War Art, British Official

I

Introduction

War Art, British Official, art commissioned by the British government for propaganda, record, and commemorative purposes during the two world wars, first under the auspices of a special department known simply as Wellington House, that later became the Department of Information (DoI), and subsequently the Ministry of Information (MoI).

II

The Purpose of Official War Art

The official war artists were commissioned to create eye-witness accounts of life at the military front and behind the lines, naval and air subjects, as well as transport, hospitals, industry, and agriculture on the Home Front. Portraits of key personalities, both military and political, were also commissioned. This conscious adherence to the eye-witness account was a new and radical principle that distinguished official war art from 19th-century military art and history painting, which tended to reconstruct a fictional, heroic narrative around military exploits or significant episodes in the long history of war.

Wellington House, under its director C. F. W. Masterman, conducted the propaganda war primarily on a literary front, although increasing use was made of photography and film. However, it soon became apparent that photography alone could not satisfy the public demand for war pictures, and a committee was set up within Wellington House to commission artists to go to the Front. The men who commissioned the official war artists were themselves artists, writers, and intellectuals, with broad cultural sympathies—they included the novelist Arnold Bennett and Campbell Dodgson from the British Museum. Although the word “official” seems to imply that the work of the war artists was controlled or approved according to some bureaucratic requirement, in general they were free to interpret what they saw according to their own light. Some critics have taken the view that progressive styles of painting were undermined by pressure from the MoI to “record” the war, but neither the archives nor even the paintings themselves support this view. It is more likely that the experience of war itself enforced a retreat from abstraction that would have occurred anyway in the course of time.

III

War Art of World War I

The Scottish etcher and draughtsman Muirhead Bone was sent to France on August 16, 1916. The success of his work led to the employment of others, including Eric Kennington and Paul Nash, who had fought on the Western Front, and C. R. W. Nevinson, who had been an ambulance driver. Artists from an older generation, such as John Lavery and William Orpen, were employed on Home Front or naval subjects, or operated, like Orpen, behind the enemy lines.

In February 1918, Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian entrepreneur, became the minister of information. The previous year, Beaverbrook had set up the Canadian War Memorials Fund (CWMF) to commission paintings, many of them from British artists. Once in government, he created the British War Memorials Committee along similar lines, which he staffed with many of the same expert advisers who had been employed at the DoI or the CWMF. With artistic aims to the fore, and ambitious plans to form an art collection that would stand as a memorial to the Great War, the Committee's choice of artists was bold and eclectic, and ranged across all the current tendencies in modern British art, from Augustus John and William Orpen to Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash, who painted one of the iconic paintings of World War I, We Are Making a New World.

IV

War Art of World War II

Even before started in September 1939, plans were afoot to employ artists in a propaganda role—Paul Nash himself attempted to organize such a scheme. A War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) was created by the MoI, and met for the first time at the National Gallery in London in November 1939. The WAAC was chaired by Sir Kenneth Clark, the gallery's director, and met monthly throughout the war until December 1945. Its ostensible purpose was to provide propaganda, or at least publicity, for the war effort, but Clark later admitted that employing artists to record the war “seemed a good way of preventing (them) being killed”. The principle of the eye-witness account was maintained, but the use of photographs for reference purposes was accepted.

The WAAC commissioned over 300 artists during the course of the war. A few key artists, such as Graham Sutherland and Eric Ravilious (who was killed on active service in 1942), were given salaried positions and military rank if serving overseas. The majority of artists were specially employed on a number of specific commissions. Henry Moore was one of these: having drawn his sketches of people sleeping in the London Underground to Clark's attention, he was commissioned to make more drawings on this theme for the WAAC. Independent submissions from artists serving in the armed forces were encouraged, and the Committee often intervened to help them obtain free time to make works. Clark's role in ensuring that some artists with an original and imaginative vision were employed was crucial to the success of the scheme, but most of the artists who constituted Britain's small abstract and surrealist avant-garde did not seek to participate, and Clark did not encourage them, in the belief that they should be left to pursue their own paths. This remains a debatable point in the history of official war art in Britain.

Both technologically and culturally, World War II was vastly different from the Great War, and naturally this produced a different kind of war art. The aerial bombardment of British towns and cities inflicted war on the civilian population, and there is an inward-looking intensity to art before 1943, until the tide of war began to turn in the Allies’ favour. Subsequently, artists were sent to North Africa, the Middle East, and Italy, and eventually to Europe with the D-Day invasion. More women artists were employed, although not overseas, with the exception of Mary Keppel, who produced some moving drawings of the plight of refugees in Germany after the surrender.