War art.

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War art.

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Gray, Anna

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7,307 words

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Article

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English

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Australia

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War art
by Anne Gray

Art on the theme of war has a history almost as long as picture-making. War scenes were painted in the paleolithic period and images of warriors can be found in Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. Likewise, images of fighting occur in Aboriginal art created before White settlement. Much early colonial art includes reference to the activities of the British forces in Australia and to the pre-Federation armed forces. War art extends to contemporary work that reflects on past wars, and to that which comments on the effect of past and present wars on people today. It includes work that makes a statement about war in general.

Artists have depicted war for a variety of reasons, none of which are mutually exclusive. Many made drawings in trenches or POW camps to while away the time and distract their minds from the conditions around them. Some, such as Horace Moore-Jones at Gallipoli, portrayed the landscape to provide useful information about the terrain to assist their compatriots. Others, such as George Lambert in the First World War and Murray Griffin and Louis Kahan in the Second, made drawings of fellow soldiers as gifts for them to send home to relatives — and as a means of achieving a small measure of immortality. Still others created visual jokes about the situation, drawings to entertain their mates and to help them momentarily forget the horrors of war. Some made paintings because visual ideas about the war preoccupied them: Lambert remarked:
I must go on painting Palestine subjects, not because there is a readier market for them than my pre-Palestine work, but because they are fixed in my brain by the impressions received out there.
Some wanted to record the events that were taking place so that those back home, and future generations, would know what had happened.

The Australian official war art scheme began during the First World War. It had its conceptual origins in The Anzac Book (1916), a book containing stories, poems and illustrations contributed by the men on Gallipoli, and edited by the official war correspondent, and later historian, C. E. W. Bean (q.v.). The illustrations were drawn in the trenches, with the contributors, David Barker, Frank Crozier, Otho Hewitt and Cyril Leyshon White, working with whatever material was available. These artists were not official war artists, but serving soldiers taken off their usual duties to work on the project. This set a precedent for the secondment of artists to depict the activities of Australian troops during the war. In 1917 Bean established a War Records Section which collected papers, photographs and battlefield relics. This section also commissioned artists to portray the war. Bean believed that artists who had participated in the fighting would provide the best portrayals of events, and consequently sought applications from serving soldiers. The five servicemen selected by Bean — George Benson, Frank Crozier, Will Longstaff, Louis McCubbin and James Scott — received training as camoufleurs (i.e. camouflage painters) and became the Australian War Records Section artists. They were provided with sketch pads and depicted events around them when time permitted. J. S. McDonald was appointed and trained as a camouflage artist, but he became ill and never took up his position. Daryl Lindsay was a medical artist at the Queen Mary Hospital at Sidcup, Kent, in England.

While Bean was establishing his scheme, the Australian expatriate artists Will Dyson and Arthur Streeton asked for permission to go to the front to work as war artists. Streeton lobbied for a program that would employ a range of artists, to be run along the lines of those established by the British (in July 1916) and the Canadians (in November 1916). His list of names of potential war artists included that of one woman, Dora Meeson. The official war art scheme, run by the Australian High Commission with Bean as adviser, developed out of this artist-based campaign.

Will Dyson had a well-established reputation as a war cartoonist when, in December 1916, he received permission to go to France to make sketches of the Australian troops. He did so in a civilian capacity, without pay until May 1917. When the Australian war art scheme began, he became the first official war artist. Dyson’s terms of employment were vague, but he regarded his output as government property, and handed most of the drawings he made at the front to the Australian government at the end of his tour of duty. In addition to Dyson, nine of Australia’s best male expatriate artists living in Britain, with a range of specialist interests and abilities, received appointments: George Bell, Charles Bryant, A. Henry Fullwood, George Lambert, Fred Leist, John Longstaff, H. Septimus Power, James Quinn and Arthur Streeton. No artist was appointed in, or from, Australia. Generally, the artists were expected to produce at least 25 works during the course of three months. They were free to draw or paint whatever subject, in whatever medium, on whatever size paper or canvas, in whatever style suited their talent and interest best. But they were expected to work within their specialist interests: Streeton, for instance, to paint landscapes, and Longstaff and Quinn to paint portraits. They were appointed as honorary lieutenants and initially were paid £1 a day for the duration of their contract, but by December 1917 they received £2 a day. This was more than the pay received by officers of an equivalent rank (lieutenant) in the AIF. All, except Lambert, served on the Western Front where they were attached to a division of the AIF. Lambert served in Palestine in 1918, and accompanied Bean on the Australian Historical Mission to Gallipoli in 1919, at which time he was granted the honorary rank of captain.

Will Dyson’s drawings from the Western Front express compassion for the serviceman; they vividly portray the soldiers’ exhaustion as well as their wry humour. Many artists came from a landscape tradition and were inspired by a love of nature. Moreover, the terrain was a major influence on events in this war: the topography of Gallipoli was as much the enemy as were the Turks; the unending flatness of the area around Ypres had a decisive impact on the action on the Western Front; and the vastness and intense heat of Palestine provided a constant challenge to those serving there. But the ways in which the artists responded to the land and the messages they conveyed about it were diverse: many like Fullwood and Leist portrayed the horrific scarring of the landscape, others, like Streeton, showed how the beloved landscape had been littered with the refuse of war, and yet others, such as Lambert, depicted the irony of war taking place in scenes of beauty.

Women were excluded from participating in this war in any capacity apart from nursing and related services, and on the home front. As a result women were not appointed as war artists, and Streeton’s recommendation to appoint Dora Meeson was not taken up. However, several women living and working overseas during the war depicted the events as they saw them. Iso Rae was in France during the First World War, employed in the YMCA (q.v.) camp at Etaples, and portrayed aspects of military life around her. Evelyn Chapman visited the battlefields near Villers-Bretonneux in 1919–20 with her father, Francis Chapman, who was attached to the New Zealand War Graves Commission; while she was there Chapman painted a series of works depicting battlefield ruins. Vida Lahey lived in London during the war, nursing her brothers, and at the end of the war she captured the varying emotions of those who survived the war in Rejoicing and Remembrance (1918).

In June 1918, the first exhibition of Australian war art, ‘Australian Official War Pictures and Photographs’, was shown at the Grafton Galleries, London. It included works by Bryant, Crozier, Lambert, Leist, Power and Quinn. Later, in November 1918, the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists organised another exhibition of war art, ‘War and Peace’, at the Royal Academy, London. All the Australian war artists had works in this show, as did other Australian artists who lived in London: George Coates, Tom Roberts, Thea Proctor and Bertram Mackennal. Paintings and sculpture by British, Canadian and New Zealand artists were also included, but the Australians had the widest representation. P. G. Konody, the Observer’s critic, noted that the Australian artists had a ‘straightforward sturdiness and honesty of purpose’ and that their general aim was a faithful representation of the thing seen, ‘stated with vigour and directness, without affectation, without deliberate striving for stylishness, and even with a certain disregard of the means employed’.
Dyson and Streeton also held individual war art exhibitions: Dyson’s ‘Australia at War’ was held at the Leicester Galleries, London, in January 1918; and Streeton’s ‘With the Australians on the Somme’ was shown at the Alpine Club Gallery in June 1919. As a condition of their commissions, artists were asked to produce at least one large work depicting a major event or incident in the war. The size of these works was based on that selected for the paintings commissioned for a proposed British Hall of Remembrance. After the war, George Coates, W. B. McInnes, Florence Rodway and Charles Wheeler were also commissioned to paint portraits and large battle pictures. In 1927 Will Longstaff painted Menin Gate at Midnight (q.v.), an image of a ghostly army rising from a field of poppies in the battlefields of Ypres. This became one of the most popular pictures on the theme of war, providing comfort for those who had lost friends and relations at the front, and who had religious faith or spiritualist beliefs. When it toured Australia in 1928–29 it was viewed by record crowds.
The Australian official war artists intended their work to be displayed. However none of the officially commissioned art was reproduced on postcards, calendars or in government publications at the time. Nor was it used in Australian newspapers or magazines, as was much of the British war art. Apart from Will Dyson’s Australia at War, published after the close of the war, there was no publication on Australian war art until 1933, when the Australian War Memorial (q.v.) published Australian Chivalry. This book did not include any of the images created at the front, but reproduced the large pictures portraying events of historical significance, and portraits. Its stated purpose was to provide an inspiration for living Australians.

Bean first proposed the Australian government develop a national war museum in November 1916, and its establishment was approved in August 1917. Bean envisaged the war artists’ work being displayed in this museum to convey what the men had done, and how they had felt and thought during the war. He saw this museum as being a national one, located in Canberra, and, like the cultural institutions already established in most Australian States, as having three parts: a picture gallery, an historical museum and a library. The AWM opened to the public in November 1941, with over four hundred First World War paintings on show.

The 1930s and 1940s were a period of considerable controversy in Australian art. Vehement debates raged over the creation of an Australian Academy of Art and the judges’ decision in awarding the 1943 Archibald Prize to William Dobell was questioned in court. Several articles appeared in the press criticising the Second World War artist appointments and maintaining (as Streeton had done in the First World War) that the best of the Australian artists had not received appointments. The journal Art in Australia also discussed the war art scheme, and compared what the Australians were doing with the British program. In the end, the war brought together a variety of artists working in a range of styles. Many, who in other circumstances would not have crossed paths, mixed together and learnt from each other.

Like the First World War art scheme, the Australian Second World War program took time to become established. Again, several schemes developed. The GOC of the AIF, Major-General Sir Thomas Blamey (q.v.), wanted to have an artist in the field to record events; and in January 1941 he selected Ivor Hele, whom he regarded as ‘one of the outstanding younger men in the art world’, from among the ranks in the intelligence section of the AIF in North Africa to work as a war artist. Blamey promoted Hele to lieutenant, and provided him with transport and artists’ materials. Unknown to Blamey, at about the same time the War Cabinet also approved Hele’s appointment as an official war artist, following his nomination by the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board.

The first official war artists in the Second World War, Harold Herbert and Frank Norton, were appointed in January 1941. When Herbert declined an extension of his appointment in August 1941, William Dargie was appointed in his place as an artist in the Middle East. In November 1941, Murray Griffin joined the ranks of the official war artists and was sent to Malaya. Artists as varied as Dennis Adams, George Allen, Colin Colahan, Roy Hodgkinson, Alan Moore and Arthur Murch subsequently received appointments. In 1945, Sybil Craig, Robert Emerson Curtis, James Flett, Donald Friend, John Goodchild, Sali Herman and Max Ragless joined their ranks. Three women were commissioned: Nora Heysen, Stella Bowen and the aforementioned Sybil Craig. Classified as professionals, all women artists received similar pay to the men but only Nora Heysen served in the operational areas, recording the activities of the nurses at the Casualty Clearing Stations in New Guinea.

Initially, the war artist appointments were the responsibility of the Department of Information, who administered the program until October 1941. At this time, control of the program passed to the trustees and director of the AWM (under Colonel John Treloar [q.v.], seconded to the Military History Section of the AIF), with funds provided by the army for that purpose. Treloar monitored the appointment of war artists, and in 1943 was instrumental in changing the status of war artists from that of war correspondents (paid two guineas a day) to that of enlisted members of the AIF (with pay equivalent to that of service personnel). The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board and the Australian Academy of Art advised him on the selection of the artists until late 1944. Artists also applied directly to Treloar. In 1944 a committee of four took over this role: Daphne Mayo, Frank Medworth, Percy Meldrum and Will Rowell. Despite the fears of modernist artists that this committee would favour conservative artists, the appointments that followed included a number of artists with a more contemporary approach.

Artists such as Dargie and Norton were commissioned for an indefinite period. Murray Griffin was taken prisoner of war after the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, and remained in Changi (q.v.) for three and a half years. But towards the end of the war artists were appointed for shorter terms, for periods of three to six months, in order to ensure that a wider range of artists was appointed and a greater variety of responses obtained. Nonetheless, some artists found it difficult to get transport back to Australia and so remained at the front for a longer period than initially intended. From 1943, the official war artists were granted an honorary commission, with the rank of lieutenant or captain, in order to provide ease of access to the front. From this time they were required to submit all their work to the AWM. As with the First World War scheme artists were able to draw or paint in whatever manner they chose, within limits. Treloar had some expectations and dispatched artists to what he regarded as appropriate theatres of war or arenas of activity. Herbert and Dargie worked in the Middle East, and the expatriate artists, Bowen and Koala, worked in Europe, as did Moore. Many served in the South-West Pacific Area. Murch served in Darwin. Craig was specifically appointed to document the civilian activities of the women munition workers in the Commonwealth Explosives Factory in Maribyrnong (see Industry). Curtis and Ragless also worked on the home front.

Treloar was also interested in the artists’ subjects. He directed Nora Heysen to paint portraits of the heads of the women’s services, and was critical when she chose on another occasion to portray a recreation scene, rather than a more serious subject while in New Guinea. He anticipated that Friend might depict the heavy construction equipment and activities at Labuan. Nonetheless when the artist informed Treloar that he was not interested in the subject, Treloar tactfully commented:
I realise that, fortunately, not all artists will find interest in the same sort of subjects. If large scale construction with the use of machinery does not appeal to you, it would, I agree, be a mistake for you to take it on.

In addition to the official war art scheme, servicemen were seconded to portray the war, as they had been during the First World War. Hele was the first such army artist. In 1941 the sculptor, Lyndon Dadswell, was wounded in action while serving in Syria, and later that year he was seconded to war artist duties. In 1943, approval was given for several other artists who were serving in the forces to be attached to the Military History Section as artists. These included Harold Abbott, Charles Bush, Ray Ewers, Henry Hanke, Geoffrey Mainwaring, Douglas Watson and Malcolm Warner. Their terms and conditions were much the same as those of the official war artists, but they were paid by the army and not the AWM. As serving soldiers they were appointed for the duration of the war, rather than for a fixed term.

Most Australian artists were keen to participate in the Second World War art scheme in the manner in which they were best trained — as artists, not as administrators or camoufleurs. In addition to the official war artists, Treloar also recruited artists from the services to work in the Military History Section to provide pictorial material to be reproduced as illustrations, and to work on the layout and design of the service annuals, As You Were, HMAS I–IV, These Eagles, Victory Roll, RAAF Saga, RAAF Log, Khaki and Green, Soldiering On and Jungle Warfare. These artists, who included Walter Beaumont, George Browning, John Dowie, Frank Hodgkinson, Tony Rafty and Ralph Walker, remained members of the AIF and received their usual army pay. Again, most of these artists worked in the South-West Pacific Area, except for Warner. After a brief period in New Guinea, Warner worked in the United States and Canada attached to the RAAF.

The official war art scheme did not end at the close of the war. Ernest Buckmaster was sent to Singapore, and Reginald Rowed and George Colville went to Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. Some artists, such as Murray Griffin, were retained as war artists to finish their work, or to do additional work. The Second World War art scheme was broad in scope, covering the activities of all the services as well as that of men and women on the home front. However the RAAF believed their involvement in the war was not being adequately covered by the official war art scheme, and as a result the RAAF War History Section appointed their own artists from within the ranks of RAAF personnel: Harold Freedman, Max Newton and Eric Thake. In fact, official war artists, Bowen, Koala and Moore, were employed to depict the activities of the RAAF in Europe, as was Warner in America, and Adams in Australia. Adams also spent time depicting naval activities, as did Norton.
In February 1942, the Allied Works Council was established by the Australian government to organise domestic defence works, such as the camouflaging of aerodromes and the construction of roads and docks, and they too developed a war art scheme. In 1943, they appointed two artists, William Dobell and Herbert McClintock, to portray the men of the Civil Constructional Corps (q.v.) engaged in constructing roads and docks. Dobell and McClintock were paid £10 a week. They had to supply their own materials, which they found difficult to obtain. As a consequence Dobell worked on masonite, and McClintock used gouache on paper. They worked at various sites in Western Australia and New South Wales.

As in the First World War, exhibitions of war art were held during and after the Second World War. The ‘All Australian Exhibition of Art by Australians in the Services’, including work by army artists and serving soldiers, was shown in Sydney and Melbourne in 1943, and the ‘Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Australian Official War Artists’, which toured Australian galleries from 1943 to 1946, included paintings by Adams, Dargie, Dobell, Hele, Herbert, Hodgkinson, Murch and Norton, and sculpture by Dadswell. Critics of both modern and conservative orientation were generally unenthusiastic about the show. They maintained that the works were mainly topographical and factual records, lavish displays of technique, which did not provide a picture of the deeper horror and tragedy of war. They maintained that these artists did not indicate, as had Dyson in the last war, how the soldier felt. They noted that there was no record of the factories and of women’s part in the war. They preferred Dobell’s images, maintaining that they were the only ones that showed any variation in subject matter and treatment. And they pointed to artists who could have done better, such as Friend, Herman and Watson (who later did receive appointments), as well as Russell Drysdale, Francis Lymburner and James Gleeson (who did not).

These comments were made in 1944, about works created during the early stages of the war. They relate to eight of the 40 artists appointed during this war. There can be no doubt that these remarks, and those of the public debates about war art at this time, had an impact on the war art scheme and on which artists were subsequently selected. By the end of the war the range of artists employed and the subjects treated had expanded considerably. More modern artists such as Friend and Herman were appointed, and the topics treated included the factories and the role of women.

The ‘Allied Works Council Exhibition of Paintings and Photographs of Civil Construction in Australia 1939–1944’ was shown in the Myer Mural Hall, Melbourne, in 1944, and an expanded exhibition toured Australian galleries in 1944–45. It showed work by Dobell and McClintock, but also that by camouflage artists George Duncan, Raymond Lindsay, Max Ragless and Dudley Wood. The ‘RAAF War Paintings Exhibition’, including works by the three RAAF artists, toured Australian State galleries in 1946. From 1946–48 an exhibition to show the variety of work by a wide range of artists working in various branches of the services and on the home front (not just official artists), ‘Australia at War’, toured Australian galleries. In addition, exhibitions of the war work of individual artists such as James Cook, Murray Griffin, Ivor Hele, Harold Herbert and Vernon Jones were held. As well as displays of war works by Australian artists, exhibitions of war art by British and American war artists also toured Australia during the war.

By the end of the war the scope of the war art was considerably broader than that achieved in the First World War. In this war portraiture went beyond the tonal realism of Longstaff and McInnes, to the powerful characterisation and rendering of flesh of Dobell’s Billy Boy (1943) and the symbolic and decorative arrangement of Bowen’s Bomber Crew (1944). There is also a wide variety in the portrayal of people. The depiction of men and women during the war includes images of suffering and resourcefulness shown in Griffin’s prisoner-of-war drawings, the weariness of constant travel visible in Friend’s drawings, and the exhaustion of men in Hele’s Australian Troops Disembarking at Alexandria after the Evacuation of Greece 1941 (1942). But there are also images of the lighter side of war, of dreaming, having fun and seeking love. In many of these works there is an almost manic quality, as in Friend’s Crowds Dancing at King’s Cross, Sydney (1945), in which the swirling dancing figures seem almost to float within the surrounding space. Elsewhere people were portrayed with an energetic purpose and liveliness, as in Craig’s images of the munition workers. As in the First World War, there was considerable diversity in the way landscape was portrayed. What pervades the images from the Second World War is, however, a sense of devastation and desolation. One of the most marked differences between the art of the Second World War and that of the First is the focus on the technology of war, and the portrayal of it in an almost surreal perspective, as in Thake’s Liberator’s Face (1945). All subjects were treated in many different ways. Some artists, such as Hele, Herbert and Norton, worked in a traditional manner with realistic detail, others like Dobell and Friend explored the possibilities of expressionism, while yet others ventured towards surrealism.

War art is not restricted to the work of commissioned artists, it has also been produced by men and women who enlisted. Some of this art was created by artists of talent and experience, who spent their leisure time depicting their experiences to while away the time and to take their minds off the war. George Benson and Horace Moore-Jones captured aspects of Gallipoli and Penleigh Boyd and L. H. Howie depicted scenes and events on the Western Front during the First World War. Louis Kahan portrayed soldiers in North Africa; Douglas Annand, Frank Hinder, Kenneth Jack, Frank McNamara and Guy Warren recorded activities in the South-West Pacific Area; while John Brack, Donald Friend, Sali Herman, Francis Lymburner, Hal Missingham, Sidney Nolan, Oliffe Richmond and Elsa Russell depicted the army in Australia during the Second World War. But experienced artists who served as soldiers did not limit themselves to depicting military activities and soldiers at rest. Some, such as Arthur Boyd, portrayed the impact of war on civilians. Artists who were placed in internment camps in Australia, such as Erwin Fabien and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, also portrayed their wartime experiences. War art was also produced by untrained amateurs, including POWs, who made images as a release from their ordeals.

Albert Tucker defies neat classification: he observed the war as a civilian before he joined up in works such as The Futile City (1940); he portrayed the war as a soldier in images like Death of an Aviator (1942); and after he was invalided out he viewed it again as a civilian in his images of modern evil, and in the painting Victory girls (1943). Later, he went to Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force as a war correspondent, and created works such as Osaka (1947).
Other artists depicted war without actually being a part of the fighting forces, and portrayed the effects of war on the home front. These artists include Grace Cossington Smith (The Sock Knitter, 1915) and Hilda Rix Nicholas (A Mother of France, 1914) during the First World War; Dorrit Black (The Wool Quilt Makers, 1940–41), Ethel Carrick Fox (Camouflage Net Workers, 1942), Russell Drysdale (Medical Examination, 1941 and Albury Station, 1943) and Margaret Preston (Tank Traps, 1943) during the Second. Artists have also created powerful images of war from description rather than experience; some examples are Noel Counihan’s The New Order (1942), John Perceval’s Exodus from a Bombed City (1942) and Peter Purves Smith’s The Nazis, Nuremberg (1938).

During the First World War and the years immediately following, there was a demand for sculptors and monumental masons to make war memorials (q.v.) to remember the dead and to discourage future wars. A substantial number of these commissions went to monumental masons, who provided stone statues for towns all around the country, but a number went to artists. These sculptures are a form of war art. Wallace Anderson, Margaret Baskerville, Charles Web Gilbert, May Butler George, Rayner Hoff, and Charles Douglas Richardson worked on such projects during the 1920s. Some of these commissions were private, for churches and for organisations such as the Chamber of Manufactures and the Commercial Travellers’ Association. Lyndon Dadswell and Paul Montford worked on the Shrine of Remembrance (q.v.) in Melbourne and Bertram Mackennal on the Cenotaph (q.v.) in Sydney. Other war sculptures, such as Anderson’s Evacuation, visualising the proud tradition of the Anzac hero, were commissioned for display in the AWM. In addition sculptors such as Anderson, Leslie Bowles and Web Gilbert were employed by the AWM to make sculptures for their First World War dioramas, and Ray Ewers and Ralph Walker worked on those for the Second World War. At the end of the Second World War town memorials were not sought after as they had been which had taken place at the close of the First. Lists of names were added to existing memorials in some towns, but many people did not want the memorials of this war to take the form they had in the last. Instead, in the words of the English Country Life magazine in 1944, they wanted ‘a memorial which would be useful or give pleasure to those who outlive the war’. Nonetheless, sculptors continued to be commissioned to make commemorative works. George Allen, Wallace Anderson, Paul Beadle, Ray Ewers, Lyndon Dadswell and Daphne Mayo created war memorial sculptures during the 1940s and 1950s. Allen was also commissioned to make the Second World War sculpture for the Shrine of Remembrance.

War art also includes Napier Waller’s major contribution, the stained-glass windows and mosaic for the AWM’s Hall of Memory. The windows (1951) pay tribute to the Australians who served in the First World War, and the mosaic (1959) commemorates the service and sacrifice of Australian men and women during the Second World War. Waller created a spiritual haven, a place that stimulates reflection and remembrance, and that honours human endeavour through symbols and the emotional power of shapes and colour. Ray Ewers sculpted the figure of an Australian serviceman for this hall in 1959, and the figures of the sailor and airman which were placed in niches either side of the hall in 1964. In 1993 the Australian Serviceman sculpture was removed from the Hall of Memory during the construction of the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier (q.v.).

Official war artists were also appointed by the AWM to cover Australian involvement in both Korea and Vietnam. Two veterans from the Second World War, Ivor Hele and Frank Norton, were selected for the Korean conflict. The AWM first recommended that an artist be appointed to go to Vietnam in July 1965, soon after the Australian government announced the commitment of troops there, but it was not until March 1967 that the first artist left for Vietnam. The selection of artists was managed by the Memorial, with advice from the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board through William Dargie. In order to ensure the widest representation, former war artists were not considered for appointment. Women artists were also overlooked. In letters to prospective artists the AWM’s director, W. R. Lancaster, suggested that they could paint in their own style and express their individual personality, but he insisted that the ‘subject matter [be] recognisable by the average human being’, thereby suggesting that he would not consider non-figurative work. The artists finally appointed, Bruce Fletcher and Ken McFayden, were proficient realistic illustrators. They were able to make speedy and accurate sketches on the spot, but were not well known at the time. They were also required to be sufficiently fit to undergo jungle training. The army did not want the cost of the war artists to be included in its budget nor their presence in Vietnam counted against army staffing. The AWM therefore accepted responsibility for the artists’ pay and allowances. In September 1967, the AWM’s board noted that the list of available artists was not inspiring and that Vietnam did not appear to be ‘in’ with the artistic world, particularly the younger artists ‘who seemed unable to appreciate the importance their role might be in capturing the scene and its social effects, whether or not they agreed with the military operations taking place there’. In February 1968 the board maintained that Fletcher and McFadyen had provided more sketches than could be displayed at any one time (overlooking the fact that these works were inevitably limited in topic and approach). Despite the mounting list of applicants, the board resolved that no further artists would be appointed.

Servicemen in Vietnam did not receive any official encouragement to depict the war, although those who were motivated found outlets for their work. Jim Kenna’s cartoons were published in the 6RAR newspaper, the Sunday Times, but serving soldiers were not invited to become war artists or to illustrate service annuals as they were in the First and Second World Wars. A few Vietnam veterans, such as Ray Beattie and Peter Moore, painted their responses to the war soon after it was over. Artist observers such as Marcus Beilby, David Boyd, Richard Larter and Clifton Pugh also portrayed their responses to the war. Their work reflects the place the Vietnam War held in Australian society at the time. It shows that for most Australians this was a war in which everyday life went on as before.
The AWM decided not to appoint an official war artist during the Gulf War and opted instead to encourage a variety of Australian artists to depict aspects of this conflict. The Australian forces were not fighting on the ground or in the air and the Australian involvement in the Gulf was on a small scale. But television has made all wars world wars, and has involved everyone in such events as passive observers. The Gulf War was not something the Australian public could overlook. This war provoked some artists, such as Gay Hawkes and Andrew Sibley, to make a general outcry against war. Others, such as Roslyn Evans, viewed it in terms of past wars, and these wars’ impact on their family. Others, like Enid Ratnam-Keese, considered the suffering of refugees. A number of artists, like Merilyn Fairskye and Jan Senbergs, referred to the way in which the media represented the Gulf War. Kevin Connor differed from most other Australian artists who portrayed this war because, in June 1991, he visited several important centres in Iraq affected by the coalition bombs and the postwar rebellion. He made drawings and paintings that showed the impact of the war on buildings and landscape as well as on people. These works report on the destructiveness of war and the suffering it brings.

War art can also be said to include that produced by artists sponsored by the Australian Army to depict their participation in peace-keeping (q.v.) missions, such as George Gittoes’s work in Somalia, Cambodia and Western Sahara. Gittoes’ work focuses on the human victims of these conflicts.
War art also includes Napier Waller’s major contribution, the stained-glass windows and mosaic for the AWM’s Hall of Memory. The windows (1951) pay tribute to the Australians who served in the First World War, and the mosaic (1959) commemorates the service and sacrifice of Australian men and women during the Second World War. Waller created a spiritual haven, a place that stimulates reflection and remembrance, and that honours human endeavour through symbols and the emotional power of shapes and colour. Ray Ewers sculpted the figure of an Australian serviceman for this hall in 1959, and the figures of the sailor and airman which were placed in niches either side of the hall in 1964. In 1993 the Australian Serviceman sculpture was removed from the Hall of Memory during the construction of the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier (q.v.).

Favoured artists, such as George Lambert in the First World War and Ivor Hele in the Second, were virtually given carte blanche to paint whatever they wanted. Moreover, as to the central issue of art in the 1940s — whether an artist should paint a close imitation of reality or make a personal expression –—the Military History Section remained impartial, and employed artists working in a variety of styles.
The Australian government was also tolerant of artists’ political persuasions. Will Dyson was Australia’s first official war artist, despite the fact that during the first two years of the war he made cartoons for the British left-wing press, which criticised militarism, conscription and the suffering of innocent victims. Herbert McClintock was appointed a war artist by the Civil Constructional Corps during the Second World War, despite the fact that he was a member of the Communist Party. In 1966, the AWM’s director explicitly stated that official war artists would not be vetted for their political views before going to Vietnam, and that the AWM was not interested in propaganda. Artists with political objections to the war were among those who exhibited in the ‘Artists on War’ exhibition: Noel Counihan, Robert Grieve, Daniel Moynihan, Erica McGilchrist and Udo Sellbach. These artists did not, however, seek appointments, and so the director’s claim was never tested.

For many Australian artists, war has provided an occasion to become adventurous, to break free from their limitations, to adopt new subjects or new styles. Streeton portrayed machinery during the First World War, long before any other Australian artist had considered this a suitable subject for art, and depicted mechanical marching men in a futurist style when many in Australia had not even heard about futurism. During the Second World War, while employed by the Allied Works Council, Dobell painted Billy Boy, an image of a Civil Constructional Corps worker, which is as novel an essay in portraiture as his notorious Joshua Smith. Thake created some of his most haunting surrealist images while employed as an RAAF artist.

Surprising as it may be, wars have been beneficial to artists: official war art schemes have provided artists with a means of living when it was hard to sell art on any other subject. They were developed before there were government grants for artists, and before there was a highly sophisticated commercial art market. During the First World War, Dyson had a break from drawing cartoons and an opportunity to make lithographs. Waller’s commission for the AWM’s Hall of Memory stained-glass windows and mosaic kept him in employment for several years and resulted in one of Australia’s largest and most accessible mosaics. In the Second World War, many artists at the beginning of their careers had the opportunity to learn from others whom they might not otherwise have met. The Melbourne-born artist Kenneth Jack, while serving as a survey draughtsman and cartographer with the RAAF at Labuan, met the Sydney-based artist Donald Friend, and benefited from studying his drawing technique. And although Friend, Lymburner, Richmond and Tucker hated army life, this did not stop them working. It could be argued that their anger and frustration put fire into their art.

Anna Gray

Last Updated

27 Oct 2023

Centre for Australian Art

Australian Prints + Printmaking

War art.

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