At War with War

November 20, 2017
Legendary designer Chwast takes a break from graphic adaptations of classics (The Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy) for this a sweeping chronology of the history of war. This volume’s antiwar message gets lost as its content amounts to a crib sheet of historical events and their dates of occurrence, with no explanation of the cited conflicts. Bolstered by an occasional historical essay or bits of commentary from the likes of Sun Tsu, Desiderius Erasmus, and Randolph Bourne, this effort renders a juggernaut of a subject into a bare-bones list, accented by Chwast’s starkly expressionist illustrations of soldiers and scenes of war. As a numbing statement on humanity’s obsession with conflict, the book succeeds, but it’s not for history buffs.

November 15, 2017
Throughout a career that started in the 1940s, graphic-designer Chwast has been antiwar. Amid a steady stream of bold, modernist advertising and book-cover, food-package, poster, publicity, and picture-book art, he has produced powerful personal work that stresses the horror and brutality of war and has earned him the sobriquet the left-handed designer, though he scourges revolutionaries as well as imperialists. This black-and-white gallery consists of two-page spreads, each containing a stark, geometrical, hand-drawn illustration of carnage corresponding to a single item in the chronological list of deadly aggressions that snakes across the pages. The chronology begins with King Menes, the conqueror, unites Egypt in 3300 BCE and ends in 2015 in Syria and Iraq; the last word in the list is Ongoing. The pictures begin with Hittites fighting Egyptians in 1285 BCE and end with two black-masked, black-clad men flanking a kneeling captive in white (about to be beheaded?). Trenchant excerpts on war by political philosophers Sun Tzu, Erasmus, and Randolph Bourne interrupt the continuum and ground the book's serious tone and import.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)