Since embracing Tyvek, Cvijanovic has painted vast and ambitious subject matter at a commensurate scale: a delirious tableau of a floating, discombobulated Los Angeles; a towering recreation of the Babylonian set for D. W. Griffith’s 1916 epic “Intolerance.” For the Bean Center, Cvijanovic set out to paint seventeen American battlefields, from the colonial era to the present, on nearly seven thousand square feet of Tyvek. This is a colossal task—laid end to end, the paintings are about as long as the Chrysler Building is tall—but Cvijanovic learned to paint fast during his years in the work-for-hire wilderness. He started his first mural in January, 2021, and finished the rest in just under two years. (Eight more are awaiting funding, which depends on congressional approval.) Although the completed images represent only a fraction of America’s military engagements, they include at least one from every meaningful confrontation: from an idyllic view of the Concord River, where “the shot heard round the world” began the American Revolution, to cirrus-streaked satellite imagery of the Spratly Islands, in the South China Sea, around which the U.S. and China are currently engaged in carefully choreographed displays of power.
Surprisingly, each battlefield is devoid of both humans and their traces, with the exception, in one painting, of the outlines of German farm fields, seen from above. (The battlefield, in this case, is the sky over Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories in 1943, when a bombing raid resulted in the loss of nearly six hundred American air crew members in a single day. “A catastrophic mistake,” Cvijanovic told me.) Whether heroizing military commanders or chronicling misery, most war painting is focussed on people. “Usually, if someone commissions a battlefield painting, they want to see the soldiers, they want to see the action,” Cvijanovic said. By removing that drama, he hoped the landscape might evoke a more abstract but also more encompassing emotional response.
At first glance, the result risks simply aestheticizing U.S. military history. The paintings are unnervingly picturesque: brilliant poppies against the violet-blue of a French afternoon, translucent ice floes glistening in the aquamarine waters of the Arctic, backlit palm trees in the eerie orange phosphorescence of a desert storm. If you didn’t know that these were the sites of enormous violence, you would think they were simply a gazetteer of some of Earth’s most majestic landscapes. “There’s no modernist shenanigans going on,” Cvijanovic said. “You’re getting a real nineteenth-century, Hudson River School view of things.”
Cvijanovic is a busy, obsessive presence in his studio. As he unrolled and pinned up sections from Omaha Beach—a foamy, green-gray English Channel, as if seen from the prow of a craft surging toward the shore—I realized that, although the landscapes seem unpopulated, they often imply a participant’s perspective. The angle at which I was admiring the movement of the waves was the viewpoint of a drenched infantryman wading into the waters under enemy fire—the “Saving Private Ryan” experience. In Picardy, the poppies fill the frame, looming above the viewer, as if seen by a soldier in a trench.
In one of Cvijanovic’s most striking works, his painting of Iwo Jima, the foggy peak of Mt. Suribachi—the site of the triumphant flag-raising that became one of the most iconic images of the Second World War—is visible at the left edge of the scene. But, as the image stretches right, a black-sand beach looms closer and closer in the foreground. It’s as though we’re face down in the pebbles—wounded, perhaps, or maybe simply prone, rifle in hand, taking aim. When I visited him, Cvijanovic was still finishing up some rocks, using a combination of Flashe, an expensive French paint, and white house paint for the highlights. He said the detail was based on a photo he’d found online, taken by a former marine, who had gone to Iwo Jima and knelt on the beach. Suddenly, the emerald-green sea, serene morning light, and jewel-like pebbles seemed full of tension. “It’s this very beautiful landscape, and it’s also a depiction of a certain position in a battle site,” Cvijanovic said. “So it depends on how you want to read it.” In the Schweinfurt scene, puffy clouds over the countryside seem picture-perfect; they’re also, if you know what you’re looking at, hiding German fighter planes. Everywhere, these gorgeous backdrops vibrate with invisible menace.
“April 19, 1775, Concord River, Province of Massachusetts Bay, British North America.”Art work by Adam Cvijanovic; Photograph by Al Ensley
Early in his career, Cvijanovic had the opportunity to spend nearly a year in Italy, living in a house just outside Rome and visiting villas, palazzos, and cathedrals. “One of the most beautiful things about all the frescoes is the way that people can just be hanging out, having their little lives, and there’s this grand backdrop behind them of the entire Bible,” Cvijanovic said. In the city of Viterbo, for example, birth registrations, marriage licenses, citizenship applications, and building permits are all filed in the shadow of frescoes depicting local history, mythology, and miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary. “It’s just there, behind you, and you go on with your life, and yet it’s completely different,” Cvijanovic went on. “I was, like, I want to do that in America.”
Cvijanovic installed the seventeen completed paintings in December, 2022. Glued to the walls under bleak office lighting, the Tyvek pops, as if illuminated from within. The paintings are set into the frame of a slight bevel, turning them into dioramas, or a series of windows. Meanwhile, the humdrum rhythms of the corridors—carts shuttling paperwork from one department to another, administrators walking back and forth between their desks and the elevators—are endowed with a new significance. For the roughly six hundred people working in the Bean Center, the accounting of American conflict now occurs quite literally amid the landscape upon which it unfolds.
Cvijanovic’s embrace of ambiguity doesn’t mean that he rejects narrative logic. On the building’s ground floor, the battlefields are in the continental U.S.: Concord, in springtime; Gettysburg, in July; the autumnal battle of Prophetstown, which was fought against a Native confederation led by the Shawnee hero Tecumseh; and the peach-blue snowscape of Jockey Hollow, the hardest winter in the Revolutionary War. So far, so successful—the young U.S. triumphant in every season, if at great cost. The second floor moves to America’s imperial era, with a series of either strategic or straightforward defeats: scenes from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. One hallway is dominated by barren, snow-covered mountains that were the backdrop for the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, during the Korean War. For nearly three weeks, the U.S. was overwhelmed by more than a hundred thousand Chinese soldiers streaming into North Korea, leading to what one historian called “the greatest evacuation movement by sea in U.S. military history.”
Finally, on the third floor, the scenes become abstract, even extraplanetary. The Gulf War is represented by a starry sky; the conflict marked the début of G.P.S.-guided missiles. Greenland’s glaciated landscapes are the site of the Cold War, both figuratively and as home to the Distant Early Warning Line, a network of radar stations meant to detect an inbound Soviet attack. The American battlefield, Cvijanovic seems to imply, is everywhere, and elemental.
For Cvijanovic’s final eight paintings, which still require funding, he plans to include battlefields in Canada, Italy, Libya, and Cuba. After that, his work on the Bean Center’s walls will be complete. “That’s where it becomes this weird kind of interactive piece,” he told me. “It changes the people standing in front of it, and vice versa.” Cvijanovic has heard from veterans in the building that the Afghan and Iraqi landscapes, in particular, have spurred profound, sometimes unsettling encounters. But his favorite compliment came while he was installing his first battlefield, a golden-purple desert scene from the Apache Wars. “Some lady who works there was walking down the hallway FaceTiming her friend,” Cvijanovic said. “She starts looking at the painting, and she says, ‘Hey, we don’t have to kill ourselves—this place isn’t going to look like an asylum anymore!’ ”
