War & Peace Quote by Gerald Scarfe

War artists are supposed to bring back clarity; Gerald Scarfe brings back discomfort. The line is almost aggressively plain, a working professional describing his job with the flatness of someone who has seen too much to romanticize it. "I have been to several wars to draw" lands like a résumé item, and that’s the point: it punctures the myth of the artist as a lofty commentator. He’s there on assignment, to look, to record, to translate violence into marks on paper.

Then comes the turn: Vietnam, named with the heavy cultural freight of a war that detonated faith in official narratives. Scarfe’s repetition, "very very sad", feels childlike, even inadequate, and that inadequacy is the subtext. No clever metaphor, no political thesis-just grief that language can’t dress up. In a media ecosystem that sold Vietnam through body counts, briefings, and televised spectacle, the modesty of "sad" is quietly accusatory. It suggests that the horror is not only what happened, but how easily it gets processed into story, strategy, or patriotic abstraction.

Context matters because Scarfe is a caricaturist by trade-a master of exaggeration, distortion, the surgical punchline. Here, he refuses the comedian’s escape hatch. By emphasizing that he drew "during that period", he signals a firsthand, contemporaneous witnessing: not hindsight, not mythmaking, but presence. The intent is almost ethical: to insist that the act of looking carries a cost, and that the artist, like everyone else, can only render a fraction of what war does to human beings.