“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present,” wrote British war artist Percy Wyndham Lewis. In part because of this talent for rendering truth, artists have joined armies in major wars, battles and conflict throughout history. Often invited or commissioned by rulers or military forces, sometimes enlisting of their own accord, artists were indispensable. Their interpretative gifts were useful for providing a birds eye – yet unique – perspective on affairs at the front line, often articulating more than a written cable or a radio broadcast could manage.
Lola Wilkins, of the Australian War Memorial, explains further: “At the beginning, photography, for example, wasn’t that far advanced, and so having artists actually there who could sketch and paint was the best means of recording what was happening at the warfront. I think the artists who go do feel that they’ve received an honour. I think that they think it is a privilege to be selected.”
Despite acting in an official capacity, war artists have generally been given reasonable latitude in their work. Countries like the US and Britain developed guidelines and basic protocols for their war artists – official war art schemes – but any constraints were more about safety than censorship. And although a more conservative approach was preferred, a wide variety of movements and persuasions were represented in the sketches, photographs and paintings that made their way back to the War Department or the museum.
Wyndham Lewis, a Canadian born British painter, worked as a commissioned artist in World War One. His stylised drawings and water-colours depicted soldiers as inhuman automata, barely distinguishable from their weaponry. Londoner Paul Nash, one of the best known British war artists, opted for a naturalistic style that evolved into modernism as he recorded life in the trenches during both World Wars.
Both men, like many of their peers, concentrated on the horrors of war (“the monstrous event” wrote Nash), believing it their job to depict the foul aspects of conflict too often excluded from the news reporting and propaganda reels back home. This was a common response, as factors like the industrial revolution and economic depression combined with the sheer magnitude of the conflicts to create a bleak picture.
And of course, artists were enlisted on the propaganda front. The Australian Army employed official Public Relations photographers throughout the war in Vietnam to create useful ‘promotional material’. Writes Simon Forrester of the Australian War Memorial. “Many of the photographs were taken on the bases used by Australians, and these are imbued with a typically Australian ethos of mateship and camaraderie. Others, taken in cities and towns such as Saigon and Vung Tau, have a deliberate tourist feel to them. A large number of photographs deal with the civil aid programs and show Australian troops dispensing medical and humanitarian aid and gifts to grateful villagers, particularly the elderly, women and children. Photographs of patrols and operations generally depict Australian troops in heroic, deliberately posed shots of helicopter ‘insertions’ and ‘extractions’, or stoically pressing on through mud or forest. Images of Australian wounded appear, but the injured are always conscious and being given medical attention.”
Decades later, some contemporary war artists turning away from bloodshed and dogma. American combat artist Steve Mumford is one such individual, who bunkered down after the events of September 11, 2001 with the U.S. military in Iraq. “I did not want to represent just the military experience,” says Mumford. “I have spent a lot of time not embedded, but simply drawing on the streets of Baghdad, drawing Iraqis drinking tea, playing soccer, cleaning the streets, hanging out in art galleries.” Mumford says it is the humanity, not the inhumanity, that compels him in a war scenario. “I’ve been trying to paint or depict scenes that show some sort of dramatic narratives involving human emotions,” he explains. “In a sense, war is the ultimate dramatic human narrative.” On the ground in Baghdad, Mumford’s sketch pad was a curiosity for the locals. “I would have a small crowd of Iraqis around me every time I would start to draw,” he says. “There was kind of an interaction between me and the people of Baghdad, which was a lot of fun and usually led to another drawing. Usually somebody would see me and invite me to come over and have tea with him, and I would wind up getting about six good drawings out of a good day like that.” Although riding shotgun to an a occupying military force, Mumford was able to engage with Iraqis on an entirely different level. His work captures this difference.
British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell also stepped away from the front line for their unique exhibition, The House of Osama bin Laden. Working on a commission from the Imperial War Museum the two visited Afghanistan to document people and places central to the war on terror, but removed from the proverbial ‘action’. Using a still and a digital video camera they captured a murder trial in Kabul, the remnants of the Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban, the presence and activities of numerous NGOs in the region, and the former home of Osama bin Laden at Daruntah. An interactive digital model of the house was created, so visitors to their exhibition could explore it inside and out as if they were there. The result was a work that communicated volumes about the war and one of its chief players without depicting a particular battle. “In The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2002, viewers can navigate through whitewashed rooms, store cupboards and bunkers and even gaze out of the windows at the surrounding countryside,” observed the Absolute Arts journal. “While bearing testimony to bin Laden’s absence, it also serves as a reminder of his forbidding presence in the Wests’ collective consciousness.”
Australian artist Wendy Sharpe is another of these new generation war artists, assigned by the Australian War Memorial to cover peacekeeping actitivities in East Timor. While her work genuinely reflects artefacts of terror in the region, it also documents the minutia (the everyday activities of an army barracks) and the joy of a liberated people. Reflecting on her service, she describes a scene similar to Mumford: “Wherever I sat down to draw, East Timorese children would come around, usually block whatever I was looking at. And I’d draw them ’cause they were usually more interesting. And they loved it! I thought, I wonder how they feel? I don’t want to treat them like something — some weird oddity that I’m staring at and treating with disrespect. But they absolutely loved being drawn.”
As armed conflict continues around the globe, war artists will no doubt remain at their forefront, colouring in new lines for debate.
