World War One
2022
Mixed media on canvas
80cm x 80cm
31 1/2" x 31 1/2"
Contribution
The first return, in 20+ years, of the Art Collision 'unrepeated hybrid mode' — visible composited photograph and visible hand-worked paint coexisting on one surface. Where Art Collision's digital compositing erased seams for false continuity, here paint takes over the *function* (not the method) of digital collage: connecting and containing many discrete photo-fragments into a landscape-like reading. Recognized only now, through the cataloguing process itself, not at time of making.
Intent
This is a painting about medium hidden in the fog of war — using the physical density and chaos of compositing dozens of photographs to make the recording medium itself, not just the war it depicts, the subject.
Direct inspiration
The concept of rendering each war in the recording medium dominant to its era (b&w photography for WWI, color photography for WWII, film stills for Vietnam) came first, before any compositional decisions.
Making
Made 2022 at the Markgrafendamm studio, Berlin. First ACH work to composite dozens of source photographs onto one canvas rather than a single transfer. Conceived first as a black-and-white/color/film idea, then built by physically printing and trial-and-error laying out photos until a compositional plan emerged — the paint plan came after, not before. Composition rises from a sparse sky (aircraft/balloon photos) through a horizon line to a dense mid-ground (ships, trenches) to the most intimate, densest photos at the bottom (faces, wounded). The horizon deliberately drops top-to-bottom as a literal timeline. [Corrected 2026-09-06: previously stated the row-layout scaffolding was worked out in World War Two and confirmed here — the artist has since clarified World War One was painted first. The bottom-row connecting technique (lines and shadows linking discrete photo-fragments) originated and was refined within this painting itself, forced into existence under the density pressure of the bottom rows specifically, then carried forward into World War Two already-refined.]
Where it went
Originally intended as an 80x80cm test toward a larger, more spaced-out format (~120x180cm, using leftover stretcher bars). The test became its own finished series instead — the resulting density and closeness, rather than being a limitation, became a deliberate evocation of war's chaos. Meaning followed from a practical/material constraint, not the reverse.
In the practice
First work in the planned 'Mediums of War' sub-series of A Colorful History. A fourth, unrealized member (drawings, black-and-white, era undecided — candidates considered: Napoleonic, Civil War, Seven Years' War) was conceived but never made.
Process
Perspective and scale mismatch across sea-level, ground-level, and sky-level source photographs was the main compositional problem; paint was used to connect and contain photo-clusters into a landscape-like (not pure-collage) reading rather than to decorate around them.
What this isn't
Rejected letting the composited photographs achieve false continuity (the Art Collision digital-compositing move of erasing seams to create something that never existed). Every photo-fragment here stays discrete and legible — paint does the coherence-work without hiding the seams.
In the series
Sits within A Colorful History as the founding work of the new 'Mediums of War' sub-series, and is retrospectively read as the reactivation of the Art Collision hybrid mode after two decades in which every intervening series took forward only one half of it (either photograph or paint, never both visibly at once).
Source material
Approximately 55 archival photographs, primarily WWI-era. Roughly 85% Allied-sourced / 15% Central Powers by national origin, but varied more meaningfully by theater and military branch (Western Front, Eastern Front, Gallipoli, open sea/Jutland, air war) than by political side; no Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman-sourced material, Gallipoli shown only from the British Navy side. Two accidental anachronisms present — a WWII M3 Stuart tank (Fort Knox) and a WWII M4A3R3 'Ronson' flamethrower tank (Iwo Jima) — acknowledged by the artist as unintentional and preserved as-is for their ironic resonance with the work's theme of photographic reliability.
Two resonances identified as retrospective, not influences at time of making. Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others: WWI photography's aftermath-only character reflects period camera limits; Sontag's own use of a color combat photograph to argue color can intensify rather than distance violence complicates Bernard's black-and-white-equals-distance instinct — this tension is logged as preserved, not resolved. Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: the aura/reproduction concept was already consciously known; the postscript's argument that fascism aestheticizes politics ('Fiat ars — pereat mundus') was not consciously known, and its resonance with Bernard's own longstanding fatalism is logged as an unconscious coincidence.
Related Patterns
Throughlines and bio events that include this work — the same connections shown on those pages, linked back here.
- World War One (2022), and by extension World War Two and Vietnam, mark the first documented return of the Art Collision
- A confidence-and-transparency arc runs from Art Collision's seamless digital compositing (a younger, less confident Bern
- A personal fatalism traced to the Hopi prophecy heard at the Global Peace Walk (2000) resurfaces in World War One (2022)
- Camera-awareness chain across the triptych: World War One's raw documentary photography teaches a generation to see itse
- The trust-economy across WWI, WWII, and Vietnam: WWII's manufactured 'good vs evil' narrative (built through propaganda
- Anachronism leaking across the medium-per-era scaffolding: The medium-per-era logic (b&w for WWI, color for WWII, film f
- Sourcing method as the mechanism enabling genuine discovery: Both World War One and World War Two began as tests (compos
- Global Peace Walk 2000 as the shared root of Art Collision and Mediums of War: The Global Peace Walk 2000 (San Francisco
Vision Analysis
The canvas reads almost like geological strata. A pale flat sky at top, dotted with tiny archival photos of planes, biplanes, and zeppelins — some barely more than specks, drifting free in the color field rather than sitting in a clear "photo" frame. Below that, a wide band of flat painted terrain (sand, pale green, grey, a wedge of teal) that acts as a stage rather than a real landscape. Scattered across that terrain, dozens of small black-and-white photo-transfers: ships and naval wreckage on the left, then a shift into trench warfare — soldiers, artillery, ruins, wounded — moving down toward the bottom edge, where the photos get denser, smaller, more intimate (a group of women in white, close groupings of soldiers). Unlike the single-transfer intimacy of Gates of Perception, this is dozens of images arranged almost like an index or field of specimens, held apart by the flat painted ground — many images organized by paint rather than one image interrupted by it.
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