No-Man's-Land: The Battlefield Watercolors of Claggett Wilson

Symphony of Terror, Claggett Wilson, ca. 1919, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin

Like many aspiring artists, Claggett Wilson, born in Washington, DC, in 1887, rejected a conventional gentleman's education at Princeton to briefly study at the Art Students League of New York before sailing to Paris. He enrolled at the progressive Académie Julian, and from 1906 to 1910 showed his work at the Paris Salon, the art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. When he returned to the United States in 1913, Modernism had fully arrived. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known simply as the Armory Show, featured 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over three hundred avant-garde European and American artists. Historically it became a Who's Who of Modern art: Pablo Picasso, Edward Hopper, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Cézanne, to name a few. Claggett Wilson's oil painting Moorish Girl, now lost, was exhibited among the works of these now better-known artists.

Modernist artists sought to create symbols representing the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the impact of cities on contemporary life. As a means of signifying their doubts about time-honored values and institutions, they rejected the traditional use of perspective, color, and composition. Critics reviled the new work as an "insane" affront to artistic sensibilities. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, with its overlapping images meant to express motion, was singled out for derision; a critic in the New York Times famously referred to it as "an explosion in a shingle factory." As an instructor at Columbia University Teachers College, Wilson was certainly interested in helping his students search for a unique, surprising kind of beauty as encouraged by the new art of the day.

In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, mobilizing more than 300,000 soldiers, thirty-one-year-old Wilson put aside his paintbrushes and left his teaching job to enlist as a combat marine. He believed that to be a fully realized artist, he needed to experience the world in all its complexity, including truly bad things. His desires, though honorable, were naive. After training as a second lieutenant, he found himself on the frontlines in France, where he experienced two of the bloodiest battles of the war: the Battle of Château-Thierry and the Battle of Belleau Wood.

In the month-long Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, US marines struggled to block one of the German approaches to Paris, but they did so artlessly, advancing shoulder to shoulder, which had rarely been done since the slaughter of the British at the Somme in 1916. Wilson was wounded by poison gas and was left for three days lying in the muddy no-man's-land between the American and German trenches before being recovered for medical treatment.

Front Line Stuff, Claggett Wilson, ca. 1919, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin

World War I was called the "chemists' war" for its large-scale use of poison gas. The gases soaked into woolen uniforms, causing skin burns and blisters, and hung in noxious clouds over the trenches, resulting in near blindness, vomiting, and long-term respiratory problems; Wilson experienced respiratory difficulties for the rest of his life.

After recovering at a hospital in Dijon, he returned to the front to witness Germany's surrender. Following the armistice, Belgian, British, French, and American forces stayed behind to maintain control of the occupied territories. While many of his buddies went home, Wilson was sent to the small town of Koblenz, Germany, for the Army of Occupation of the Rhineland. To deal with the haunting memories of life in the trenches, a place filled with the stench of urine, rotting flesh and excrement, rats the size of cats, and men suffering from poison gas and shell shock, Wilson knew he needed to paint; it was the only thing that would bring him solace. He acquired a set...