Infantry Passing a House, France

Artist

Raphael Gleitsmann (American, 1910 – 1995)

Date

Ca. 1944

Medium

graphite on paper

Dimensions

Image : 7 3/4 x 11 in. (19.68 x 27.94 cm)
Sheet : 9 1/2 x 12 1/4 in. (24.13 x 31.12 cm)

Credit Line

Hope College Collection

Object Number

2017.81.1

Label

Ohio artist Raphael Gleitsmann served as a US Army combat engineer in Europe during the final two years of World War Two. As his unit fought its way across Italy, France and Germany, Gleitsmann filled several notebooks with drawings of battlefields, destroyed buildings and other scenes of devastation. After the war, Gleitsmann used those drawings to create dark, brooding paintings that won national acclaim in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This image of US soldiers passing a ruined house in France in 1944 may be one of his wartime drawings, or it may be a post-war studio creation based on a wartime drawing.