Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1
Editor's Note: William Linzee Prescott already knew a lot about war when he went to Vietnam. Born in 1917 and the descendant of the Colonel Prescott, who had told his men to hold their fire until they saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes on Bunker Hill, he studied art at Chouinard in Los Angeles, joined the Army at the outbreak of World War II, and jumped into Normandy with the 82d Airborne. Captured and held for ten months before he escaped, Prescott documented his POW days in brisk sketches and the Normandy invasion with a mural at West Point.
In 1967, he was sent to Vietnam as the first civilian painter with the Army Combat Artist Program. At the time of his death in 1981, he was planning a book of his Vietnam drawings; but work had not gone far, and Morley Safer, a correspondent who also put in time in Vietnam and who recently wrote a fine book about it, has expanded on the hastily penciled identifications the artist left behind on his watercolors. Safer believes that Prescott’s vibrant paintings show that war with an urgency and an intimacy that the camera often misses.
The artist at war is a unique character. Unlike the correspondent, he has no artificial deadline imposed by editors—only the much harsher deadline of movement to be captured, complicated by that dreadful monster that people politely call the muse. Unlike war photographers, he has no technical help, no motor drive to catch images almost faster than they occur; his equipment has not changed much since early man. And yet the artist in war, like the artist anywhere, is forever on the edge of something new. What he sees is only part of it; the agility of hand is only part of it. The main thing is what the muse, the monster in his head, makes happen. When it doesn’t happen, it is just so much paint on paper. These next few pages are anything but that.
I did not know Linzee Prescott. I wish I had. If a man’s paintings are an exposure of character, then Prescott would clearly be the kind of man any correspondent would want to share a few glasses with. For the truth of war is that, as tragic as the whole awful panorama may be, it is also very funny. And Vietnam was more absurd than most, with its combination of imperial arrogance, boyish innocence, its whoring and dying in the span of a day, and all without any purpose anyone could rationally explain. Prescott captures it all in a few bold strokes.
Vietnam Rhapsody is a rush of images that has haunted me since the day I first saw Prescott’s portfolio: the garish and sacred, the profane and the deadly. I can smell the rot and scratch the imaginary bug bites, hear the din of Saigon traffic drowned out by the whap-whap of the Hueys. To anyone who was there,