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'Art of the American Soldier' -- an exhibit culled from the rarely displayed collections of the United States Army Center of Military History and the National Museum of the United States Army by the always inventive and clever curators of the National Constitution Center. Pencil sketches, charcoal rubs, watercolors, acrylics, and oils on canvas encompassing every modern conflict from World War I through Iraq.

There are a few familiar pieces, notably Tom Lea's "Marines Call it That 2,000 Yard Stare" and several satirical "dogface" drawings by Bill Mauldin ("I can't be funny about the war," the heralded soldier cartoonist once said, "but I can try to make something out of the humorous situations which always accompany misery"), as well as a smattering of iconic scenes: MacArthur reviewing a decimated Philippine landscape in 1944; the liberation of Buchenwald in cold, sorrowful darker hues; Eliza Golden's 2005 painting "Martyrdom Denied" rendering through desert haze the demolition of a Mosul safe house U.S. Special Forces ensured would not live up to its billing for Uday and Qusay Hussein.

Mostly, though, the exhibit vista is idiosyncratic to the ground-level micro reality as the soldier sees it, usually overlooked and, thus, wholly engrossing: Medics struggling to maneuver a wounded man down a mountainside under the cover of darkness ("Night Shift"); bloody sheets outside a hospital tent ("Normandy Wash"); red, kinetic blur of chaos in Vietnam ("Hot Village").

"I can tell you put your soul into this portrait," a man tells Master Sgt. Martin Cervantez, one of the Army's current frontline artists on hand for the exhibit opening, "it touched my heart."

The painting in question is of a masked Afghani translator working with American officers in Khost, and risking his life to do so. Cervantez is a self-taught artist who joined the military with no inkling he'd eventually paint scenes for the Army to warehouse as part of the nation's historical record. In off-duty hours he pursues abstract art. On deployment Cervantez enters the heat of battle with all the usual concerns -- the welfare of the soldier next to him, security, the mission -- plus one more: Discovering, capturing, and relating the essential truth of what churns around him.

Link to the slide show -the exhibit--> Art of the American Soldier 1910 - 2010