Madonna of the Napalm 1967

| Martin Sharp Archive |

The first issue of London OZ magazine, published in late January / early February 1967, featured a fold out poster entitled Madonna of the Napalm, lambasting the role of United States, South Vietnam and Australian politicians in the wanton bombing of that country as part of an horrific and needless war in which thousands of innocent civilians were killed and injured.

Martin Sharp, Madonna of the Napalm, OZ, London, #1, February 1967.

The artist of this scathing political caricature was Australian Martin Sharp (1942-2013), co-editor with Richard Neville (1941-2016) of OZ magazine. The poster comprised a detailed pen sketch of American President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) - also known as LBJ - and a number of political figures associated with the Vietnam war. These included the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt (1908-1967) and the Prime Minister of South Vietnam, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ (1930-2011). The latter was the former head of the Republic of Vietnam military who took power in a United States backed junta during 1965. Holt is portrayed by Sharp as a dopey-eyed kangaroo in a vignette on the top left corner of the image, whilst Kỳ is shown as a faux babe-in-arms - an Adolf Hitler mini-me - clad in Nazi regalia and held in the arms and skeletal hands of a Grim Reaper - the dour, long-faced and robed LBJ, The latter is smiling a wicked smile, and wears a crown of bayoneted rifles in Byzantine Madonna like pose. Behind him is a chorus of skeletal angels, whilst the top right vignette features an American bomber dropping its napalm loaded cargo over Vietnam onto a largely innocent population below. On the lower left of the image is a profile portrait of American Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, smiling Joseph Goebbels-like beneath an array of bombs, whilst on the right we see two big-nosed generals with protruding canons above them. The offset lithographic poster was printed in black with brownish highlights. It also served as a calendar for the month of February 1967, with day, month and year dates printed within the bottom section. Overall, it is a brutal critique of the role played by politicians in initiating and manipulating war. It resonates to this day, both due to the historic references, but also standing alone as an image of corrupt, evil and, in some instances buffoon individuals. Mark Vallens for example, in a 2010 Art for Change blog entry, comments as follows on the content of a variant of Sharp's poster, in the context of the then current American forces action in Afghanistan at the instigation of the President Obama regime:

Sharp’s poster was created in 1967, and it is a good example of how the alternative culture of the 60s meshed with the antiwar activism of the period. However, an evaluation of the poster brings up unavoidable questions regarding the present day U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. Sharp’s Madonna of the Napalm is a biting condemnation, not just of military conflict, but of third world dictators, the compromised political leaders of Western democracies, religious piety distorted by fanaticism, and the overall decrepitude of “liberal” society rendered insane by imperialist war. We have not seen the likes of this poster since the late 1960s, but given the painful similarity between [President] Obama’s Afghan catastrophe and Johnson’s Vietnam disaster, we ought to see such posters proliferate in the near future.

To start with, Sharp’s poster is a gem when it comes to psychedelia. His acerbic but fanciful caricatures were drawn with detailed though fluid pen lines, and when combined with vibrant fluorescent orange and black ink, an eye-popping visual was achieved. Moreover, Sharp’s semi-Gothic, neo-Art Nouveau style was the very epitome of psychedelic aesthetics. One can only imagine the excitement his poster generated when viewed under the “black light” displays that were so popular during the sixties. But this was not simply another day-glo poster from the Aquarian Age, it was an angry political diatribe against the centers of power and fully intended to help incapacitate the war machine. Sharp’s Madonna of the Napalm represents a sub-genre rarely mentioned in modern-day coffee-table books dealing with psychedelic prints from the sixties - that of the political protest poster.

The central character in the poster is a depiction of President Johnson as an ancient Byzantine Madonna figure, but there is nothing sacred about this icon, who wears an imposing radiating nimbus made from rifles. Floating in the heavens behind this demonic sham Madonna are skull-faced, black-winged angels of death. The unholy mother of war clutches a mortar shell in one claw, and a deformed puppet general in the other. The general, with a glowing halo made from the U.S. flag, is none other than the U.S. backed Nguyen Cao Kỳ, who served as Prime Minister of South Vietnam from 1965 to 1967, and then served as the Vice President until he retired in 1971. Kỳ originally received military training from the French army, who founded the Vietnamese National Army (VNA) to help assist in their colonial control of “French Indochina.” Kỳ served the French well, but in 1954 when they finally departed Vietnam in military defeat, the VNA was reorganized into the American supplied and controlled “Army of the Republic of Vietnam” (ARVN).

The background of Sharp’s Madonna of the Napalm presents some interesting character studies. At bottom left one can see Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and LBJ, and a primary architect of the U.S. war on Vietnam. Starting out with the firm belief that the U.S. could win the war militarily, by May 1967 McNamara informed LBJ that the war was “becoming increasingly unpopular as it escalates - causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North.” Six months later LBJ would remove McNamara from his post. Contrast McNamara’s remarks to those made in May of 2010 by Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said; “We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely, in fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.” An anthropomorphized kangaroo figure holding a boomerang is depicted in the upper left corner of the poster; the caricature is of John Gorton, [NB: actually Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia between January 1966 - December 1967] the pro-Vietnam war Prime Minister of Australia who governed from January 1968 to March 1971. Under Gorton’s administration around 8,000 Australian soldiers assisted the U.S. by fighting in Vietnam, but Australian public opinion turned against the war - hence the boomerang. On May 1, 1970, over 200,000 people gathered in Melbourne, Australia for a mass protest dubbed the “Vietnam War Moratorium March.” Eventually some 50,000 Australian soldiers would be rotated into the war, around 3,000 would be wounded, and nearly 600 were killed. The last Australian soldiers would finally be withdrawn from Vietnam in 1972.

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Despite the confusion between Holt and Gorton, Vallens' commentary highlights Sharp's stinging attack on the war mongers responsible for the disastrous war in Vietnam. Both the Australian and American forces suffered heavy casualties, though of course they pale into insignificance when the impact upon the people of Vietnam is considered. The immoral pursuit of the war by President Johnson and his political allies - including Holt, Gorton and Kỳ - gave rise to the widespread public protests seen around the world during the late 60s and early 70s. Sharp's poster was initially printed in London, as part of the January 1967 edition of OZ. A copy was almost immediately reprinted as a 2-page spread in the March 1967 issue of the Sydney-based OZ magazine, which Neville, Sharp and Richard Walsh had set up in 1963 as a precursor to the London edition. Within that reprint the bottom calendar section of the poster was removed and replaced in part by some black ink work.

Martin Sharp, Madonna of the Napalm, OZ, Sydney, #33, March 1967.

At some point during 1967 the poster was also reprinted in the United States by Stolen Paper Editions of Mill Valley, California. Therein the darkish brown highlighting was apparently replaced with a flourescent orange (referred to in Vallen's review above), reflecting the countercultural and psychedelic nature of many posters of the time.

Martin Sharp, Peace on Earth, Stolen Paper Editions, California, 1967, 31.5 x 57.5 cm / 17 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches. Lithograph in black and orange on cream card stock.

The reprint bore the title Peace of Earth in the lower section where the February 1967 calendar detail initially appeared. Whether this reprint was done with the permission of Sharp or not is unclear, though magazines such as OZ were part of the international Underground Free Press organisation, and content therein was generally designated as copyright-free, at least to the extent that it was used to promote just causes, and not necessarily for profit. Sharp was very supportive of such an initiative and made use of material from other magazines and books in his own collage work, which also featured OZ Sydney and London. There is no doubt that he would therefore have supported the publication of his anti-LBJ poster in the US. 

Many Australians took exception to the fawning behaviour of local politicians such as Harold Holt and Gorton over the American President and their government's seemingly mindless engagement with the war in Vietnam. The conservative Holt's declaration of "All the way with LBJ" in support of the President's visit to Australia in October 1966, brought widespread protests from the growing number of anti-war demonstrators. Holt was merely parroting Johnson's 1964 American presidential campaign slogan. Sharp went on to reflect this subservience to the US President and military establishment by Australian politicians on the cover of the May 1965 edition of Sydney OZ.

Martin Sharp, All the way with L.B.J., OZ, Sydney, #19, May 1965.

Therein, LBJ is portrayed as a stetson-hatted Bald Eagle excreting bombs over Vietnam, followed close behind by a weak-winged Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies (1894-1978), who held office from 1949 through to 1966. When Johnson toured Australia as the American equivalent of the British Queen Elizabeth II, there was both adulation and abomination.

 

The anti-war movement was strong in Australia, especially during the early 1970s when massive Moratorium rallies were held across the nation. Upon his return to Sydney after residing in London between 1966-1969, Sharp prepared a poster for those rallies, and in part it reflects the content of Madonna of the Napalm.

Martin Sharp, We are them.. They are us ... Moratorium!, lithograph on paper, Sydney, 1970, 43 x 56cm.

In this instance, death is the theme once again, only this time the analogy is to the Little Prince character of French fantasy fiction, facing the Grim Reaper as he leaves the earth to join those who had gone before him. Martin Sharp's art was not usually morbid, though in the case of the Vietnam War and the later Luna Park fire in which a number of people died, his darker side - his anger and rage over the injustice - came to the fore. Madonna of the Napalm is one of the finest examples of this, and on the artist as commentator and purveyor of public compassion.

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Acknowledgement

Thanks to John Griffin for bringing the variant Peace of Earth poster to my attention, and thereby stimulating the writing of this blog.

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References

Neville, Richard (editor), OZ, London, #1, February 1967. Available URL: https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozlondon/1/.

Vallens, Mark, Hey, Hey, LBJ - President Lyndon Baines Johnson in Poster Art 1962-1968, Art for a Change [blog], 1 December 2009. Available URL: http://www.art-for-a-change.com/LBJ/LBJ.htm.

 -----, The Madonna of the Napalm, Art for a Change [blog], 6 October 2010. Available URL: http://art-for-a-change.com/blog/2010/10/the-madonna-of-the-napalm.html.

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Michael Organ, Australia

Last updated: 8 May 2021