Great war paintings, like great war novels, are not always produced by eyewitnesses of war. Art critics agree that some of World War II’s finest paintings have been produced by a genial, fierce-looking Spaniard named Julio de Diego, who spent the war painting in a New York studio. Julio de Diego hates war and paints it with fiery Spanish ardor. He also paints it with a technical precision and a subtle feeling for color that might be envied by many of his contemporaries.
Julio de Diego’s pictorial war is not realistic. A product of his own feverish imagination, they establish de Diego as a leader in the U.S. art in a trend away from factual scene paintings. De Diego’s scenes suggest those of some weird, macabre ballet in which machinelike humans and human-looking machines fight relentlessly in front of fantastic architectural props and backdrops. His soldiers and statesmen are as impersonal as purposeful insects, their human qualities obliterated in a hopeless atmosphere of regimentation and mechanization. An incredibly rapid worker, de Diego turned out 45 paintings on war in the short space of three months, followed them with 40 cynical pictures about peace. Selections from these painting are now on exhibit at New York’s Nierendorf Gallery.
Blueprint of the Future is De Diego’s abstract interpretation of diplomats and statesmen working on elaborate blueprints to rebuild a war-ravaged world. Hands in gold-braided sleeves symbolize council statesmen. The green monsters behind them are sinister forces which are selfishly influencing the peacemakers.
In 1951 Lester Burbank Bridaham wrote a piece for the April issue of Art in America on Julio De Diego. In it Bridaham discusses the artist's various processes, as well as his deep aversion to war.