An Anonymous Victim of War: Christian Petersen’s Unknown Prisoner

by Lea Rosson DeLong

National Coalition of Independent Scholars Conference: Traditions and Transitions

New Haven, Connecticut

June 20, 2015

For a conference entitled Traditions and Transitions, nothing would seem to be more appropriate than the subject of war, since conflict generates change and pushes society and individuals into transitions, though not necessarily welcome or beneficial ones. At the same time, the fundamental constants of war have remained, we might say: constant. Among them is the fact that conflict, no matter how mechanized or remotely controlled, almost always makes its way to the human body. Like so many things in human behavior, war has its own traditions. Whether experienced as a combatant or as a victim, war’s primary location is in the human body.

Unknown Prisoner
[Editor’s Note: This sculpture has been retitled Unknown Political Prisoner.]

Also among war’s traditions is the impulse to remember and to memorialize, usually with a work of art. Part of the subject of this paper is how that impulse changed in the 20^th century, or it may be more correct to say that what is being memorialized has changed. I would say that war memorials have changed in that today they are less likely to celebrate victory or even valor in battle than loss, suffering or even more bluntly: death.

War memorials have been an unhappy constant in human society for centuries. Most war memorials of the past honored some gallant general or celebrated a victory. If any regrets attended warfare, they were pushed aside to focus on battles won, heroic leaders, or successful exploits and campaigns. Seldom referred to were the inevitable losses on both sides, no matter who won. Also generally ignored in war memorials were the common soldiers who endured the fight and carried the burden of the actual combat. Even less likely to be memorialized were the civilians who got in the way.

War has always involved non-combatants, and civilians have always been victims. It can be argued that terrorism and torture of the innocent is an age-old practice and yet, it is only in the 20^th century, that we find the involvement of civilians has got on to our “not allowed” list of acceptable actions in war. We have also settled the question of whether torture is acceptable, at least in theory. By “in theory,” we refer specifically to the rules of warfare established by the Geneva Conventions. And yet, a cursory glance at even a shallow news report reveals that war remains a lawless and rule-free human endeavor and that the innocent are not just affected, but at times actually targeted.

The idea that war was a tragedy, that it incurred permanent and irreparable casualties among persons and society did not begin to emerge on a significant scale, at least in public sculpture, until around World War I. Probably the majority of the memorials did commemorate, in some way, the ultimate victory achieved by the American forces in Europe but some did begin to suggest the de-humanization in modern warfare and the mourning over the deaths of the common soldier. Christian Petersen (1885-1961), was among those artists who created sculptures with a mournful tone that dealt more with the grimness of warfare rather than celebrating victory. In fact, in his World War I sculpture, Battery D Memorial of 1924, the ultimate victory is not even suggested by the figure of a single soldier shown in the repetitive, rather mechanical job of loading a shell into a gun.

Subsequent sculptures dealing with World War II, especially his Price of Victory (Falling Soldier),c.1943, also refrained from notions of victory to express the tragedy and terror of 20^th century conflict.

The traditional symbolic visual language of war was scarcely found in Petersen’s work. Judging from his wartime and postwar sculptures and drawings one might not know that the United States won the war.

For this Danish-American sculptor, war was a frequent subject. His very presence in America was due largely to his parents’ decision to emigrate from a region of Denmark under German domination so that their sons would not be drafted into the German military. He grew up in New Jersey and began his career in Massachusetts, but in 1928, he moved to the Midwest. In 1934, he came to Iowa State University to hold the first artist-in-residence position at an American college. His numerous sculptures there established a legacy that has resulted today in Iowa State having the largest public art on campus program in the US.

Petersen dealt with war in a variety of ways. Artists have the capacity to deal with characteristics that they themselves do not possess. Many artists who love peace take up the subject of war and then portray it in ways that are appalling--which is usually their intention. Petersen was not an expressionistic artist so his works do not have the emotional assault of, say, Otto Dix’s (1891-1969) drawings of trench warfare in World War I or Leon Golub’s (1922-2004) victims of criminal political regimes. Nor was he an abstractionist. I have often thought that the reason much art became unrelentingly abstract after World War II was because photography had so thoroughly documented the war’s reality, including its worst atrocities. Realism in painting and sculpture was, for many, defeated by the sober inarguable images found in photographs. Yet, some artists, such as Petersen, persisted in a realist approach in trying to express the experience of the war and the postwar, atomic world.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of Petersen’s attempt to express the horrors of war, and specifically the torture that often accompanies it, was his sculpture, Unknown Prisoner [Unknown Political Prisoner]. We know from other work that he was obsessed with the idea of war’s crimes, its harvest of sorrow and, especially, the victimization of the innocent. What the exact genesis of this sculpture was or when Petersen began to develop his visual idea isn’t known but we do know that he entered a competition for a sculpture on the theme of “the unknown political prisoner” and this sculpture ought surely to be seen, at least partly, in the context of the Cold War. Initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the competition was conducted in the United States by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An announcement went out in 1952, and Petersen responded by sending this small, sculpted model along with drawings elaborating on his proposal to the American jury. [Editor’s Note: For the most current research on Unknown Political Prisoner, see this page.]

Petersen did not win, and it is likely his entry was scarcely considered by the jury because of its use of the representational human figure, the realism of his concept, and the visual affinities with the religious iconography of the crucifixion of Christ. The jurors’ choices were nearly all highly abstract interpretations of “the unknown prisoner,” and the winner of the competition was the British artist Reg Butler whose sculpture’s main formal quality was geometric. Petersen’s figure shows torture as a criminal act against a human body; the abstract ones make that reality less vivid and deal more with the psychological effects. Petersen’s interpretation would have almost certainly been regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned, even a flat-footed, unimaginative treatment of a theme that was properly expressed in a metaphorical fashion. Petersen, however, did not deal in metaphor in the sense that these jurors admired. But he did show a grasp of symbolism that was steeped in tradition, but which he turned in a new direction. Sixty years beyond that competition, Petersen’s sculpture can be seen in a less prejudiced light, and the fact that he chose to maintain a realist approach is not necessarily regarded as an artistic weakness.

The artist modeled a nearly nude male figure hanging by his wrists, face-first, against a broad slab. The figure is still and, with both feet trailing behind him, he no longer supports his own weight. This figure is different from Petersen’s other war sculptures in that he is not an active combatant or a victim of bombing or an instance of collateral damage. This man has been tortured deliberately, and his situation is not incidental to warfare nor is it collateral damage.

The posture of Petersen’s figure, along with the rudimentary cross against which he hangs suspended (the base is also cruciform), connect this sculpture to the traditional depictions of the crucifixion of Christ, but with significant differences. This man is turned away from us; his face, where we might gauge his suffering, is hidden, and his identity is obscured. Public humiliation was one aspect of Christ’s punishment–and of almost all executions carried out by the state–and his face and his body were lifted above the crowd and displayed frontally for all to see. As ignoble as this situation is, it does at least recognize the individual and thus his fate becomes a public act in which there is the notion of spectators engaging in a shared experience. In Petersen’s sculpture, however, the hanging man is denied the dignity of being recognized as an individual; by obscuring his face, spectators cannot register him as a person, even if all they do is to note him as an unfortunate among them. Turning the front of the body and the face away bestows anonymity, a lack of personhood. He is not only unknown, he is of no importance. It will be difficult to remember and commemorate those whose faces we cannot see.

It is a strength of Petersen’s sculpture that it declines to associate itself fully with Christianity, but there can be little doubt that a source of the artist’s feelings is his newly-defined connection to Christianity. After World War II, in 1949 at the age of 64, Petersen converted to Roman Catholicism after a lifetime of disdaining religion. His position seems to have been that war was inconsistent with Christianity or, perhaps more accurately, it is un-Christian behavior that leads to warfare. In bypassing a specifically, exclusively Christian component, he opens up the interpretation of his sculpture to a multitude of possibilities, an asset in art. There are no signs identifying the figure (such as “This is the King of the Jews”) to give some reason for his punishment or to hold him up to public ridicule. There is little art historical iconography to give us the story behind what we see in Unknown Prisoner [Unknown Political Prisoner] or to place it in a time-honored religious context or any other context. What examples of such postures can we point to in the art of the past? There are a few martyrdoms which have the victim strung up in this way, but not many, and they are not usually without a specific identity. Because of these dis-associations, we must see this figure in a largely ahistorical way. This sculpture is both a depiction of torture and a symbol of it as well. Because we can identify him with nothing, with no particular time and no particular place or no particular person, we can identify him with anyone, or everyone. The suffering we witness is human suffering, in the body and the mind – things we all possess.

We do not know why he has been hurt or killed. Actually, we don’t know whether he is dead or alive. Again, Petersen’s lack of specificity strengthens his sculpture when we puzzle over whether this person is unconscious or dead. Hanging by his wrists, shoulder blades protruding, and feet dragging at the base of the slab, the body is inert. (Motion or the capacity for motion is the main sign of life.) We cannot, however, tell whether to mourn or to hope. Among the horrible aspects of this scene is the fact that the man has not been affixed to the slab by hammer and nails—as in crucifixion—but is held up by straps, straps that seem intended to be used more than once. There was likely a person in these straps before, and another person will hang from them when this man is removed. They are re-usable, a permanent piece of equipment designed for sequential use. In the context of the postwar world, Petersen’s slab with straps assures us that this aspect of warfare will continue and that all the violence expended in World War II and since then was not enough to stop this practice.

We know that Petersen planned to enlarge his sculpture to make it into a monumental public memorial. After the war, he drew incessantly developing ideas for war memorials, and occasionally we can follow his thinking in the development of a visual idea. One sheet of sketches includes a clear indication of the scale on which he hoped to realize his vision. The sculpture itself has been rendered in a small size relative to the landscape so we know he aspired to have it on at least a life-size, if not monumental, scale. However, this sculpture, like all of his other proposals for war memorials, was never realized.

After the end of World War II, some memorials did appear, but they were often not traditional statues. The country seemed remarkably uninterested in such things. Iowa State University, like other colleges, was flooded with veterans using their G.I. Bill benefits, and the college was preoccupied with enrolling, instructing, and housing all the new attendees and their growing families. These new students, as well as college administrators, were building for the future and eager to put aside, if not forget, what had happened in the war. Petersen’s worries about the causes of conflict and his commemoration of the losses and deaths in World War II did not find a broad, supportive audience. His sculptures were dedicated to mourning the dead and displaying the sorrow of those left behind; themes of victory and triumph were absent. After the war, Iowa State, which had commissioned one campus sculpture after another from Petersen since the mid-1930s, drastically curtailed its patronage. Though he was a revered figure on campus, especially as a teacher, his contributions to the public art on campus were almost at an end.

Despite his failure to realize a sculpted public war memorial, Petersen has nevertheless left us a significant legacy of sketches, proposals, and thoughtful visual ideas that can offer insight not only into his particular artistic identity, but into the vocabulary of warfare and its commemorations. Of all his ideas, sketches, models and proposals, Unknown Prisoner [Unknown Political Prisoner], is the sculpture that, in my estimation, makes us most regret the lack of patronage for his war memorials, but is the sculpture which seems most applicable to the wars and conflicts of our own time.

[Editor’s Note: For the most current research on Unknown Political Prisoner, see this page.]