by Robert Hill
Jack Pavia has a glossy art book spread across his lap, one finger on Tom Lea’s wartime painting Patrol Out of Iceland (right). Lee has depicted a naval gunner in an airplane gun bay, looking intently into the void.
"This is a Catalina PBY," Pavia is explaining fervently. "But see the grips on that machine gun? They belong back here," he points. "Of course, if you put them back there, the painting would have just awkward proportions. In reality, the ammunition belt would go through his left arm and the expended shells would be bouncing off his face. . . . I looked at that and I said, ‘Wait a minute, that doesn’t belong there,’ just as I looked at another painting and thought, ‘That’s not an American uniform.’ Because I grew up seeing these things."
Pavia, an associate professor of history at Ithaca College, is the son of a former naval flight surgeon who was stationed on Okinawa for part of the war. He belongs to that generation of Americans who grew up fascinated with the deadly paraphernalia of the Second World War, and he remembers it with the vivid connoisseurship that springs from youthful affection, from watching naval planes depart on one sortie, arrive from another.
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Nancy Brcak’s childhood was quieter. Her mother was an artist. "She particularly appreciated the Japanese aesthetic," Brcak recalls. As a girl at home, she pored over her mother’s books and, like her, conceived a deep interest in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Japanese influence in Wright’s approach to architecture. Brcak is now associate professor and chair of the College’s art history department, with a specialty in 19th-century American architecture that is the fruit of childhood bookishness. |
And here sits Pavia the historian, waxing enthusiastic in the service of art criticism, while Brcak the art historian nods approvingly and adds the occasional piece of historical fact. This isn’t a case of academic dissonance -- rather, it’s a symbiotic reversal of intellectual roles between the principals of a successful teaching team. Since 1990 Brcak and Pavia have offered Introduction to Japanese Culture, a 200-level, multidisciplinary course designed to introduce students to 300-level courses in such subjects as art history, anthropology, and religion. "We attend all the lectures and we both participate in each period, so it’s truly team taught," Brcak explains.
The partnership has blossomed into an academic enterprise that, outside the classroom, has earned the pair the somewhat schizophrenic attention of military historians and art historians alike. Just a few weeks after their inaugural lectures, Pavia and Brcak began writing a paper for the United States Navy’s Conference on Asian Affairs in Washington, D. C. In the years since their initial collaboration, the pair has presented papers on wartime Japanese and American propaganda art at universities and conferences in eight states, as well as at the various United States armed services centers for military history.
Their joint research has focused on the notion of national identity as revealed by each country’s wartime propaganda. "What we discovered was that both countries, attacking the enemy, were saying more about themselves than about the other," Brcak recounts. "It was fascinating how much self-exposure there was." Initially their focus was on wartime cartoons, the ephemera of the daily press, spawning papers with titles such as "The Enemy as ‘Other,’ " "Cartoons at War," "Mixed Messages," and "No Laughing Matter."
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"We knew that there was this persistence of memory [about the Japanese], that there was no other way to deal with the Japanese," says Brcak. "My feeling, as we continued our research, was that there was very little difference between the Japanese and the Americans in terms of their attitudes, in terms of their ambitions and aims." The difference, they discovered, lay not in the attitudes of the warring nations, but in the vernacular by which each expressed its loathing for the other. "The Americans turn the Japanese into subhumans by making them into monkeys and insects," Brcak notes. "The Japanese tend to turn the Americans into subhumans by making them into something called oni-beasts." So one finds Americans depicted with fangs and three-toed claws, or the Japanese emperor as a sinister bat in full uniform, flying over Pearl Harbor with a clutch of tiny bombs. |
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"And just the portrayal of Roosevelt with hair on the back of his hand, which we all have -- well, that’s bestial in the Japanese eye," adds Pavia. This sounds like fairly simple analysis, yet the comparative methods Brcak brings to the topic require scholarly acquaintance with the historic idioms of Japanese art. "Japanese propaganda images suggest a visually literate audience," she writes. The cartoon of Roosevelt poised with grasping, hairy hands, for example, must be juxtaposed to a similar figure by the 18th-century satirist Sharaku. Knowing the historical analogies and the vernacular of the artist -- satire, in the case of Sharaku -- places the graphic icon within its interpretive context. |
How have art historians missed this approach to history? "Subject matter and representational art have a tough road in the 20th century," Brcak muses. "The 20th century is about aesthetic issues, and this is about subject matter. In talking about war art, you give it credence, and I think that there are, especially in my generation, a whole lot of individuals out there who hate war. I wouldn’t say that art historians have written off looking at propaganda. They’ve looked at it, but not placed it front and center. We study propaganda because we think it’s fundamental to understanding cultures."
Having studied the cartoons closely, Brcak and Pavia have expanded their scrutiny to the paintings of American and Japanese wartime artists, most of whom were not at the front, or at least not while the action they depict was occurring. "The paintings are interesting," Brcak explains, "because they really have imbedded in them national ideas, without the kind of slavering propagandistic quality that comes from [the immediacy of cartoons]." For example, she notes that American works often depict a "single individual, perhaps wounded or in some difficulty. In Japanese works, that’s much more rare. More likely, you’re going to see a group of individuals whole, and you’ll see them together at a moment of triumph -- the kamikaze pilots before they go away."
In conversation, the two professors interact with an enthusiastic chemistry that belies the serious scholarship underlying their projects. If Brcak’s training as an art historian gives her a means to interpret the silent language of the cartoons, Pavia’s historical training and his childhood passions give him an odd literalness with which he analyzes the paintings. He spots the inaccuracy in Tom Lee’s machine gun or in the painting of American soldiers togged out in British expeditionary shorts and British helmets, carrying British rifles.
"The inaccuracies that Jack sees in the images lead us to look for other critical aspects in them," Brcak says. "Sword and bayonet over machine gun," Pavia chortles over one Japanese artist’s rendering of a noble last stand. "You get that image again and again and again. You get dead or dying Americans; you see captured American equipment. In American war painting, we very seldom showed dead Japanese -- the ultimate contempt. We showed dead and dying Americans -- ‘look what they’re doing to us.’ Those are fundamentally different national attitudes. Now, I don’t know if that’s a historian’s approach or an art historian’s approach."
Indeed, the editors of the Historian, the scholarly journal first to publish one of their joint papers, were equally confused by the method. "They liked the content [of our first paper]," Brcak recalls, "but they didn’t understand the methodology. . . . We rewrote it as a small history article." By including an appendix with captions and juxtaposed images, they managed to include the comparative art history approach as a postscript.
Their research has led to scholarly conversation in their respective fields, it has given rise to the idea for a traveling exhibition of war art, and, according to Pavia, it has profoundly affected their teaching styles. "Having worked together on a number of papers, we work together in the course at a much higher level, with greater confidence," he says.
In turn, their scholarship grows apace with their teaching collaboration. In March they presented a paper on ‘silent language’ -- "Japanese war art as a manifestation of self-attitudes," Pavia explains. "How did the Japanese portray themselves when they were fighting the Chinese in 1894-95? How did they portray themselves when they were fighting the Russians in 1904-05? How did they portray themselves when they were again in China in 1937? How did they portray themselves in 1941-45? It’s different each time." This approach, understanding a nation’s internal changes through the history of its propaganda, is a new twist on the American-versus-Japanese approach and promises to bear new insights.
Each time they have taught the course on Japanese culture, they say, it has been a different course. "I think when we first did this we each knew, ‘These are my ideas, those are her ideas,’ " Pavia says. "Now the ideas flow back and forth, so I don’t think there’s a division . . . . Very often, one of us is lecturing and you can see the other one jumping up and down. You see something for the first time or you make a connection.
"We’re developing a new approach to teaching," he continues. "It’s interdisciplinary; it’s the use of the image as primary source as opposed to illustration. It’s team teaching. These are all things that are in the air."
Brcak adds, "We both love teaching. That’s part of what makes this fun. If you’re working by yourself, you know what you’re thinking. I never know what Jack’s thinking."
Pavia, too, seems to thrive on the sense of impending surprise. "You never walk into class feeling bored, because you really don’t know what’s going to happen."
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