Recently got a book about Maya Lin, the artist who designed the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. I have been there several times, and it is a powerful tribute to the nearly 60,000 U.S. deaths during the war; of course more than 200,000 Vietnamese were also estimated to have died in the conflict. To me it is an interesting combination of the abstract, as it is basically two long granite walls forming a “V” shape, and the specific because it is filled with the names of fallen U.S. service people.
Lin’s memorial is on the north side of the Mall adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial and across the reflecting pool from the Korean War Memorial. The latter memorial is an interesting contrast to the Vietnam War one because it contains a group of realistic, slightly-larger-than-life-style statues of U.S. soldiers from the Korean War marching in one direction through inclement weather. The sharply differing artistic styles of the two war memorials may reflect the difference in historical attitudes to the two conflicts: while both cost many lives and vast damage, most people consider the Korean War to have been a victory for the U.S. and South Korea, while almost everyone acknowledges the Vietnam War was one of the worst military/political failures in U.S. history.
The two monuments bring to mind Wilhelm Worringer’s 1907 classic on art history Abstraction and Empathy, in which the German art historian posits that the abstract in art reflects a turn toward the spiritual in times of crisis, while the mimetic or realistic style is indicative of more confident and calmer times when empathy is preferred. He argues neither is superior, only a sign of their times. To me, the Vietnam War Memorial seems like a largely abstract reflection of U.S. regret about that conflict, while the Korean War Memorial is a more realistic/empathetic monument to a conflict many people are actually proud of.