«Is Peace any less of an emergency?»

William Condgon and the American Field Service in Molise (1943/1946)

Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Campobasso (Museo Sannitico)
Museo Nazionale di Castello Pandone, Venafro
Castello di Civitacampomarano

21 June-24 October 2024

An exhibition by Ministero della Cultura –– Parco Archeologico di Sepino e Museo Sannitico di Campobasso - Direzione Regionale Musei Molise with The William G. Congdon Foundation and Fondazione Intercultura ets

On the 80th anniversary of the historic battle of Montecassino, an exhibition organized in three museums in the Molise region retraces the tragic events that affected the people of Molise between the autumn of 1943 and the spring of 1944 through the writings and works of William Congdon, an artist of the New York School in the immediate post-war period. In that period, the Allied armies faced the Nazi troops for many months on the so-called Gustav Line, a system of fortifications along the Sangro river up to the mighty stronghold of Montecassino. The exhibition also brings to light a series of still unknown chapters in these well-known events. Initially, it tells of the presence of the American Field Service volunteer ambulance drivers and their commitment to the civilian population in a spirit totally alien to the logic of war, described by Congdon in his letters and in his memoir In the Death of One (the source of the quote in the title of the exhibition) and in the drawings made on site, deeply empathetic with the suffering of the local population. Then, the exhibition also recounts Congdon’s collaboration – together with his platoon companion John Harkness, a renowned architect – still in the midst of the war, in the drafting of an urban plan for the reconstruction of the city of Isernia, which had been partially destroyed by the bombings. The exhibition goes on to tell of the relationship with the Poles of the 2nd Army Corps with whom Congdon shared the bloody final assault on Cassino in May 1944. Finally, it documents Congdon’s return to Molise in 1946, together with a Quaker mission, for the reconstruction of the towns and villages destroyed by the war, ahead of the Marshall Plan and UNRRA’s intervention.

Approximately thirty oil paintings, chosen from all periods of his long creative journey and displayed in the Castello Pandone in Venafro, crown the historical part of the exhibition with images documenting the persistence of the wounds of war in Congdon’s painting itself. In Civitacampomarano, a small exhibition of pastel drawings presents, with a brighter and more relaxed note, a further aspect of the work of this still little-known post-World War II master.