 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
The lower room of The Art Gallery, which is located in the Paul Creative Arts Center, is painted with the cheerful glow of natural lighting from a large window that rises from the floor to meet the ceiling and lengthwise extends about ten feet.
Whitewashed walls, adorned with paintings that are as bright and cheerful as a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, zigzag at obtuse angles to create a creative and enticing atmosphere.
It's uplifting.
In the upper gallery, on the other hand, the traditionally ordered walls appear grey from the soft lighting of spot lamps that hang from a circumnavigating track.
Here and there, the wall is interrupted by a sheet of scarlet red, and mounted on these walls. Hanging at regular intervals, are equally-sized, black and white visions of starvation, torture, murder, death and general inhumanity.
It's depressing.
But in a world that struggles with the sorrows of 9/11, the genocide in Darfur, and the Iraq war, the exhibit strikes a resonate and emotional chord with many.
On Jan. 20 the UNH art gallery opened the famous, Napoleonic era painter, Francisco de Goya's, etchings series, "The Disasters of War."
"It's just so emotional," said gallery attendant, Tiffany Heineman, as she described a print that she found particularly poignant.
The print, titled "No se puede mirar" or "One can not look at this" in English, depicts a group of civilians who are about to be shot. A cloaked woman clutches her young child. A man kneels stiffly, presumably in prayer, bracing himself for the end. Another woman has her head thrown back and her arms extended at her sides and seems to wail in despair. A man in the foreground kneels before his executioners with his hands clasped, pleading for his life. And sticking out of the right side of the frame is a cluster of rifle muzzles with attached bayonets.
"I don't know if I could call it my favorite, but it's the one that shocked me the most," said Heineman.
Sean McGrimley, the gallery attendant that was watching over the "New Hampshire Art Association's 59th Annual Exhibition" downstairs, said of the Goya exhibit, "It's a downer for most people."
However, he also said, "I like it. It's just when you look at it you're like, 'Wow."
This seems to be most people's reaction.
The gallery attendants get to sit at a desk with stacks of pamphlets propped up along the front edge for visitors. There they spread out their homework and with a little, metal gadget that has a button to press when someone comes in, keep track of the number of visitors that pass through. As such, they get to witness people's responses.
According to Heineman, powerful and evocative are the two most common adjectives that people use to describe it. Many people fall silent.
Sitting at her desk and reflecting on when she first saw the exhibit, she said, "I got really solemn and introspective and retrospective ? all the spectives."
An art student who got let out of class early because he had a critique, decided to pay the exhibit a visit. Heineman clicked the button on the silver counter and the young man, Max Shaw, set his backpack down near a pillar and started to silently look around.
The exhibit below drew him away for a while, no doubt from the sunlight and colors, but he came back and browsed the Goya exhibit a bit more. He didn't really have much to say about the exhibit.
However, he did point out the unique composition of the prints.
There is little or no background to the images, and the focus of the picture is centered right in the foreground. "It makes the message very definite," said Shaw.
The composition of the works also happens to be one of the interests of Vicki Wright, the gallery's director, and the woman who arranged for the Goya exhibit to be brought to UNH.
"He situates you as though you were watching the scene," said Wright regarding Goya's composition of the prints. This focusing of attention makes the viewer witness what Goya witnessed ? the disasters of war.
So, like a 19th- century version of a modern photojournalist, Goya made etchings of the events that he saw during the Peninsular War which was precipitated by Napoleon's invasion of Spain and the replacement of the Spanish King with Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother.
Unlike the images we get from Iraq today, however, said Wright, in which we are spared the most gruesome scenes (Abu Gharib notwithstanding), Goya shows us real horrors of war.
There are a total of 80 prints in "The Disasters of War" collection. The Georgia Museum of Art, from which The Art Gallery is renting the exhibit, only loans half of the total collection. And says Wright, "There are worse ones in the series that [Goya] did."
The Art Gallery didn't get them, however.
Nevertheless, as disturbing as some of the images are, Wright says that the exhibit has been quite popular. It has been visited by classes in art prints, art history, philosophy, Spanish, honors English and even high school classes. Additionally, every Wednesday the gallery hosts an event. March 21 saw Dr. Amanda Wunder, an assistant professor of history at UNH, give a lecture on "Art & War in Goya's Spain," according to the schedule pamphlet on Heineman's desk. And on the 22, Heineman said that a high school class from Oyster River was due to visit.
Wright credits some of the exhibit's success to its timeliness. With the predominance of the situation in Iraq, Wright says that "war is on all of our minds."
But in addition, besides the fact that it is Goya's work that is on exhibit, much of the success is due to Wright's criteria for selecting new exhibits.
"The shows that have been the most successful are the ones that coordinate with the interests of multiple disciplines on campus," said Wright.
In her selection of the Goya exhibit she bore a few things in mind. First of all, she likes the exhibits to be able to support both the goals of the art and the art history sections of the art department. For instance, the art department is devoted to helping its students build a strong foundation in drawing the human form. As such, Wright is interested in art that is more representative of reality than less precise works such as conceptual art.
Another matter to consider is the financial cost.
Excluding staff pay and benefits, the Art Museum only has a $29,000 budget from the university to work with. While they gain a further $15,000 to $19,000 from appeals to membership holders around the region, they can't afford such historic art as that produced by the ancient Greeks.
However, the ancient Greeks and Professor David Kaye, the director of acting and directing at the department of theater and dance, helped inspire Wright to introduce the Goya exhibit. How do ancient Greeks, an acting professor, and an early 19th-century artist have anything to do with each other?
It was Kaye's Greek Trilogy Project that was the catalyst that brought Goya's "The Disasters of War" to UNH. Along with UNH, Plymouth State and Keene State chose their own Greek tragedy, which they performed in rotation around the campuses. The over arching theme of the plays was, like Goya's etchings, the effects of war.
Wright knew about Goya's "The Disasters of War" series.
"So I thought it would be a good tie-in not only with art but with theater and drama in terms of theme," said Wright who collaborated with Kaye, found the exhibit for the right price ($2,000) at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, and set up the exhibit at UNH to follow the Greek Trilogy Project.
Since then, it has been a boom to not only the art and drama departments but, said Wright, "it has been a show that has a broad interest to departments in the College of Liberal Arts."
However, she says it is more difficult to find art exhibits that collaborate with the math and science departments.
Whether a math or English major, anyone interested in seeing the exhibit should see it soon.
It closes April 7.
But be warned, McGrimley had it right when he said, "I remember looking at it and I was like, 'Wow, this is intense."
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