Humanity is at stake

EXHIBITIONS: Goya, Jacques Callot, Otto Dix. Their subject is war, and the pity of it

Goya, Jacques Callot, Otto Dix. Their subject is war, and the pity of it

REVIEWING the Robert Capa exhibition in Edinburgh last week, I remarked that the Spanish Civil War was probably the first major conflict in which the modern media were important not only in reporting events, but in leading world opinion. Today, it is more and more obvious that newspapers, photojournalism and television tell us more about war than traditional artists ever could. Yet such artists are still needed: not because they are more sensitive and humane than cameramen, but for a more elusive reason. They tell us about killing while also representing culture.

This is the underlying theme of "Disasters of War" at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, a neat, disturbing exhibition of prints by Jacques Callot, Goya and Otto Dix. Callot shows us the early stages of the Thirty Years War, Goya broods on the Napoleonic Wars, and Dix portrays the lives - and deaths - of German infantrymen in the First World War. All three use printing techniques (etching, engraving and aquatint), and it is clearly a necessary part of their message. Painting might have been too soft and luxurious a medium, whereas printing is sharp and immediate. It also gives the flavour of a report.

Still, in war art, culture is more important than reportage. In this area Callot and Goya are superior to the relatively untutored Dix. For it is a rule of war art that the artist must throw away some of his own cultivation. Callot was trained in the sophisticated workshops of Florentine court art and goldsmithery. Goya also studied in Italy, and began his printmaking career by engraving paintings by Velsquez, that most fastidious of artists. But neither man could express what he felt about war without doing some hurt to his artfulness, perhaps indeed to his own personality. Hence the darkness, abruptness and apparently slovenly passages in Goya's prints, and the way that Callot adds a coarse blackness and scratchiness to the miniaturist delicacy of his style. Dix had less culture to lose , being so young when he put on a uniform. For this reason, his prints had an especially vacuous horror.

Like his contemporaries in German Dada, Dix made his work as though previous art had never existed, or was irrelevant. Goya's Spanishness was both natural and as theatrical as a matador's cape. By contrast, there is a statelessness in Callot's manner, the result of his early Italian schooling, and the misfortunes of his native region. He was born in 1592 in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, at that period an independent duchy linked to Germany and France. In 1633, which is the date of Callot's Miseries of War, the French invaded Lorraine. The result was not exactly conquest, but anarchy. Armed gangs roamed the countryside, killing, plundering, and burning villages. Callot was the witness of such events.

There are 18 sheets in his first Miseries of War series, which was published in Paris as a booklet. All are small, and their format is elongated. One has to pore over the plates. This gives an intimacy, not at all pleasant, to Callot's revelations. The closer we are to his craftsmanship, the more we are drawn into the humanity of his subjects. And Callot, it must be said, is at his best when he depicts executions and scenes of torture: mass hangings, a firing squad, someone burnt at the stake. The torture scenes are abominable.

Goya knew Callot's prints, and his Disasters of War echoes the Lorraine artist's title. He did not publish these private, agonised prints, though he probably meant to. He gave a set to a friend, and this album found its way to the British Museum. The other sets of prints in this show also belong to the BM. Precious, vulnerable art about the worst things that people can do to each other is preserved by scholars in Bloomsbury. And "Disasters of War" is essentially a museum exhibition. Connoisseurs will appreciate it more than generals, or pacifists. This is the paradox of the show, and perhaps of all the best war art.

Especially Goya's. Like Callot, he brings an internal vision to his images. We look at his mind as well as the events that he witnessed. One print is called I Saw This, declaring that the artist was present at a particularly terrifying scene. But looking at the series as a whole, we do not think of Goya as an outraged spectator, but of his imagination, and the damage that war had done to his noble soul. Egotism and compassion are strangely united in Goya. This may be a characteristic of the great war artists. If so, Dix is wanting. He did not have an elevated mind. But his rage, ugliness and despair of expressing himself are important. Here was his solidarity with the common soldier.

! Manchester Whitworth Gallery (0161 275 7450), to 16 Aug.