Harvey Dunn and the war

Illustration from "The Lord Taketh and the Lord Giveth,"
a story by Cyrus Townsend Brady in the Ladies Home Journal.

 

South Dakota's Harvey Dunn was no starving artist, no dreamy Vincent. He was, in every way, a realist. His characters, after all, were recognizably human, and he'd never considered art to be something for which he shouldn't earn a healthy living. He and his family lived sumptuously in a big, beautiful house, he courted work from America's leading magazines, and painted and drew with the same tenacity his father had mounted to plow the native prairie his son had left behind when he went off to Chicago. Harvey Dunn did well.

Today, it's increasingly hard to imagine what kind of hold magazines once had on American consciousness. Life and Look and the Saturday Evening Post were news networks, mini-libraries, that bi-weekly offered subscribers portraits of the world beyond their front porch. 

Those big magazines did so, not because they alone communicated news and culture, but because each worked hard at producing visually attractive content. A story by Ernest Hemingway required a new portrait of the writer, in addition to a story illustration, or two or three, by someone capable of creating an image as remarkable as the stories they chose for publication. 

Harvey Dunn's work ethic was as estimable as his track record turned out to be. He pleased editors because he pleased their subscribers, and he did his work on time. What's more, he did a lot of work. He and his family lived comfortably, to say the least, and he drove show-stopping automobiles in an era pre-dating the garage.

When the nation went to war in 1917, Harvey Dunn was called upon, even though his 34 years put him beyond the reach of the draft board. He and seven other artists were given the assignment of documenting the war effort, for posterity--and, yes, public relations too, a pair of sometimes conflicting ends.

Dunn loved the work and didn't shy away from the front. He lugged his equipment into dark and terrible corners, and, surprisingly, turned out fewer finished pieces than did his contemporaries, most of whom didn't court the dangers as frequently as he had. 

In 1918, the nation was singing "How you going to keep them down on the farm, now that he's Parieey" once the carnage ended. War changes things, and, more significantly, war changed the doughboys. Harvey Dunn, who produced less but did more, suffered a verifiable change of heart after experiencing what he did.

His limited production wasn't short on volume. Along the way, he created endless sketches because he determined that, once back home, he would continue to work for the government and turn those sketched memories into pieces that would come to define the war he experienced, the war America had fought through. He made offers, but the government wasn't buying, they weren't interested in more. The war was over.

That failure, his biographers claim, was the most crushing defeat of his life, not because he needed work--he never needed work--but because the war had shaped him into a someone who determined that his art was going to be more than illustration. It needed not simply to highlight good things, but be good things. The war made him want to do more on canvas, to help people see big things that stood just beyond the view from the front porch.

War, World War I, had taught him something about himself and his work. And when the government turned its back on his particular dreams, he determined to look elsewhere for inspiration to speak truth. 

Strangely enough--and thankfully--he looked homeward, home to the prairie.