war artists. During the
First World War scores of artists, some already famous, were put into uniform and encouraged to paint scenes of war, with interesting results, both as art and as propaganda. Many striking pictures resulted, and a few great ones.
The propaganda possibilities of war art were perceived early, both in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. Both these regimes, and painters working in
Franco's Spain during the
Spanish Civil War, had developed by 1939 a style which might be called Fascist Realism—strikingly similar to the Socialist Realism then insisted upon in the USSR, but with warplanes and tanks instead of dynamos and tractors.
The British mobilized artists again in 1939. Some stalwarts from the previous war, notably Sir Muirhead Bone, Eric Kennington, Paul Nash, and Norman Wilkinson, were still available: Wilkinson, who had been present at the Dardanelles on 25 April 1915, painted the
Dunkirk evacuation; Nash, who had painted the unforgettable
Menin Road outside Ypres in 1917, painted both the
battle of Britain and the pitched air battles which took place during the
strategic air offensive against Germany.
There was hardly ever room for an artist on the spot during tactically critical actions, whether on land or sea or in the air; though Ronald Searle, then a private in the Royal Engineers, was able to sketch from a corner of the room the act of British surrender at
Singapore in February 1942.
Pace Edvard Munch, it is not easy to depict fear on canvas; but Edward Ardizzone proved that you can capture both boredom and apprehension, in his sketches of shelterers during air raids, and Henry Moore made some exceptionally moving and memorable drawings of Londoners sheltering in underground railway stations, which provided motifs for much of his later sculpture.
Soviet, American, German, Italian, and Japanese as well as British artists were awake to the new visual possibilities presented by the war in the air, as well as on the ground; numerous striking pictures resulted. Such artists as Aleksandr Deineka, in his
The Defence of Sevastopol 1942, were able to combine the strictest rules of Socialist Realism with a passion for displaying defenders of the USSR in hand-to-hand combat. Japanese war art looks somewhat stilted to western eyes, in conformity with western judgements of the restraint with which no Japanese artist could then help painting; the artists felt as strongly about their subjects as any westerner could.
War art was both of artistic and of historical value. Quite apart from their merit as works of art, which was often high, these pictures could provide striking evidence of what life in wartime looked like to a trained, intelligent observer; observers in later ages can benefit directly, by using their own eyes. Obviously, the pictures dealt much more with life in wartime than with acts of war; but life in wartime remains a matter of historical interest, for which these pictures provide useful evidence.
Another important wartime role for artists lay in the design of posters, often a useful arm of propaganda. The German slogan
Feind hört mit! was echoed by the English ‘The enemy is listening’. Cartoonists on both sides busied themselves in warnings of the dangers of careless talk; war finance depended largely on loans, which in turn depended largely on the efforts of poster designers. See also
culture sections of the major powers.
M. R. D. Foot
Bibliography
Foot, M. R. D. , Art and War (London, 1990).
McCormick, K., and and Perry, H. D. , Images of War (London, 1991).
