“‘D-Day: Freedom from Above’ Review: Soldiers’ Airborne Stories”
Mark Yost, The Wall Street Journal
Of the 16.4 million Americans who fought in World War II, only about a hundred thousand remain with us. The poignancy of this fact is brought into sharper relief on such occasions as yesterday, the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, and by exhibitions such as the National Museum of the U.S. Army’s “D-Day: Freedom from Above,” reviewed here by The Wall Street Journal’s Mark Yost. Soon—within a decade or two—the only way to hear these veterans’ stories will be secondhand. Yost recounts some of the memories contained in “Freedom from Above,” including that of the paratrooper Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, who after shattering his ankle upon landing in France didn’t just survive, but inspired other troops to fight, too. (His bravery earned him not only a Distinguished Service Cross but also the honor of having his experience portrayed by John Wayne.) Countless stories of humility and greatness fill the exhibition, as Yost describes it. What better weekend to revisit these stories than this one?
“‘A group of deranged idiots’—how the Soviets saw the Avant-Gardists”
Charlotte Hobson, The Spectator
The Soviet Union’s philistinism greatly benefited the West throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The totalitarian nation’s failure to appreciate and protect such gems as Kandinsky, Chagall, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff resulted in these artists defecting westward, bringing their talents with them. Some of the avant-garde remained inside the nation’s borders, however, as Charlotte Hobson reminds us in The Spectator. Reviewing Sjeng Scheijen’s The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Hobson details the messy fates of many of these artists. As Hobson tells it, some were placed in key cultural positions following the October Revolution, but not because any of the revolution’s leaders really believed in their art: rather, they wanted to channel the creatives’ energies toward propaganda. As soon as those energies proved untamable, the artists were deemed expendable, and most were forgotten or persecuted as the regime’s artistic attitudes calcified into official directorates for only Socialist Realism and the like. Hobson’s evaluations of these forward-thinking artists provide an excellent window into the art itself and the regime that crushed it.