An artist's view of World War I

The Kansas City Star: An artist's view of World War I
"On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941" by Steven Trout; University of Alabama Press (344 pages, $48.50)

At some point, Steven Trout, author of "On the Battlefield of Memory," visited the grave of William Davis in Winchester, Kan. What he found probably wasn't what he expected.

In the 1940 painting "The Return of Private Davis From the Argonne," Kansas artist John Steuart Curry had depicted the 1921 ceremonial reinterment of Davis' body. The young man had been a friend of Curry's and one of the first members of the Kansas National Guard to die in France in 1918.

But, as Trout soon recognized, there were issues with Curry's version of events.

The Davis grave is on a steep incline from which no distant horizon can be glimpsed. The view is not at all as presented by Curry on his canvas, on which mourners are dwarfed by a vast Kansas prairie.

There was more. Davis, Trout's research revealed, didn't die during the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the epic offensive of September 1918 that helped hasten the war's end some two months later.

In fact, Davis had been killed more than a month earlier, and in the Vosges Mountains in eastern France.

What was the artist's point in suggesting otherwise? It was this distance between historical reality and artistic license that intrigued Trout - English professor at Fort Hays State University - and prompted his investigation of the painting's backstory. The Curry canvas is one of many artistic representations of World War I's sacrifice and aftermath that Trout subjects to scrutiny.

He devotes separate chapters to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, dedicated in 1921, and the European grave of Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore, who died in 1918 while serving as a pilot over France. He also discusses post-war film and fiction, as well as the work of several artists, Curry among then.

At a minimum, Trout demonstrates that the ways the Great War was remembered in the years following the armistice often were at odds with the official reasons why we fought.

To that end, Trout wonders whether Curry tweaked the narrative of Private Davis' death to advance his own agenda, sometimes in subtle ways.

That huge Kansas horizon is an example. Curry - like Private Davis, a one-time resident of Jefferson County, not far from Kansas City - by the late 1930s lived in Connecticut, near his patrons. But the artist today is perhaps best known for "Tragic Prelude," a mural in the Topeka statehouse, with its wild-eyed John Brown.

Curry knew where his bread was buttered. He "was adept at giving his East Coast audience what it wanted: scenes, the more violent or grotesque the better, of exotic flatlanders inhabiting a strange, monotonous landscape," Trout writes.

The canvas details a crowd of mourning residents huddled around the flag-draped casket, listening to a minister. If the artist treats the mourners with respect, Trout writes, his depiction of the preacher is not flattering - as if Curry is signaling his disregard for the day's official articulator of the country's collective sacrifice.

Trout even sees a similar signal in the Model T Fords lined up in the painting's background. "This may seem to be a stretch," he writes. But in the then-contemporary fiction of Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather, enthusiasm for motor cars was used to suggest, Trout writes, "the deadening conformity of small-town America."

Trout also considers the long gestation of the painting, not completed until 1940. Curry was an isolationist, and Trout considers it possible that the gathering storm in Europe prompted Curry not only to finally complete his long-considered painting, but also to give it a title that would remind viewers of the more than 26,000 Americans killed in the Meuse-Argonne action.

"To view this canvas is to feel simultaneously the force and the failure of war remembrance when confronted with a conflict fought far away - somewhere over the Kansas rainbow - for a questionable cause and with dubious outcomes," Trout writes.

Perhaps it's odd that the book has no apparent discussion of George Creel, the former Kansas City newspaper reporter who led the U.S. propaganda effort during the war and largely was responsible for language and imagery used to convince Americans of the war's necessity.

But the book is, at minimum, timely given the approaching anniversary of the war - the Civil War. While many Americans may be familiar with the continuing debate regarding the Civil War's origins and ends, Trout's book poses the possibility that it may be the more recent conflict whose meaning has grown more ambiguous.

In fairness, Curry ultimately didn't think himself above the residents of Winchester. Upon his death in 1946, Curry - like Davis - was buried there.