September 13, 1918, St. Mihiel

Kerr Eby, artist

1889–1946

September 13, 1918, St. Mihiel, 1934

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: laid paper; etching; sandpaper ground; aquatint

Dimensions:
Plate Mark/Block Dimensions (Height x Width): 264 x 407 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 331 x 479 mm
Plate Mark/Block Dimensions (Height x Width): 10 3/8 x 16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 13 1/16 x 18 7/8 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 17 3/8 x 22 3/4 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund

Accession number: 2003.0015

Not on display

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Label texts

Exhibition Label:
"Conversation XVIII: World War I," Jan-2014, Stephen Goddard
Eby enlisted in the Army in June, 1917. He was stationed in France, where he first served with the ambulance corps, and then with a camouflage division. After the war he expressed his pacifist views in a book titled War.

Exhibition Label:
"Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard
Kerr Eby enlisted in the Army in June, 1917. He was stationed in France where he first served with the ambulance corps, and then with a camouflage division. He sketched extensively, and when back in the U.S. in 1919, he reworked his drawings as etchings, drypoints, mezzotints, and lithographs. Like many of his European counterparts, Eby was optimistic about the War at the outset, but this enthusiasm was quickly tempered by the tragic realities of protracted trench warfare.

The Battle of Saint-Mihiel, which took place from September 12-15, 1918, involved French and U.S. forces under U.S. command. Eby first made a print of this subject in 1919, on a smaller scale and as a mezzotint. The much larger etching of 1934 is Eby's acknowledged masterpiece. According to a 1939 article in Print Collectors Quarterly, "In the Saint-Mihiel
Drive, the great cloud hung for days over the advancing troops, the Germans called it the Cloud of Blood."

With the exception of a few tonal passages, the massive black cloud is etched entirely in finely drawn cross-hatching. This near-obsessive, repetitive, and time-consuming approach leaves open the possibility that this print was a meditative coming-to-terms with the artist's wartime experiences. The year after this print was made, Eby wrote a short antiwar essay for the catalogue of an exhibition of his World War I works, titled simply, War. In this essay Eby wrote:

Maybe there is not one thing that can prevent another war but I do know that if everyone who has any feeling in the matter at all said what he felt in no uncertain terms-and kept saying it-the sheer power of public opinion would go far to make war impossible.