At the Imperial War Museum

These are some highlights from a recent visit to the upper decks of the Imperial War Museum to see the recently opened Blavatnik Galleries.  This has enabled the museum to display a more complete survey of their visual arts collection to include film and photography alongside paintings.  A decent selection of the museum’s major paintings was supported by a large group of lesser known pictures from the hidden depths of what is a vast collection of works.  It’s always fascinating to see what emerges from a museum store after a deep curatorial dive and many unjustly neglected paintings (often by female artists) have been rescued from oblivion.

Percy Wyndham Lewis,   A Battery Shelled  (1919)

Lewis had a remarkably inventive visual imagination - his Cubist-inspired bio-mechanical figures were the perfect combatants in a war that was increasingly an inhumane  technological struggle for supremacy.  On the left a stylised trio of officers, two seem lost in thought, only one observes the incoming fire and the frantic efforts of the troops in a shattered landscape on the ground.  Crates of unused shells look terrifyingly vulnerable to enemy fire.

Paul Nash,   The Menin Road  (1919)

Nash served as an officer in this part of the Western Front in early 1917, later that year he returned as a War Artist and made the sketches and studies that would form the basis of this painting completed in London in 1919.  His experiences were condensed into this tormented landscape, blown apart by the exchange of explosive forces.  For an artist whose sensibility was largely formed by a reverence for the natural world, this sight was the ultimate affront. Displaced concrete defences and curls of corrugated iron are scattered on the cratered woodland floor, to which a handful of splintered tree stumps remain anchored.  All under a turbulent sky pierced by searchlight beams, illuminating the scene in a sickly, unnatural glare.

Anna Airy,   Shell Forge, Hackney Marshes  (1918)

With so many male artists overseas, female painters landed some major commissions recording the Home Front.  Anna Airy, an established Slade-trained realist painter in her mid-thirties spent a year travelling the country painting the spectacle of heavy industry in the service of the war effort - manufacturing munitions, assembling aircraft and extracting domestic gas from coking coal.  Her command of perspective and ability to build a coherent composition in challenging environments were every bit as effective as similar works by the much more celebrated Terence Cuneo.

Douglas Fox-Pitt,   Indian Army Injured in Hospital in Dome, Brighton  (1918)

Fox-Pitt was a son of the founder of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, blessed with competent drawing skills he drifted into the fringes of London’s art world, linking with the painters of the Camden Town Group. In this painting he records a curious wartime episode when the dome of the Brighton Pavilion was commandeered as a hospital for the treatment of Indian and Asian troops injured on the Western Front. It’s a boldly coloured and attractively naive composition - an elevated viewpoint enhances the artist’s pattern making impulse.

John Wood,   ARP in Jamaica  (1941)

Five female nurses of the Order of St John in training in Jamaica. Commissioned as part of the scheme for "War Pictures by Native-born Colonial artists", 1941

Ethel Gabain,   Bunyan-Stannard First Aid Envelope for Burns Victims  (1943)

Sequential four part image showing different aircrew at work with protective silk envelopes shielding their injured hands.  A varied selection of her portraiture (mostly theatrical subjects) and workplace studies from the war can be seen here.

John Singer Sargent,  Gassed (1919)

Sargent’s monumental picture of the victims of mustard gas dominates the space.  Blindfolded and carrying their weapons they process across the picture plain with hands resting on the shoulder of the man in front. Another line of injured men sprawl in the foreground.  In August 1918 Sargent was witness to just such a scene on a day when hundreds of injured men were led from the trenches for treatment behind the lines.  The epic scale and the cinematic presentation make a powerful statement about the random cruelties of armed conflict.

 

New York City Landmarks No. 4 - USS Recruit

This was a New York landmark that came and went within the space of 30 months but in its brief existence it made a major statement. Constructed from timber by the US Navy, it was a full size replica of a Dreadnought Battleship located in Union Square on the boundary between Lower and Midtown Manhattan.  Commissioned into the Navy in September 1917 with a captain and 30 crew members its function was to serve as a central recruiting station for the entire city. On board was crew accommodation, officers’ quarters and a suite of offices.  Fully armed with a complement of wooden replica guns, the ship stood ready to bombard the neighbouring real estate.  Visitors were dwarfed by its great mass but turned up in great numbers, attracted by an ever changing programme of patriotic and social events, including concerts and dances.  Over the next 2 years, more than 25,000 volunteers were recruited for service in the Great War.  When the end finally arrived in March 1920, the ship was dismantled with the intention of moving it to Coney Island - a plan that was abandoned when it was calculated that the cost of reassembly greatly exceeded the value of the salvaged materials.

The postcard view includes two prominent buildings that are now landmarks in their own right - in the centre is the Germania Life Insurance building (now a hotel) and to the left, the Everett Building of 1908. The headquarters of the US Communist Party was elsewhere in the square and it was a popular place for organised labour demonstrations.  Frank Dobias wrote a few helpful facts on the reverse and posted it (presumably inside an envelope) to an address in New Zealand, suggesting that it might have been an example of postcard exchange, a popular pastime in the early decades of the last century. This was a part of the general mania for postcards (that died away after the Great War) and involved collectors making contact with total strangers in far off countries in the hope that their collections could be mutually enhanced by swapping examples from their respective home towns. Something like it still happens, even into the digital age.  The post concludes with postcard images of real battleships and an overview of Union Square without a wooden ship.

 

John Hassall - Poster King

John Hassall is having a moment.  There’s a comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner (ending on August 29) accompanied by a new book, The Life and Art of the Poster King by Lucinda Gosling (Unicorn, 2021).  This recognition is long overdue - there has been a persistent reluctance on the part of museums to exhibit the work of graphic artists whose output fell, for the most part into the category of what used to be called commercial art.  The sense that the association of art and advertising is unworthy of close study never quite goes away, along with the gulf in status between Fine Art (engages the higher faculties) and Advertising Art (vaguely disreputable, appeals to the coarser instincts). Curiously as state patronage of the arts declines the art world has been forced into an ever closer funding relationship with the world of business and finance whose tolerance for sponsoring work that questions their activities often wears thin resulting in hidden pressures to focus on work that more closely aligns with corporate interests.  In this context the straightforwardly transactional nature of the work of artists like Hassall can seem less compromised.

The book is superb - the author has unearthed some rarely seen items and chosen to display in depth rather than showcase prime (and often over-familiar) examples. The selection of thumbnail images is generous and judicious and gives a much better impression of the range of Hassall’s output than I’ve ever seen before. Two column text blocks and visual material are well balanced and make for clarity of design. Pictorial boards, illustrated endpapers and a stitched-in bookmark make an excellent package and the absence of a dust-wrapper is something to celebrate.  Hassall’s productivity was a match for Tom Purvis and some of his drawing has the toughness and muscularity of that of Purvis.

Hassall produced all the artwork for this colouring book for children in support of the Belgian Relief Fund in 1914.  The Belgian nation has never been so popular with the British public as it was in the first year of the Great War.  An intensive propaganda campaign in the popular press, demonising the German invaders for the ruthless cruelty inflicted on the civilian population created a great wave of public sympathy, of which this publication was one manifestation.  It is striking to see the extent to which it combined philanthropy with commercial interests - every page had a business sponsor whose consumer products were publicised in Hassall’s drawings in the hope that their virtues would be embedded in young minds as their clumsy brushwork stuttered across the page.  It was presented as an alphabetic sequence with accompanying versification.  Allusions to military campaigns can be found but for the most part the patriotic note is one of restraint.  Given the audience, images of children predominate and the war is very much off stage. None are especially memorable with the possible exception of the sturdy British youth who poses defiantly in his Pesco underwear with hairbrush at the ready, fully prepared to die for King and Country.