Beloit College Magazine
Beloit College Magazine
Fall 2000 Contents
Departments
Features
- Underwater Archaeology
- Hearing the Meanings of Words
- Kerouac for Grown-Ups
- A Race to the Starting Line
- "Don't rain! Don't rain!"
- Taking Theatre to the Streets
- Beloit in Africa
- A Paintbrush at the Front
- Saving the Turtles
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— Mara Naselli
Frank Boggs has always been an artistic explorer. He has worked in different media—concrete, printmaking, plastic molds, metals, glass, paint, and mosaic, and is an artist who will try anything. When he taught at Beloit from 1945 to 1977, he encouraged his students and colleagues toward similar experimentation.
At the opening Art League of Beloit event this autumn, Prof. Boggs shared an important,
perhaps less known chapter of his artistic life—the years just before coming to Beloit,
spent as a war correspondent for Abbott Laboratories covering the U.S.Medical Corps during
World War II. Artists were sent to cover the war with their paintbrushes and sketchbooks.
Their work, often done on the front lines, was used to offer Americans images of servicemen
in the field before the general availability of color photography.
They Drew Fire, an hour-long documentary film first seen this summer on Public Television, was shown at the opening of the evening honoring Prof. Boggs. The artists in the film presented personal testimonies of horror and chance that made the war real. And for those who lived through the war, it affirmed an experience that is impossible to forget.
In 1939 Boggs first experienced the war when he was studying in Innsbruck, Austria. The Germans were invading Poland and Boggs was told all hell was going to break loose. In Paris, Boggs and his friends learned that Holland, their point for departure for the U.S., had closed its borders, and Paris would be bombed. Paris roads filled with cars with mattresses and baby buggies on top as people rushed to leave the city. Boggs spent four hours in a rail station as passenger cars and boxcars transported people out. He made his way out of Paris in a boxcar and returned home before heading overseas again, this time as a war artist.
When asked how he became a war artist, Boggs quipped, "Kind of by luck." He was working for
the Tennessee Valley Authority under another artist who was determined to become a war
correspondent. His colleague was assigned by the Association of American Artists (AAA) to
North Africa and recommended Boggs for a Medical Corps assignment co-sponsored by Abbott
Laboratories. Boggs sent the AAA recruiters a photograph of an award-winning mural and
another of a painting of farmers observing a trailer thrasher ". . . and well, that
did it." After fleeing Paris, Boggs wanted to avoid Europe and requested an assignment to
China-Burma. Instead he was sent to the South Pacific and began covering the hospitals and
gradually worked his way to the front lines.
As a war artist, Boggs said he studied his subjects in the same way he studied the scenes of pigs, roosters, chickens, rabbits, corn husking contests, and his mother canning beets and peaches on his family farm in Indiana. Verne Shaffer’50, his former student, teaching colleague and on-stage interviewer during the Art League tribute, remembered Boggs’ father recalling how his son noticed the shapes and light in the trees on the farm.
In the battlefields and hospitals during the war, Boggs studied the shapes the blood made on the bandages. He produced about 25 paintings, many of which were seen in the PBS special and in the accompanying book of the same name. They are now the property of the U.S. government.
None of those paintings was actually produced in the field. Rather, they were created stateside from sketches and photographs, and from Boggs’ exceptional visual memory.
Faculty email: Frank Boggs - professor emeritus, art