War through Artist’s Eyes

One of my favour­ite books to look through when I was a kid (in the 50s) was a col­lec­tion of the works of the WWII War Artists — which included Paul Nash and Henry Moore (Moore’s massive, sculp­ted draw­ings of sleep­ers in the Tube shel­ters). I don’t think I’d real­ised that war artists had also been appoin­ted in WWI but there’s cur­rently (but only until the end of the month) an exhib­i­tion of their work at the Imper­ial War Museum North, in Salford.

Most of the paint­ings (plus a few sculp­tures) were very spe­cific as to date and place, and it had enabled the cur­at­ors to set pan­els beside each paint­ing with quo­ta­tions from people who had been there, or nearby, or in a sim­ilar situ­ation. Paul Nash did a lot of work in this war too, but oth­ers were new to me and quite a rev­el­a­tion, espe­cially Nev­in­son, who had a very avant-garde style. They weren’t afraid to con­vey the hor­ror, little of it could have been called pro­pa­ganda. There was one paint­ing of the wounded of the Somme leav­ing in ambu­lances from Char­ing Cross sta­tion, while the news­pa­per plac­ards pro­claimed “Vic­tory on the Somme.” Given that the paint­ing was fin­ished some time after the event, by which time the “vic­tory” was known to be a defeat, this can­not be innocent.

The rest of the museum, apart from being gobsmack­ingly odd archi­tec­tur­ally, con­cen­trates on the 20^th Cen­tury and traces the his­tory of the vari­ous wars in which GB has been involved. Incred­ibly mov­ing, and ulti­mately depress­ing — how can the human race spend so much time, money and lives on a destruct­ive activ­ity which seems to deny our humanity?