The Art of War
British artists in a century of conflict
Presented by Michael Portillo
Three x 55 mins
An Illuminations HD production for Sky Arts
John Wyver
+44 7973 835 330 / + 44 20 7288 8400
john@illuminationsmedia.co.uk
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• The Art of War explores how painters and sculptors in Britain have
responded to a century of conflict.
• This is a timeless story of controversy and occasional censorship, from
official concern about C.R.W. Nevinson’s images of the western front
right through to Steve McQueen’s ongoing campaign to issue stamps
with the faces of British troops killed in Iraq.
• Debates about images of war remains a highly contemporary topic, and
one that it’s fascinating to consider in the context the art featured here.
• The Art of War is conceived as a presenter-led series for Michael
Portillo who has indicated his strong interest in the series.
• It is envisaged that Michael Portillo would visit artworks and the locations
associated with them, and in each film would meet perhaps four or five
figures who in conversation with him can draw out the associated stories.
• In addition to the paintings and sculptures, which would be filmed as
often as is feasible from the originals with Illuminations’ customary care
and precision, the films would draw on archival material, including
photographs and film extracts – and the range of these is indicated in
relation to many of the individual stories.
• The series should be serious but not in any way sombre or earnest. It
should also be sceptical about official attitudes at certain points, but it is
not intended as polemical. It could be highly appropriate to premiere
around Armistice Day 2010.
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Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, Imperial War Museum
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The films
1. Art and the First World War
Summary
Artists had long depicted war but almost exclusively in heroic and
triumphalist terms. In the early years of the First World War, artists were
among those who enlisted, and some – most notably Eric Kennington with
The Kensingtons at Laventie (1915) – used their experiences for unofficial
paintings and drawings. But from 1916 the official schemes to commission
war artists during the First World War changed the ground rules, offering
access to the battlefields and permitting (within limits) images that did not
directly contribute to the propaganda effort.
In addition to exploring the work of the War Propaganda Bureau,
providing a context for the operation of the war artists’ scheme, the
opening film explores the portrayal of fighting on the western front in the
work of four different artists: Wyndham Lewis, C.R.W. Nevinson, Anna
Airy and John Singer Sargent.
The second half of the film takes the theme ‘lest we forget’ and considers
commemoration in painting, in sculpture and in the architecture associated
with cemeteries – which was far more significant after the First World War
than after the Second.
This film explores five of the central stories in the art of remembrance,
including the Cenotaph by Lutyens and the Menin Gate Memorial by
Blomfield, as well as C.S. Jagger’s remarkable sculpture for the Royal
Artillery Memorial and paintings by William Orpen and Stanley
Spencer.
Key stories
• The War Propaganda Bureau
In August 1914 the British government discovered that Germany had a
propaganda agency and determined that it too needed such an office.
Liberal politician Charles Masterman drew together a distinguished
group of writers to write anti-German pamphlets but only in 1916 did he
engage first Muirhead Bone and then Francis Dodd to create images for
use in propaganda.
The next year Lloyd George restructured previously decentralised
propaganda organisations in a new Department of Information, and here
many more war artists were commissioned. Paul Nash, C.R.W.
Nevinson and Eric Kennington were among those sent to the western
front.
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In March 1918 a Ministry of Information was established under Lord
Beaverbrook. Using a Canadian model, and working with the writer
Arnold Bennett he organised British War Memorials Committee to
acquire ambitious and exciting war art. Pictures were ‘no longer
considered primarily as a contribution to propaganda, they were now to
be thought of chiefly as a record’. Major works acquired included Paul
Nash’s The Menin Road, Wyndham Lewis’ A Battery Shelled and
Stanley Spencer’s Travoys Arriving with the Wounded.
Locations and resources:
Most major paintings are held in the Imperial War Museum. For this and
other segments, we would expect to film in the reconstructed western
front trenches in France.
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Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 1919, Imperial War Museum
• Wyndham Lewis
In 1914 Lewis was very much the enfant terrible of the London art scene.
He was at the centre of the new avant-garde movement known as
Vorticism and in July he published the first issue of Blast. He gloried in
the modern energy of the machine and celebrated abstraction in image
making. But the war overturned his plans and after publishing a second
issue of Blast, the ‘war number’, in 1916 he joined the army as a gunner.
The massive A Battery Shelled, finally completed in 1919 draws on his
experiences in the trenches and is perhaps his finest painting.
The painting was commissioned for a proposed Hall of Remembrance, to
a size determined by the dimensions of Uccello’s fifteenth century Battle
of San Romano, the size being considered suitable for a commemorative
battle painting. The Hall, however, was never built, although the painting
attracted considerable controversy.
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Locations and resources:
Lewis’ letters from the front are revealing, as his autobiographical
Blasting and Bombardiering, published in 1937.
• C.R.W. Nevinson
After studying, like so many of his
generation at the Slade, Nevinson
went to Paris in 1911, where he
studied Cubism and the other
advances in contemporary
painting. Associated with the
Italian Futurist Marinetti just
before war was declared, he
signed up as an ambulance driver
and was in France by November
1914. His first paintings from the
front were exhibited in March
1915.
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Nevinson’s angular, abstracted
canvases (like The Machine-gun,
1915, Tate, left) attracted many
admirers and he was recognised
as capturing new aspects of warfare, perhaps especially the
mechanisation of conflict. Apollinaire praised his work for depicting ‘the
mechanical aspect of modern warfare where man and machine combine
to form a single force of nature.’
He was accepted as an official war artist in 1917 but his exhibition of
work in 1918 demonstrated the limits of what were acceptable images at
this stage of the war. His A Group of Soldiers, which now looks entirely
unexceptional, was criticised by the War Office censors because ‘the
Germans will seize upon the picture as evidence of British degeneration’.
Paths of Glory, which shows two corpses tangled in barbed wire, was
banned outright, but Nevinson exhibited it covered with brown paper on
which he wrote ‘Censored’. He was fiercely reprimanded not only for
exhibiting the image but also for the unauthorized use of the word
‘Censored’ in a public space.
Locations and resources:
All of Nevinson’s major works are at the Imperial War Museum or Tate.
• Anna Airy: a woman at war
In addition to the new Ministry of Information, from 1918 the newly
founded Imperial War Museum was charged with collecting records of
the war, including fine art. One of the first artists to be commissioned by
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the museum (and the first official female war artists) was Anna Airy, who
had studied at the Slade before the war.
She painted large, powerful images of munitions work in factories, which
she sketched on the spot. Her life and work, however, is largely forgotten
today – there is no entry for her, for example, in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography.
Locations and resources:
The Imperial War Museum collection has five major canvases by Airy,
although they are very rarely exhibited. The museum also has some
limited documentation of her life. This section of the film can become
something of a search for Airy and her work, and can make a strong
argument that she should be as celebrated as her male peers.
• John Singer Sargent, Gassed
Exhibited in a specially built room at the Imperial War Museum,
Sargent’s Gassed (1919) is an overpowering mural-sized canvas. The
painter had been an immensely celebrated portraitist of Edwardian
society but had spent much of the First World War in the USA. In April
1918 he was invited to contribute a large-scale work to the proposed Hall
of Remembrance (for which Wyndham Lewis and others had also been
commissioned). For research, Sargent travelled on the western front
from July to October 1918.
It had been suggested that he might depict British and American troops
co-operating together, but he eventually agreed with the British War
Memorials Committee that his subject would be a gas attack that he had
witnessed in August on the Arras-Doullens road. Completed in the
following winter, Gassed is a monumental work showing a line of
blinded, mustard-gas victims picking their way across a field of wounded
as the setting sun casts an eerie yellow light.
Locations and resources:
Gassed is on view at the Imperial War Museum, which also holds a set
of sketches showing the development of the picture. There is also
archive footage and photographs of the aftermath of gas attacks, with
figures in similar poses.
• A classical Cenotaph by Edwin Lutyens
There were few models in the British tradition for memorials
commemorating individual soldiers. When he was asked by the king for
the design for a temporary structure for the Peace Celebrations held in
London in July 1919, the architect Edwin Lutyens looked to classical
Greece for a model. His first Cenotaph – a monument erected to dead
buried elsewhere – was made of wood and plaster, but its replacement –
unveiled on November 11, 1920, is a masterpiece of stone cutting. Every
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surface is subtly curved, much as in the Parthenon, for optical effect. The
verticals, for example, if extended would meet at a point 1000 feet above
the ground.
Despite its modern, abstract form, in which Lutyens uses a mathematical
language to express spiritual ideas, the Cenotaph was immediately
hailed by the press and public. The avoidance of literal imagery (there
had been a plan to add bronze figures) meant that it could become a
deeply personal symbol for all, expressing the sense of both individual
and national bereavement.
Locations and resources:
The changing designs of both the temporary and permanent structures
are kept in the RIBA and Imperial War Museum collections. There is also
extensive documentation in film and photographs of both versions, of the
unveiling and of the memorial as a focus for protest and debate through
the 20th century.
• William Orpen: To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France
Like John Singer Sargent, William Orpen was a successful portrait
painter before the First World War, and he secured a position as an
official war artist in 1917. His first paintings at the front were portraits of
officers and later he made portraits of delegates to the Paris Peace
Conference in 1919. He also completed two large group pictures in
which the architecture dwarfs the diplomat participants.
Orpen was working on a third
picture from Paris in 1921,
which was to have shown the
delegates waiting to enter the
signing chamber. But Orpen
began to add figures from
among the dead. ‘In spite of all
these eminent men,’ the artist
wrote, ‘I kept thinking of the
soldiers who remain in France
forever.’ He kept working at the
canvas and eventually rubbed
out all of the statesmen and
commanders. As exhibited at
the Royal Academy in 1923, To
the Unknown British Soldier
Killed in France was of a flagdraped coffin guarded by two
soldiers.
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The painting caused a sensation, and was widely attacked for its
obscurity and ‘sacrilege’. Commissioned as a portrait by the Imperial
War Museum, it was then turned down as having failed to fulfil its brief.
Only in 1928, and after Orpen had decided to remove from the picture
the soldiers and two angels floating over the coffin did it enter the
museum’s collection.
Locations and resources:
The painting and documentation of its earlier versions are in the
collection of the Imperial War Museum.
• The Menin Gate and the cemeteries
The Imperial War Graves commission was set up in May 1917 to ensure
appropriate graves and memorials for those who died in France. Its early
decisions that grave markers should be uniform and remains should not
be repatriated (both thought to respect the ‘brotherhood’ of the soldiers,
regardless of rank or social position) proved immensely controversial.
But it also sought to achieve both perfection and permanence in the
memorials, and it chose to work with the most eminent architects of the
day, including Lutyens and Sir Reginald Blomfield.
The Commission’s work was challenged after the war but a debate in
parliament included a speech by Winston Churchill that silenced any
opposition. The Commission, Churchill said, was building memorials to
commemorate in perpetuity the sacrifice of an Empire’s soldiers. Future
generations would gaze in wonder upon them and remember.
Lutyens designed the massive memorial at Thiepval, on which is carved
the names of more than 72,000 British soldiers who died in fighting at the
Somme. But the most moving of the monuments is the Menin Gate
Memorial dedicated to the missing British and Commonwealth soldiers
who fell around the Ypres Salient. Blomfield designed the triumphal arch
in 1921 and it was opened in 1927. The names of nearly 55,000
Commonwealth soldiers are inscribed in the Hall of Memory but despite
its size this was found not to be large enough. A further 35,000 names
are listed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing.
Locations and resources:
The Last Post is still sounded by a bugler each evening at the Gate.
• Charles Sergeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial
Jagger was studying to be a sculptor in Rome when war broke out in
August 1914. He joined the volunteer unit known as the Artists’ Rifles,
and later served in the Worcestershire Regiment at Gallipoli and on the
western front. Wounded three times, he was awarded the Military Cross
for gallantry.
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He created numerous sculptural memorials but the best known is his
Royal Artillery Memorial, unveiled in 1925 at Hyde Park Corner. Even so,
this great work of realist sculpture in largely ignored by almost all who
drive past it everyday.
When he was working on it there was still a government ban on images
of dead British soldiers but Jagger flouted defied this with his bronze
corpse shrouded in a greatcoat. Three other soldiers stand guard around
the massive stone howitzer on the base of which are carved
extraordinary relief scenes of fighting in the trenches.
Locations and resources:
There is unrestricted access to Jagger’s memorial. Nearby, and a
remarkable point of comparison, is Derwent Wood’s 1925 slender bronze
David, which is another sculptural memorial to the dead of the war.
• Sandham Memorial Chapel: the paintings of Stanley Spencer
Jagger collaborated on the stone podium for his Royal Artillery Memorial
with the architect Lionel Pearson. And it was Pearson that the Behrend
family asked to design a chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire to hold a
cycle of commemorative paintings that they had commissioned. Mary
Behrend had asked Stanley Spencer to create a memorial to her brother
who had died in Macedonia, where the painter had also seen service.
Spencer’s great cycle of nineteen paintings is surely the supreme work
of commemoration. He worked on them from 1926 to 1932, for much of
the time in Pearson’s chapel, which was dedicated in March 1927.
Spencer had given the architect precise instructions about dimensions
and shapes, and the canvases fill three walls of the tall space.
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Stanley Spencer, Bed Making, 1932, The National Trust
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The paintings bring together precise memories of Spencer’s Macedonian
experiences (as well as scenes from wartime hospital life in Bristol) with
his eccentric, extraordinary and deeply personal Christianity. The
culminating image, on the east wall, which took him nearly a year to
paint, is The Resurrection of the Soldiers, with a cascade of white
crosses being handed by soldiers to Christ. There is little violence or
fighting in the images but rather a quiet, almost domestic sense of
sacred ritual, which together achieve a powerful emotional effect.
Locations and resources:
The Sandham Memorial Chapel is owned and administered by the
National Trust and, for a fee, we can negotiate filming access.
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2. Art and artists in World War Two
Summary
Perhaps surprisingly, the defining British artworks of World War Two are
not of the conflict in Europe or North Africa but of the war at home. Most of
these paintings, prints and drawings were supported in some way by the
War Artists’ Advisory Committee.
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Paul Nash, Totes Meer, 1940-41, Tate
Henry Moore’s tube shelter drawings, Graham Sutherland’s images of
the Blitz and Stanley Spencer’s epic cycle of war production on the
Clyde are of the home front, as is the canvas by Paul Nash Totes Meer
which has become as iconic an image as his 1918 painting We Are
Making a New World.
But among the most striking home front paintings are of women at work,
in factories and elsewhere, despite the fact that the WAAC was largely
blind to the work of women artists.
There are strikingly few artists who consistently painted or drew images of
the actual fighting. The longest serving of the artists at the front was
Edward Ardizzone who travelled with British troops from the British
Expeditionary Force through North Africa and then, via the invasion of
Sicily, back to Europe. But like almost all of his peers, Ardizzone rarely
dealt with violence and death. The artist who most consistently portrayed
the turmoil of conflict was Albert Richards; he was killed by a landmine in
March 1945.
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Lacking images of actual warfare, the WAAC commissioned
reconstructions, including two famous ones of the withdrawal from
Dunkirk. But the graphic scenes at Bergen-Belsen forced a direct
engagement with wrenching physical trauma. Back home, and preparing
for peace, Kenneth Clark aimed to take art to the new audiences won over
by the romantic modernism of the WAAC’s commissions.
Central stories
• The War Artists’ Advisory Committee
With the coming of war, Director of the National Gallery Kenneth Clark
worried that many, perhaps most, British artists would be deprived of
their livelihoods and, worse, would end up dead. His solution, inspired by
the government’s commissioning of art in the First World War, was to set
up a central advisory committee for the selection of official war artists.
(As film 4 will argue Clark had another agenda also, to do with fostering
a national culture of modernism.)
Through until 1946, when its collection was dispersed to the Imperial
War Museum and numerous other galleries and collections throughout
the Commonwealth, the WAAC acquired some 6,000 pieces from more
than four hundred artists. 37 artists were salaried during the war and the
others received funding from commissions and purchases.
Throughout the war the WAAC had constantly to argue for the legitimacy
of its work. There was a constant tension between the demands of art
and propaganda. Another line of attack held that photography could
provide a record of the war far better than painters and sculptors. But as
the influential critic Eric Newton argued, “The camera cannot interpret,
and a war so epic in its scope by land, sea and air, and so detailed and
complex in its mechanism, requires interpreting as well as recording.”
Locations and resources:
The WAAC met at the National Gallery in London where it also
organised exhibitions.
The WAAC is well documented in the wartime film Out of Chaos (in the
collection of the COI), which includes Clark speaking about the reasons
for establishing the WAAC as well as one of the WAAC exhibitions.
Hulton/Getty also has a wonderful selection of relevant photographs.
• Shelters from the storm
‘In this war, by “War Pictures” we mean, pre-eminently, paintings of the
Blitz,’ the poet Stephen Spender reflected in 1943. ‘ In the last war we
would have meant pictures of the pictures of the Western Front.’
There are numerous potent images of the Blitz and of the destruction it
wrought. Night Raid on Portsmouth Docks (1941) is a remarkable
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painting by Richard Eurich, an artist who deserves to be far better known
(and whose reputation the series could significantly enhance).
Numerous artists showed post-raid damage but few paintings depict
either fear or corpses. (The WAAC rejected Carel Weight’s frantic It
Happened to Us.) Instead, the broken bodies of civilians are evoked by
architectural damage, as in Graham Sutherland’s anthropomorphised
ruined buildings. Many pictures depicted historic buildings violated by the
bombs, like Coventry Cathedral, showing the raids as attacks on tradition
and continuity. The defiant St Paul’s is also fundamental to this story.
After bombed buildings and portraits, the most heavily depicted home
front subject was public sheltering from the bombs. Many of these
images, including Henry Moore’s famous tube shelter drawings,
bolstered the ideas of shared hardship and community building. Moore’s
drawings were also seen as ennobling and universalising suffering.
Locations and resources:
Many, many WAAC artworks are in the collection of the Imperial War
Museum; others (including the Eurich) are with Tate.
Moore is shown making notes for his tube shelter series in Out of Chaos
and there are wonderful photographs of him at work by Lee Miller.
Coventry Cathedral especially, but also St Paul’s and an underground
station would all be appropriate locations for this segment.
Astonishingly, the official war artist Leonard Rosoman, who painted
images of the Blitz is still alive, aged 95. We have been exploring
whether it is possible to film with him.
• Women at work
The 1941 National Service Act forced all women up to the age of 30 into
fulltime work, and the profound social change that this brought about are
shown in many remarkable paintings. Evelyn Dunbar’s St Thomas’s
Hospital in Evacuation Quarters (1941) depicts women in the traditional
wartime role as nurse, and Dunbar was then given a fulltime contract to
show women at work on the land. Strong associations were made
between women and rural Britain and national identity.
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Dame Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring, 1943, IWM
There are many images too of women in industrial work, the most
notable and widely publicised of which is Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech
Ring painted in 1943 by Dame Laura Knight. Ruby herself was an
attractive young woman who had become an unlikely industrial heroine
in the press by mastering a particularly tricky engineering task. Knight’s
realistic painting stresses Ruby’s female qualities at the expense of the
technical task and turns the subject into the poster girl that she became.
The WAAC commissioned a large colour reproduction for factory
canteens.
Locations and resources:
The story of Ruby Loftus… would be central to this section. Artist and
subject appear in the Paramount News short Warwork News No 20 and
feature extensively in press coverage. The painting is in the Imperial War
Museum.
• Shipbuilding on the Clyde
It’s notable that in Stanley Spencer’s great cycle of fourteen paintings set
in a Port Glasgow shipyard there are at least six women shown working
at industrial tasks. Spencer’s laboured on these canvases collectively
titled Shipbuilding on the Clyde from 1940 to 1946 and they are intended
to be hung in a specific sequence on all four walls of a room.
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Spencer brought to these astonishing scenes of heavy industry many
references to events from the Bible, and especially the life of Christ. As
one critic has written, ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde is… as much a
meditation on the transcendently intertwined wonders of life, love,
religion and work as it is a visual record of Scottish war work.’
Locations and resources:
Spencer is shown at work on the cycle in Out of Chaos where he shows
a group of workers some of his sketches done on a toilet roll. His studio
where he worked on the cycle is preserved in the village of Cookham.
The cycle itself is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum where the
segment would, at least in part, be filmed.
• Visionary romanticism
Among the major artists of the war, Paul Nash is perhaps the figure most
concerned to develop the personal symbolic language of his work. His
great canvas Battle of Britain (1941) exemplifies this. ‘Fact… both of
Science & Nature are used “imaginatively”,’ he wrote, “& respected only
in some far as they are symbols for the picture plan which is viewed from
the air.”
Nash was respected for his depictions of the Western Front from twentyfive years before but his appointment as a full-time war artist was seen
as risky, ‘rather like,’ as one reviewer said, ‘asking T.S. Eliot to write a
report on the Louise-Farr fight’.
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Paul Nash, Battle of Britain, 1941, IWM
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Fascinated by flight but unable to fly because of his poor health (he died
in 1946), Nash saw planes as having human and animal appearances.
But his depictions of British bombers ‘watching’ or ‘at play’ were
regarded as unacceptable by those on the WAAC who wanted factual
and documentary records. For the artist, the landscape of Britain too was
an organic, living entity, contrasted with the German sea of death in
Totes Meer.
Locations and resources:
Nash is seen at work on Totes Meer in Out of Chaos. Letters about the
filming and his life during wartime are in the Tate archive. Totes Meer is
with Tate and Battle of Britain and many watercolours are in the IWM
collection.
• Edward Ardizzone
Ardizzone was the longest-serving official war artist, employed by the
WAAC for 5 years, during which he made more than 150 paintings,
drawings and watercolours of British troops at war. As Kenneth Clark
recalled, ‘When the war came and we had to find war artists, I wanted
one who would show the earthy part, who would show what military life
was really like.’
Ardizzone’s images, and his wartime diaries, have great charm but they
also have a quality of English whimsy which is sometimes hard to
reconcile with what we know of the realities of war.
Locations and resources:
The artist’s grandson is a filmmaker and could be an interesting
character to meet, along with a look at Ardizzone’s diaries held at the
Imperial War Museum.
• Albert Richards
Although there are individual images like George Lambourn’s stark
Calais, 26th May 1940. Died of wounds, very few war artists dealt
directly with violence and death. Albert Richards is the most prominent
exception. Having been briefly a student at the Royal College of Art, he
served with the Royal Engineers from 1940-43 and then as a
parachutist. He was dropped into Normandy during the June 1944
invasion.
There was persistent criticism of the WAAC about its comparative lack of
interest in artists who were primarily serviceman – as it was believed that
the major artists of World War One like Nevinson and Nash had been.
One critic acknowledged that many of the searing images of the previous
war ‘were cris de Coeur, while one has the feeling that too many of the
present pictures are cris d’artistes’.
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Albert Richards, The Drop, 1944, IWM
Although little celebrated, Richards’ best work has an urgency and
authenticity. On the night of March 5th 1945, Richards told his
colleagues he was going off to paint what was for him 'the greatest
picture of the war' - a night attack by the Allied troops on the retreating
Germany divisions near the river Maas. Misunderstanding directions
from the engineers in a charge of a minefield, Richards turned off the
road and into the fringes of the field, and was killed. He was 25 years
old.
Locations and resources:
Works by Richards are held by the Imperial War Museum, Tate and the
British Council collection. His family holds photographs and memorabilia
and we have begun to discuss filming with them.
• Resorting to reconstructions
An important principle for the WAAC was that artists should depict
events to which they had been an eyewitness. But faced with the
difficulties of securing convincing images of men at war, the committee
sought out a small number of reconstructions of landmark events. The
most admired of these was Charles Cundall’s The Withdrawal from
Dunkirk, June 1940, which went on display in August of that year.
Cundall had not been with the BEF during the traumatic evacuation but
those artists who had been (including Ardizzone) produced small
focussed drawings.
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Richard Eurich, The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, National Maritime Museum
Another canvas shown alongside Cundall’s work was The Withdrawal
from Dunkirk by Richard Eurich, who was praised by Kenneth Clark ‘as
one of the few painters who have succeeded in reconstructing scenes
from second-hand material without loss of conviction or pictorial effect.’
Eurich is a fascinating figure, perhaps the most convincing artist to work
on the battlefront during the war, yet influenced by Quakerism he
professed to be a pacifist and there is a detachment from violence in all
of his work.
The Royal Navy selected Eurich’s image for its Christmas card in 1940
(!) but the popular vote was definitely with Cundall. The Ministry of
Information issued a publicity photograph of two Scottish soldiers looking
at the painting and seeming to verify its accuracy.
Locations and resources:
The Cundall canvas is with the Imperial War Museum, Eurich’s at the
National Maritime Museum. It might be appropriate to film the segment
with the host in Dunkirk.
• Artists at the death camps
In April 1945 Bergen-Belsen was the first important concentration camp
to be liberated. In the weeks afterwards it was visited by four artists:
Leslie Cole, Mary Kessell, Sergeant Eric Taylor (one of the camp’s
liberators) and Doris Zinkeisen.
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In their work there is a direct account of death that appears nowhere else
in British war art from 1939-45. Cole’s One of the Death Pits (1945)
depicts piles of corpses around a central trench, while Mary Kessell’s
tiny drawings have an almost hallucinatory quality. These are
astonishing (and again, hardly ever seen) images, rendered in black
charcoal or sanguine. They are of bodies abstracted from any setting,
‘isolated in private universes of loss’.
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Kessell’s drawings, almost all of which seem to be of women or children,
suggest that conventional art simply isn’t adequate for the horrors of the
camps. So much other war art seems to be have been about
reassurance and about bolstering national and individual identity. Not
here. Brian Foss has written the best book about art during World War
Two, and this is how he describes these works:
‘Presented in monochrome, on small, scrap-like pieces of fragile
paper, they in many ways say more about the war’s dreadfulness
and thanatotic anti-humanism than do the square yards of canvas
produced by many other artists.’
Locations and resources:
Cole and Kessell’s work is with the Imperial War Museum; Kessell also
kept a diary during the six weeks she was at Bergen-Belsen. Works by
all four of the artists mentioned above are included in Unspeakable, an
exhibition at the Imperial War Museum until August 31st 2009. As with so
many other events in this story, there is extensive (but perhaps overfamiliar) film and photographic archive, but it may be that the artworks
will have more impact without its use.
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• Winning the Peace
October 1945 saw the opening of a major exhibition of the WAAC war
art, after which the committee was dissolved and plans made for the
works to be dispersed. Some sixty institutions made successful pitches
to receive some of the 6,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures,
although the Imperial War Museum acquired just over half of them
(including many that no other museum requested).
There is also an important intangible legacy of the WAAC, since Kenneth
Clark at least had seen it as a way of catalysing a new kind of national
culture. ‘Clark almost certainly envisioned the WAAC,’ Brian Foss writes,
‘as an instrument to raise public taste, foster a national culture, and lay
the groundwork for post-war patronage of art by the state.’
There was a recognition that the arts, and perhaps especially literature
and music, had seen what was said to be a ‘wartime renaissance’ and
Clark was concerned to develop both a system of enlightened state
patronage and an active education programme. In part this was achieved
through the setting up in 1946 of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Clark was also concerned to see the very English form of ‘romantic
modernism’ in which he so fervently believed established as the
dominant style of post-war art. International abstraction needed to be
marginalised, and the course of British art from 1945 onwards – with the
dominance of Moore, Sutherland, Piper, all key figures for the WAAC –
was set by decisions made in life during wartime.
Locations and resources:
One or more major sculptures by Henry Moore, including perhaps the
figure at Harlow New Town (newsreel of the unveiling exists), or the
collection at Moore’s home at Perry Green, is the appropriate setting for
this argument.
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3. Artists in war since 1945
Summary
The official commissioning of war artists, ended at the close of 1945, was
started again by the Imperial War Museum in 1972. This film meets seven
of the artists who have been commissioned since then and reflects on how
the art of war continues to be contested and controversial right through
until today.
The artists and the conflicts they covered are as followed: Ken Howard in
Northern Ireland, Linda Kitson’s work in the Falklands in 1982-83, John
Keane in the first Gulf War, Peter Howson in Bosnia, Paul Seawright’s
photographs made after his visit to Afghanistan in 2002, Langlands and
Bell also in Afghanistan, and Steve McQueen’s controversial project made
after a recent visit to Iraq, Queen and Country.
Central stories
• Ken Howard
Northern Ireland 1973 and 1977
The painter Ken Howard, who today is a Royal Academician, served as
a marine from 1953 to ‘55, when he kept a sketchbook filled with
drawings of the daily life of soldiers. In 1973 and again in 1977 he visited
Northern Ireland as the Official Artist of the Imperial War Museum. He
was not, however, an official war artist, since the conflict there was not
defined as a war by the government.
He spent a great deal of time with ordinary soldiers. ‘I didn’t take photos,’
he explains, ‘I just sat down and drew in some very hairy places. If you
were drawing all the time, which I was, people could see what you were
doing. Whereas if you took a camera, they didn’t know what you were
collecting, or why you were taking pictures… I never felt in danger.
Whereas if you had a camera it would have been different.’
One of the things he became fascinated with was the graffiti which he
saw as expressing much about the politics and emotions of the situation.
His most notable painting is Ulster Crucifixion, a triptych featuring a boy
hanging from a lamppost against a ground covered with graffiti. ‘One day
I saw a little boy playing on a lamppost, hanging from it, and I thought, it
looks just like he’s been crucified. So I gave him 50p to go back up and
hang there for a while and did a drawing of him.’
Locations and resources:
The artist would be happy to take part in the film. We can potentially take
Howard and the presenter back to Northern Ireland and to see Ulster
Crucifixion, which is in the collection of the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
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• Linda Kitson
Falklands, 1982
The official war artist with the Falklands Task Force, Linda Kitson
travelled to the South Atlantic on the QE2 and the SS Canberra and then
followed the British forces across San Carlos to Stanley. Over three
months she made more than 400 drawings in crayon. When she
returned to England these artworks were received without critical
enthusiasm, in part because they were seen as ‘only’ sketches and not
finished paintings. As the IWM web site records, ‘this in turn prompted
debate about public expectations of war art and its relevance to
contemporary life.’
‘You’re trusted the minute your presence is known, provided you use the
old-fashioned title of “Official War Artist”,’ she says now of her
experiences with the troops. “Historically, every soldier aged 19 knows
about war artists – it’s part of their tradition. And they’re about tradition.
That’s how they keep going.’
Locations and resources:
Sixty of the drawings remain in the collection of the IWM, and the artist
would be happy to take part. She also painted wall panels for the
Falkland Islands Memorial Chapel, which was inaugurated in May 2000.
Linda Kitson, Goose Green, 10 June 1982, 1982
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• The record of John Keane
In the summer of 1990 the painter John Keane was commissioned to be
the Imperial War Museum’s ‘official recorder’ to the Gulf. (Again, we
were not at war, so the term war artist was avoided.) In fact, he could
only secure access, via Bahrain, in February 1991, after which he spent
a month with British troops before the ground offensive. He then spent
five days in Kuwait City following the liberation.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
John Keane, Mickey Mouse at the Front, 1991
Throughout this time he used a camera and a video recorder
extensively, and then on his return to Britain he painted 35 canvases.
One of the paintings, Mickey Mouse at the Front, was seen as an explicit
critique of America’s role in the war.
Locations and resources:
John Keane would be pleased to take part in the film. His documentation
from Iraq is part of the Imperial War Museum film and photographic
collections.
• Peter Howson in Bosnia
Peter Howson made two visits to Bosnia in 1993, during which the BBC
made a Forty Minutes documentary about his time there and his friend
Ian McColl shot a video diary. The works that he painted on his return
prompted debate about the validity of scenes that the artist had
‘imagined’, specifically the canvas Croatian and Muslim which depicted a
rape scene. The work was a response to numerous accounts from rape
victims which Howson had encountered.
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There was further debate in the press when the Imperial War Museum
elected to take another painting into the collection rather than Croatian
and Muslim.
Locations and resources:
Howson continues to live and work in Glasgow and is prepared to be
involved in the film. His documentation of the Bosnia travels is in the
collections of the Imperial War Museum.
• Paul Seawright: Hidden
Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, the documentary
photographer Paul Seawright visited Afghanistan in the wake of the
London bombings of 2002. His potent images in muted colours of
devastated landscapes show mostly the aftermath of conflict – or its
potential in shots of live minefields. These are ‘art’ photographs far from
the frontline tradition of Robert Capa or Don McCullin and are rather
closer to nineteenth century images by Matthew Brady and Roger
Fenton. In this ‘spectacle of ruins’ is concealed much about modern
warfare.
Paul Seawright, Valley, 2002
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Locations and resources:
Seawright, who would be pleased to take part, has documentation of his
trip and the images are owned by the Imperial War Museum. They were
also published in an elegant book titled ‘Hidden’.
• An Afghan video game from Langlands and Bell
The duo Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell visited Afghanistan on an official
Imperial War Museum trip in October 2002. They documented their trip
with stills and digital video, including their journey to the former home of
Osama bin Laden at Daruntah, west of Jalalabad. There they took
measurements and stills and on their return they created an interactive
digital environment much like that familiar from video games. In The
House of Osama Bin Laden (2002), viewers can navigate through
whitewashed rooms, store cupboards and bunkers and even gaze out of
the windows at the surrounding countryside.
Locations and resources:
Illuminations has produced an ‘EYE’ film with the artists and we know
well the extensive documentation that is available from their trip. They
would be pleased to be part of this documentary.
• Steve McQueen: Queen and Country
The film and video artist Steve McQueen went to Iraq in the summer of
2003. But he found that his every move was determined by MOD
minders. ‘It was like a magical mystery tour,’ he has said, ‘They led me
by the hand. I couldn't investigate anything.’ Nor could he film anything
worthwhile, and a follow-up trip two years later was cancelled because of
security concerns.
Then, so the story goes, when he was licking the envelope of his tax
return, he thought of the work that became Queen and Country (2007): a
run of Royal Mail stamps featuring photographs of all the 115 British
soldiers who had died in the Iraq war.
Neither the MOD nor the Museum would help with contact details for the
families. So he hired a researcher and unofficially asked all of them for a
photograph and permission to include it in the artwork. 98 of those
originally approached agreed to help, 4 refused and the others did not
respond. And McQueen made these into samizdat stamps. Today, the
work has been achieved with the help of 137 families.
The work was first shown, installed in an archival cabinet of English oak,
at the Manchester Festival in 2007. Since then there has been a
campaign, including an online petition and support from many MPs, to
have the Royal Mail issue the stamps officially.
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'An official set of Royal Mail stamps,’ McQueen has said, ‘struck me
as an intimate but distinguished way of highlighting the sacrifice of
individuals in defence of our national ideals. The stamps would focus
on individual experience without euphemism. It would form an
intimate reflection of national loss that would involve the families of
the dead and permeate the everyday – every household and every
office.'
The Art Fund this year purchased the work for the IWM’s collection. But
McQueen and others continue to want the stamps to circulate as widely
as possible, so that they can properly fulfil their the commemorative
function – and the commemorative function of so much of the art of war.
Locations and resources:
Access to the artist, who has since completed the prize-winning feature
film Hunger about Bobby Sands, and to Queen and Country can be
negotiated.
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Beyond the screen
• We would create a lively and very regular blog throughout the
production, with numerous links to the galleries and other locations
where the original artworks can be seen.
• An interactive online map could also guide viewers to appropriate
locations.
• The films will have defined sections, which can be used as shorts on Sky
Arts and online, and also perhaps as podcasts or as elements on
YouTube and other video sites.
• Illuminations would be keen to publish a DVD of the series
• It is possible that a relationship can be established with the Imperial War
Museum, which could result in joint marketing of the series sand perhaps
a special display of items from their collections. This has not yet been
discussed with the museum.
Issues
We do not anticipate any legal, compliance or logistical concerns beyond
the usual problems of rights clearances within the budget. Many of the
artists and their estates are, frustratingly, represented by DACS, and great
care will be taken to ensure proper relations with the collection agency and
with the estates as well as with the museums and galleries involved.
Also, the Imperial War Museum is undergoing major building work which
may make access to certain works less easy than we might ideally like.
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