction is a little banal by comparison. This is “clean your plate, there are starving children in China” writ grandiose. And yet: Don’t you wish sometimes that you could be that sincere? About anything?<\/p>\n
Then again, maybe the artist was perfectly cynical about his work, a little artistic war profiteering. Maybe he cared only for the portraiture — clearly he cared for that — and figured the slogans were for others to worry about. I wonder, too, what the models were thinking, holding that pose. The woman holding the limp doll has to pick up her kid from her mother’s in half an hour; the soldier wants a drink; the nurse would like the artist to quit leering at her. And I’m not even going to ask why it’s only the women tied to that iron cross.<\/p>\n