n 1974 in Lincoln, Nebraska, an 8-year-old named Matt Sesow and his neighborhood friends were playing a game called SPUD on a grassy airfield across the street from the Sesow home.

Better Times Buckaroo

The small runway was not much more than a dirt road leading into a remote, rural town. Many families had hangars behind their houses like garages. They’d come in (taking note of a windsock on the runway to tell which direction the wind was blowing), pull their small aircrafts into their driveways and park them like any other vehicle. To a kid the field was a perfect playground.

The way the game of SPUD works is everyone has a number, one person throws the ball in the air and calls a number, the kid with that number grabs the ball and yells SPUD, then tries to hit everyone with the ball. During this particular game Matt had a simple and brilliant idea.

“I remember thinking to myself,” he recounted later, “‘I wonder what happens if I call my own number.’ So I threw the ball, yelled ‘Four!’, ran… And the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital.”

A plane had landed amidst the SPUD game and struck him. In front of his friends and his brother and sister and God, the plane’s propeller severed his left arm. He nearly bled to death on the runway.

It’s fortunate that Matt’s surgeon at the hospital was also a Vietnam veteran who had put soldiers’ arms back together during the war. Thankfully he was able to reattach Matt’s arm. But that was the extent of Matt’s good fortune. Gangrene had set in, and it was decided that his hand would be amputated.

hirty years earlier, on March 16, a German air force plane not much bigger than the one that hit Matt Sesow crashed near a town then called Freiberg, in Ukraine. The plane, a Junkers Ju 87 dive-bomber, was an icon of German power during WWII; the same model that bombed Guernica when it made its combat debut with the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War.

Mission Accomplished

This particular Stuka, however, was shot down from the sky above Crimea, the “‘No-Man’s Land’ between the Russian and German fronts.” The pilot died on impact. The rear-gunner, a man named Joseph Beuys, was ejected from the plane and survived.

“The last thing I remember,” he said later, “was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground.”

But by a stroke of fantastical luck, Beuys’ body was found buried deep in the snow by a group of nomadic Tatar tribesmen. To revive the warmth in him, they slathered his nearly-frozen broken body in animal fat and wrapped him in felt. He was found the next day by a German search commando and sent to a military hospital.

wo months after Beuys’ plane crashed, Joseph Stalin made history by exiling the Crimean Tatars from the Soviet Union. In a completely unrelated event seven years earlier, Stalin’s greatest opponent, a Ukranian named Leon Trotsky whom he had also famously exiled, was offered refuge in Mexico. He moved in with a married couple, both painters and Communist sympathizers, named Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Trotsky had an affair with Kahlo, a beautiful and strikingly sexual woman who was crippled her entire life, first by polio, which she contracted at 6, and by an accident that happened when she was 18. On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding the bus in Mexico City where she grew up. A vehicle collided with the trolley car and sent it tumbling. Inside an iron handrail came loose and flew into Kahlo’s body, piercing her abdomen and uterus. Her spinal cord was broken; her collarbone, pelvis and ribs were broken; and her legs were crushed. She barely survived, and spent much of the rest of her life in physical and emotional pain, unable to conceive the children that she longed to have.

Today Frida Kahlo is known as one of the most important artists of her generation. Her self-portraits display, however fractionally, the effects of a trauma that would affect her until her death.

Bull, Bunny, and a Cup | Matt Sesow

Joseph Beuys became a pivotal figure in the history of contemporary art, after turning to painting and performance to work out the tragic events of his life. In his spectacular and often brilliant performance pieces, he has employed materials including felt and animal fat to express poignant philosophies and radical political ideals.

Guernica, which Pablo Picasso painted in reaction to the city’s bombing in 1937, is considered the most important anti-war artwork of all time.

And 35 years after being hit by a plane and losing one arm, Matt Sesow has become one of the most exciting and relevant artists working in America.

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