John Wilde - Wartime Journal

Wartime Journal

Wilde received his bachelor of science degree in 1942 and was drafted into the US Army shortly thereafter. He served with the Infantry Air Force and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). As an artist he was assigned to produce drawings for the army venereal disease program and maps and terrain models for intelligence. During this time he kept a private journal that he filled with self-portraits, fantastic and macabre scenes and written reflections on the Army, an institution he despised for its regimentation and bureaucracy. In the journal’s pictures and words, Wilde also documented his increasing feeling of hopelessness as his term of service stretched into years. In spite of his deepening depression, Wilde saw broader artistic possibilities in some of his journal sketches, working them up into larger drawings that he mailed to Dudley Huppler in Wisconsin. According to art historian Robert Cozzolino, in his later career Wilde returned "dozens of times" to the unsettling themes and situations that he first explored in his wartime journal. Upon discharge from the Army in 1946, Wilde returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he studied art history, graduating with a Master of Science from the School of Education. His thesis was ostensibly about the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, but Wilde later admitted that the thesis was also a statement of protest against Abstract Expressionism.