The Marine Corps Combat Art Program

Basquiat, Richter, Tuymans, US Marines? This is great:

Many of the paintings explore the Marine experience from a disarmingly humanistic perspective: a boy perching in a leafy tree near Carrefour, Haiti, where Sergeant Battles deployed last February to cover humanitarian relief efforts; Marines snoozing by piles of body armor in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2009. A painting from his 2007 Iraq tour presents a half-smiling woman carrying a toddler, a luminous, enigmatic image that brings the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans to mind. “We’re not here to do poster art or recruiting posters,” Sergeant Battles, 42, said. “What we are sent to do is to go to the experience, see what is really there and document it — as artists.”

Read the NY Times story here. You can also view their slide-show here.

Tags: art education, Art Law, military art