Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

AT WAR WITH WAR

Seymour Chwast

Designed by Seymour Chwast
Edited by Steven Heller
Introduction by Victor Navasky

At War with War visualizes humanity's five thousand-year-long state of conflict, chaos, and violence on a continuous timeline. Seventy pages of stark black-andwhite pen-and-ink drawings and woodcuts illustrate history's most notorious battles - from 3300 BCE to the present day. Interspersed are contemplations on war from historic thinkers, including excerpts from The Art of War by Sun Tsu, The Complaint of Peace by Desiderius Erasmus, and "The State" by Randolph Bourne.

Searing and sardonic, balancing anger and despair with wit and humanity, these raw illustrations follow in the tradition of great social satirists such as Honoré Daumier, Frans Masereel, Felix Vallotton, and Otto Dix.

Available products
Book Published by Seven Stories Press

Comments

In the author's own words: Civilization has advanced since we invented fire and the wheel. We are clever primates, doing wonderful things for our welfare and enriching life. One aspect of our human condition that hasn't changed is our aggressive nature leading to 5000 years of warfare. Exposing some of them as a timeline reveals how persistent, repetitive and deadly wars are. My illustrations are inspired by these qualities. The weapons are becoming more destructive and uniforms of the warriors have changed but the desire of the powers commanding the army have not. I don't expect that my book would cause wars to be abolished or even affected, but we might reconsider the reasons and results. We are up against the glory and glamour, an attraction for young people and exploited by generals and older generations. Novels like resolved endings. My book has none. Pity

The designer has long used his graphics as a tool to promote peace and challenge the "necessity" of war, and this is perhaps his most comprehensive distillation of that yet. [...] The sketchy, fluid, monochrome linework of Chwast's illustrations feels fitting to the subject matter - it straddles reverence and the terrifying reality of the transience of lives lost to war. The minimal text of the timeline feels similarly fitting: its neutrality presents the facts of man's apparent propensity for war and terror as a series of stark, depressing numbers, while quietly condemning and mourning such realities. [...] For a rather wee volume, a hell of a lot is packed in. -- Eye On Design Read more...