laststandonzombieisland

Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sunday, I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors and the like that produce them.

Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of Joseph Hirsch

Philadelphia-born Joseph Hirsch began serious art study in 1927 while just a teenager at the Philadelphia Museum. Traveling extensively in the late 1920s and 30s, he emerged as a serious painter in the Social Realism School, studying both in France and under both Henry Hensche in Provincetown and George Luks. When the Depression hit everyone, Hirsch, then a young man in his SC, signed up with the Public Works of Art Project and then the WPA during the New Deal and worked both easel painting and murals. During this period he traveled the country making murals at union halls on both coasts, as well as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and several Philadelphia public buildings including the Municipal Court, which today remains as the home of the Family Court:

He was well received. In 1934, when Joseph Hirsch was only 23, he won the coveted Walter Lippincott Award then went on to grab the First Prize at the New York World’s Fair (1939), and two back to back Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. Interestingly across his 50-year career, he worked in inks, pencils, watercolors, oils, etchings and other forms, mastering all he touched.

When WWII came, he signed up to be a pictorial war correspondent for the U.S. Navy. He worked with noted military artist and LSOZI Combat Gallery Alumni Georges Schreiber at Pensacola Naval Air Station in 1943, documenting the cradle of Naval Aviation.

Following this stateside work, he went overseas and saw the elephant. During this period, Hirsch made about 75 paintings and drawings between 1943 and 1944 in the South Pacific at the direction of Adm. Ross McIntyre, Surgeon General of the Navy, to document the efforts of Navy medicine, then was loaned to the Army to cover firsthand the GI’s medical efforts in Africa, and Italy.

Of his war experience, he later said :

It was hard and unforgettable and lonely and sometimes frustrating running into the real McCoy. You know, talking with — I saw soldiers in more hospitals — I had been in many hospitals in Philadelphia as my father was a doctor. The three trips I went on had to do with naval air training at Pensacola, Florida; then naval medicine in the Pacific; and army medicine in Italy and North Africa. I was of course moved most by the two medical assignments because I saw wounded kids. It was a very good experience. And the drawings that I did — I did about twenty-five pictures on each assignment, most of them done from sketches made on the spot. I didn’t have any camera with me. Not having a camera simplified everything because there was no censorship.

The majority of the work was done immediately upon my return. I’d go out for a couple of months and come back and spend another three or four months doing perhaps a dozen paintings and as many drawings both for the aviation series and the naval medicine and the Army medical. The Navy had never had any shore-based installations before World War II and they were very proud of whatever they had. I also visited a hospital ship. I suppose the most vivid experiences were down in Guadalcanal with the Marine Corps. I watched a hospital set up from landing until it was in operative condition in less than three hours from landing on the beach and set up in eight tents the entire thing with portable X-ray — everything within the space of three hours. It was a rehearsal landing with L.S.T.’s and dispersed units so that any aerial attack would not destroy the hospital. They were dispersed under the palm trees. This was on one of the beaches at Guadalcanal. To see the kind of organized spirit of cooperation was — I don’t know what the Navy’s Medical Corps is like now but at that time during the war to see a lot of wonderful improvisation made for material for good sketching and painting and drawing.

What he saw in war reinforced his feelings on the horror of conflict. In 1979, he protested to a magazine that had used one of his wartime hospital paintings to illustrate an article justifying the use of the atomic bomb.

After the war, he returned to Europe to study on a Fulbright Fellowship, and then returned to Government service by producing art for the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s and 70s.

Hirsch passed away of cancer at his home in Manhattan in 1981 at age 71.

According to the US Navy’s Historical Command, there are no less than 32 works of Joseph Hirsch in the Navy Art Collection and all of them are online.

Works of Joseph Hirsch are also in the permanent collections of these institutions:

Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA
Butler Institute of Fine Art, Youngstown OH
Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas TX
Library of Congress, Washington DC
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA
Truman Library, Independence MO
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Army Center of Military History, Washington DC

An oral history interview with the artist recorded in 1970 is online at the Archives of American Art

Thank you for your work, sir.