Official War Art

Official War Art. Art sponsored by the British Government during the First and Second World Wars to make a visual record of all aspects of the war effort for information and propaganda purposes. In the First World War the work was directed by the Ministry of Information, which was advised by a committee drawn from distinguished figures in the art world and public life, among them Campbell Dodgson, keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, and Eric MacLagan, later director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1916 the Ministry launched the Official War Artists scheme, under which artists were recruited, with appropriate military ranks, to serve as chroniclers (the Germans already had a similar scheme in operation). The first artist to be commissioned was Honorary 2nd Lieutenant Muirhead Bone, who left for France on 16 August 1916 and toured the front in a chauffeur-driven car. Many others soon followed, among them some of the most illustrious British artists of the time. They included men who had already been serving in the armed forces, such as Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer, and others who were too old for active duty. The works produced varied enormously in style and quality (the committee was admirably broad in its choice of artists) and included imaginative evocations of the war as well as sober factual records. There were many portraits of participants, but two of the most notable portraitists who worked as Official War Artists—Orpen and Sargent—showed a different and unexpected side to their talents, powerfully depicting the horrors they saw.

In the autumn of 1939, soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, the Ministry of Information appointed Kenneth Clark chairman of a small group that became known as the War Artists' Advisory Committee (Muirhead Bone was one of the members). It met weekly at the National Gallery, of which Clark was director, and its functions were principally ‘to draw up a list of artists qualified to record the War at home and abroad … [and] … to advise on the selection of artists from this list for war purposes and on the arrangement for their employment’. Clark regarded his work on the committee as ‘my only worthwhile activity’ during the war: ‘We employed every artist whom we thought had any merit, not because we supposed that we would get records of the war more truthful or striking than those supplied by photography, but because it seemed a good way of preventing artists being killed’ (Ravilious was one of the rare fatalities). Several painters who had been Official War Artists in the First World War were employed in the same capacity in the Second, among them Nash and Spencer, but the Committee mainly employed men of a younger generation. The terms in which they were employed varied: some were given salaried posts for a specific period, while others were given one-off commissions. The Committee also encouraged artists, whether serving or civilian, to submit pictures for consideration. Generally the commissions in the Second World War were on a smaller scale than those in the First, with many works being executed in watercolour (Spencer's huge canvases of shipbuilding on the Clyde are a conspicuous exception). Henry Moore's drawings of Londoners sheltering from air raids in Underground stations are perhaps the best known of all the works produced under the auspices of Clark's Committee.

In both wars women were employed as Official War Artists on the home front, notably the animal painter Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958) in the First and Laura Knight in the Second. A huge number of works was produced. The largest collection (about 10,000 items) is in the Imperial War Museum, London, which was opened in 1920 and moved to its present home (the former Royal Bethlehem Hospital) in 1936. The Tate has another major collection, and many provincial museums have good examples.

Since the Second World War the tradition of Official War Art has been maintained on a lesser scale by the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum. Linda Kitson (1945– ) went on its behalf to the Falkland Islands during the war there against Argentina in 1982, for example, and Peter Howson (1958– ) went to Bosnia in 1993. His exhibition ‘War in Bosnia’ at the Imperial War Museum the following year attracted considerable attention because of its unsparing depiction of atrocities: ‘Now that I've actually seen dead bodies, and guts and brains, and starving children, it has made the work authentic.’