Editor’s Note: Focus In/On is a new program of the Hillstrom Museum of Art in which the expertise of College community members across the curriculum is engaged for a collaborative, indepth consideration of particular individual objects from the Hillstrom Collection. What follows is an abridgement of an essay centering on the Museum’s recently acquired lithograph Where Do We Go? For the full text of the essay, please visit the Hillstrom Museum pages on the College’s website.
n 1936, concerned about the unstable world situation that would soon lead to World War II, artist and printmaker Kerr Eby (1889–1946) published his book War (Yale University Press, New Haven), which illustrated 28 prints and drawings he’d made from his experience in World War I and included an essay outlining his abhorrence of war and his opinion of its futility and barbarity. The lithograph Where Do We Go? was one of the images in the book, which was dedicated “to those who gave their lives for an idea, the men who never came back.” Eby’s essay, according to its opening lines, was written “in all humility of spirit, in the desperate hope that somehow it may be of use in the forlorn and seemingly hopeless
fight against war.” Eby, who was assigned to the 40th Engineers, Artillery Brigade, Camouflage Division when the United States entered World War I in 1917 and saw much battle action, especially in northeastern France, noted that the images in the book were made from his own “indelible impressions of war,” and were “not imaginary.” He stated further that the “world today [in 1936] is a more savage place than the world of 1914,” and despaired that war was heating up yet again. He ended his essay with a special appeal to women, mothers particularly, exhorting them to act and speak up for the protection of the men who would have to fight the impending battles. Eby’s purpose in writing the essay and in publishing his works was not fulfilled, of course, and World War II was not prevent-
Winter 2005–2006
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