Wittgenstein the Soldier
This is the first of the three prints in the suite
which refer to Wittgenstein’s biography.
Diane Kirkpatrick’ describes it well:
‘Wittgenstein the Soldier’ bears a text which describes part of
Wittgenstein’s service in the Austrian army during the First World War. The
composition has four small silhouette soldiers and one huge cloudy ‘soldier’ at
the left whose rucksack would identify him as Wittgenstein, complete with
unseen manuscript of the ‘Tractatus’.
The poetic blend of sharp and hazy imagery in the finished print is due
to the unique collage technique Paolozzi employed for this one work. He pasted
one layer of images (which are soft in the final print) on to the main support.
Over this he fastened a sheet of tracing paper on which he created the patterns
which remain crisply in focus in the print'.
I am unsure of its veracity, but this notion that
Wittgenstein had the draft of the Tractatus
with him ‘in the trenches’ is certainly an intriguing one – the contrast
between highly innovative philosophical thinking and the blood-and-guts of
warfare is salutary. Perhaps the
inclusion of the image of a butterfly – a delicate creature alongside the visual
military cues - is an allusion to this incongruity.
In 1913/14 Wittgenstein was in Norway where he
wrote, Logik, this being the basis
for much of the Tractatus. The Tractatus,
the only work published (1921) in his lifetime, concerned Wittgenstein’s
concept of language as depicting the world in one-to-one pictures of fact. His other major work, Philosophical Investigations, overturned some of the precepts of
the Tractatus and focused on the
theory of language games.
Wittgenstein volunteered to join the
Austro-Hungarian Army as soon as war was declared. It was a distinguished service – fighting on
the Russian and Italian fronts, winning several medals, commendations and
promotion to the rank of lieutenant.
As previously noted, Paolozzi used components from Tortured Life to construct the images of
the soldiers.
This is the collage:
And this, the print:
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