The Art of War - Esther

“Paint slows the narrative down. A photograph can only capture one moment in time, whereas you can include a distillation of many moments with a painting”

Arabella Dorman, war artist

In the UK, we mark the ending of the First World War each year on Armistice Day, the 11th November often with a silence. There is a lot of store set by the time & date: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Since we are in the 22nd year of the 21st Century, I thought today we could have a look at some interesting war art. 

Not all artists of war are official war artists. Sometimes a war artist will be appointed by an official body in order to depict a certain feature of a conflict, at times for the purposes of propaganda. In visually recording the different aspects of war, you’d imagine there must surely be something of the artist & his/her opinions or experiences brought to the work. Nevertheless, war art is seen as evidence, as educational, portraying many facets of wars & conflicts – the emotional & physical experiences of the humans involved or the ones who have been inadvertently caught up in it.

Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904), The Apotheosis of War, 1871

There have been official war artists in Britain since WWI, when Glasgow’s Muirhead Bone was commissioned as the first UK war artist in 1916. Previously artists like Paul Nash had been recording their experiences visually & when it was clear the work was in the public interest & collections began to emerge, a range of resources were gathered. The Imperial War Museum (founded in 1917 & who still commissions war art today) at first accumulated artefacts including art related to WWI to memorialise & record wartime events & life. Collections by some of the most prominent & innovative artists of the day were housed at the Imperial War Museum. It was a little haphazard, this being the first time such collections had been created here, but in WWII, more than three hundred artists received commissions for collection. The War Artists’ Advisory Committee emerged to develop a thorough creative record of British war time. The arising collections toured the UK & beyond, then in 1946 they were dispersed throughout the UK & Commonwealth countries.

Some war art is clearly designed to inform & provide facts, some to touch on the more distressing elements which naturally provoke an emotional response in all who view it. All is a search for a truth & all concludes that the overwhelming power of war is greater than all of us & good for absolutely nothing. 

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Gassed, 1919

One of the more ghastly aspects of war is & was poison gas. Mustard gas not only affects breathing & eventual death but tortures the victims with blindness, burns & cancers. It was first used as a chemical weapon in WWI, creating large blisters on the skin & lungs & is in fact a fine mist rather than a gas. The figures in this painting are almost life-size, which gives some idea of the image’s enormous scale. It shows casualties helping each other towards a field hospital, as victims lie nearby & another group of barely-walking wounded move in line towards them. Particularly poignant for me is the third soldier from the front, newly blinded overstepping onto the boards, clearly having been instructed by the helper in dungarees to step “up.” In spite of his crippling injuries, he takes care not to trip & fall. The photograph from 1918 shows a group supporting each other in the same way from the Battle of Estaires.

Eric Kennington (1888-1960), The Kensingtons at Laventie, 1915

Sadly the World Wars were not far apart & some war artists worked them both. Kennington was one of these artists & in the photograph, he is painting Flight Lieutenant John Mungo-Park, a fighter pilot sadly shot down & killed in 1941. There’s a disturbingly modern feel to Kennington’s painting of a platoon of soldiers in various poses. Despite standing together, they seem lost & alone as individuals, as suggested by the fact they are each facing in different directions. The white of the wall is reflected by the white of the snow on the ground, which appears to add to their detachment from their surroundings. Kennington uses metallic paint in this work & check out his incredible signature, bottom right.

Muirhead Bone (1876-1953), Tanks, 1918

This drawing (print?) of tanks navigating trenches & barbed wire looks like something straight out of a futuristic sci-fi dystopia. The photo of Lieutenant Muirhead Bone himself, up to his shins in mud was taken at Maricourt in 1916 during the battle of the Somme. He had petitioned widely for the formation of an official war artists organisation & was given an honorary rank & salary to One gets the feeling they were keen to get rid of him, as they packed him off to France to work on the Western Front. Many of his war art pieces depict architectural or construction sites & his lithographs of Clydeside shipyards are perhaps the most stunning pieces of propaganda (not to mention fundraising items for the war effort) you’ll ever see.

Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), A Battery Position in a Wood, 1918

Of course Wyndam Lewis was also a writer & the co-founder of the Vorticist art movement. Here we see the stuff of trench warfare, a mixture of the day-to-day ordinariness & cramped & unpleasant conditions in his stylised approach. 

Paul Nash (1889-1946), We Are Making a New World, 1918

Was there ever a more sarcastic title throwing shade at the whole futility of war? Nash’s “renewed” landscape is all the more sardonic when we understand that we’re building this world on the bodies of fallen soldiers as a cold, wan sun materialises. The tiny specks of light dotted around the piece mock us all; we can expect nothing new to rise or grow from what’s left of the soil.

Doris Zinkeisen (1898-1991), Human Laundry, Belsen, April 1945

Doris was primarily known for theatre & costume design, however she spent a period of time as a nurse in London, tending to victims of the Blitz. It was actually after the war that she was employed to record for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee & she created images such as this in the aftermath of liberation. According to her son, what she saw - & smelled – gave her nightmares for the rest of her days.

Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), Devastation, 1941, City, Panorama of Ruin, 1941

Sutherland was commissioned as a war artist from 1940 & I think his works are some of the most enduring & ageless war art images. To me his works are timeless; they could represent any major conflict. They are universal cities turned to ruins. Perhaps this quality is best described by Sutherland himself:

“The sordidness and the anguish implied by some of the scenes of devastation will cause one to invent forms which are the pictorial essence of sordidness and anguish... Dirty-looking forms, tormented forms, forms which take on an almost human aspect.”

Ethel Léontine Gabain (1883–1950), A Child Bomb Victim Receiving Penicillin Treatment, 1944

One of the special jobs of the official war artist was to record the everyday lives of civilians & the suffering they endured. This piece was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee after conversations Gabain had with Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin.

Peter Kalhkof (1933-2014), Stealth, 1995

Though not an official war artist, here Kalhkof has created a compelling & fascinating example of contemporary war art. His piece has a modern, disturbing & almost abstract, which more or less describes the purpose of stealth aircraft itself! The tiny triangles represent the way the plane absorbs any attempt to locate it. It all speaks of the ingenuity that goes into military operations & technology of killing people.

Arabella Dorman (b. 1975), Faces of the Fallen

I feel as if this image of soldiers killed in Afghanistan speaks for itself. I’ll leave the final word to Dorman herself:

“To tell the story, you’ve got to take risks.”