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LECTURE VISIONS OF WAR & PEACE Tenth Anniversary Lecture contributed by the Literature & Humanities Group, chaired by Dr Peter Rex Valentine Paul Gough, Dean Dept. Art Media & Design, University West of England, 24 September 2003, The speaker stated his basic theme "Why Paint War which is such a horrific subject" when art, for most people, is associated with beauty and truth. In 1941 Steven Spender said people in 1981 would ask, "What did War look like. No amount of description or documentation will answer them, nor will big formal compositions like the battle pictures found in palaces and even photographs that tell us so much. They leave out the colour and peculiar feeling of events in these extraordinary years. Only the artists heightened powers of perception can recognise which elements in a scene can be picked for posterity, and as new subjects saturate his imagination they create a new style, so that from the destruction of war something of lasting value emerges. " The main purpose of commissioning war art was propaganda information sent to neutral countries by The War Office, and for war culture and posterity, thus like state art it was partly censored. The speakers first example was 1st & 2ndWW artist Muirhead –Bone, etcher not painter, who turned previously dull routine recording into engaging complexly detailed pictures of grandeur, by meticulous draughmanship. In His 2WW picture "St Brides and the City After the Fire", measuring 77x44 inches, was sufficiently detailed to be used as evidence of bomb damage. Nevinson on the other hand, a member of the Slade vorticist group, stylised by cubist fractured shapes both men and machine resulting in a remarkable unified and bleak atmosphere so typical of war. These two artists demonstrated the extremes of illustration and interpretation. Nevinson also drew from the air and used film. In one of his most memorable paintings of retreating French troops and lorries on an undulating road Nevinson had had to repaint the traffic for right hand driving such were the requirements of authenticity and censorship. In spite of their abstraction Nevinsons vorticist War paintings seemed to capture the mood of the time and were very popular both with the public and military themselves. War now became industrialised with tanks big guns and lorries. Photography in the First W.W. was difficult due to unwieldy large plate cameras, photographs were manipulated, and negatives superimposed thus undermining their authenticity. Much information came from amateur’s diaries and sketches such as those by Rev Lomax. These personal statements gave much information of the difficulties of trench warfare. The speaker showed Studio magazine’s Long lists of Artists including Paul Nash and Eric Kennington trying to get into the action, as there were no art commissions or materials at home. The Speaker quoted their pleading letters. From slides of Nash’s "Donkey Track" and "The Menin Road" the speaker showed how War changed Paul Nash from a limp Pre-Raphaelite type painter into a major English war artist. "Don’t miss a war if there is one going" said gung-ho Wyndham Lewis. In one of the speaker’s own drawings of a landing craft he recounted how he had to straighten out the dents, before the censors accepted it. In another slide the speaker showed a unique bitter Protest drawing by Hyram Sturdy in comic strip style with the enemy on the Right and east and the British on the Left and west, with text in the middle. Sturdy shows in these series of drawings, his friend George, asked by his own sergeant to put a sandbag on the parapet and as he did so being picked off and shot by a German sniper. The speaker then showed a section of Stanley Spencer’s Sandham Memorial Chappell at Burghclere. Drawn from his reminiscences as a medical orderly at Beaufort Military Hospital in Bristol and the Macedonian Campaigne. Somehow Spencer seemed to see past the horror and destruction of war and by pictorial decoration elevate it to a celebratory almost domestic level as in the "Map Reading and Bed Making", shown.
This was typically English, lacking the realism of a Goya or Grosz for which some criticised him. Also mentioned were Pipers "Somerset Place", Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Albert Richards. More recently in the 1982 Falklands war the speaker showed a drawing of the first female war artist Linda Kitson of a military hairdressing salon. Like Stanley Spencer she had concentrated on the less shocking aspects of war and afterwards was quoted as saying, " I had to decide what aspects of war I should record, my brief was to record common experiences, but I decided that the horrifying sights of parts of human bodies, although pictorially sensational and relevant, were not part of my brief, neither were the war graves. Should I have used more shock tactics"?
The ensuing litigation by the Disney Corporation was de-fused by a photograph produced by Keane showing this juxtaposition of images (a Mickey Mouse model in a supermarket trolley) during a looting incident, proving this was a real incident and not something contrived by the artist. In conclusion Paul Gough considered the purposes of War Memorials, not just to remember those who gave their lives for it, but also to celebrate victory or peace or to enable us to forget war. This included his own experiments, making a false Cenotaph in Bristol, during the time of the war in Afghanistan and purposely allowing the public to deface it with comments and graffiti in a way, which would be seen as desecration in normal circumstances. His last slide was the Thiepval Memorial Arch by Edwin Lutyens 1922, which was now being added to by a Visitors Centre showing the need to keep the memory of the 1stt WW alive so that, as Steven Spender said "something of lasting value may be learnt."
Subjects brought up for questions included- Jack Chalker the "Railway Artist" and his dispassionate objectivity in recording appalling images. The speaker said he once had the job of teaching soldiers how to draw under fire for a TV documentary, adding that David Bomberg could not stop being a painter and was therefore not a good war artist. But some other draughtsmen, like Paul Nash were made as artists by the extremity of war. The speaker was asked if he had purposely left out demonisation of the enemy, he said he had not included propaganda posters but had mentioned censorship, such as that of showing British dead as opposed to German dead which was permitted. Nevinsons faces of ordinary men in the street were deemed not acceptable. Interestingly enough the Royal Academy like the Germans were obsessed with the blonde Arian youth Were conventional artists materials still used? The speaker said oil on canvas and bronze and quoted John Keene’s Collages using banknotes etc. The speaker recalled when he drew a tank with charcoal and smudged the back with charcoal dust this was interpreted by the commissioners as real exhaust fumes on the paper. Were the horrors of war seen differently if it was considered to be just? There were fourteen categories of war art from the home front to the Western front. However ghastly, images of what was thought to be a just war at the time were more acceptable as in the First WW. One member suggested photographs particularly in the 2nd WW competed with paintings and were more relevant. The speaker commented that although photographs used to be manipulated as in the 1st WW due to technical difficulties, with modern cameras in the hands of photographers such as Don Macullin manipulation was not necessary. The compositions were created spontaneously through the lens and were works of art in themselves. Peter Rex Valentine |
