CULTURE War paint
Books of the month: Andrew Hook
Sketch by Fred Farrell
A Chasm in Time, Scottish War Art and Artists in the Twentieth Century, by Patricia R Andrew, Birlinn, £30
The title of this remarkable book comes from a letter to his brother by the Scottish poet Charles Sorley. An admirer of German culture, Sorley was actually studying in Germany when the first world war began. Back home, he enlisted to join the fight for his country, but unlike so many of his fellow countrymen, never regarded the enemy as anything other than equally civilised opponents. From the beginning he had no illusions about what the war meant. His letter makes this abundantly clear: ‘The war is a chasm in time. I do wish that all journalists etc, who say that war is an enobling purge etc, etc, could be muzzled… All illusions about the splendour of war will, I hope, be gone after the war’. Sorley was to die in the Battle of Loos in October 1915.
In fact as late as 1916 the general run of British art had scarcely been affected by the reality of the war or its meaning. Lady Cynthia Asquith records visiting the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition in June that year and being appalled by what she saw. ‘Amazing to see it just the same as ever,’ she writes. ‘The old sheep by lakes, historical pictures, etc. It gave an extraordinary sense of stability unaffected by cataclysm.’ A reviewer in The Studio agreed. ‘Certainly there is no hint given by the show that this country is going through an experience almost without precedent in its history, and is engaged in what is actually a struggle for existence.’ However, the one picture that both observers admired was a piece of war art: John Lavery’s ‘The First Wounded, The London Hospital, August 1914’. Cynthia Asquith’s conclusion was that ‘Certainly war does not seem to incubate art’.
The truth is that war has always stimulated the creative imagination in every form of art – including painting. But as Patricia Andrew shows in her opening chapter – ‘From Colour to Khaki’ – in the century preceding 1914, British art had been inclined to celebrate only the heroism and splendour of war, helping to create the kind of illusions that Charles Sorley hoped to see abandoned. And in that older patriotic and glorious tradition, no soldiers and regiments were more prominent than the Scottish ones. Scots in scarlet tunics and kilts had indeed attained iconic status in such late 19th-century pictures as Elizabeth, Lady Butler’s hugely popular ‘Scotland for Ever!’ depicting the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo, and Robert Gibb’s equally famous Crimean war picture ‘The Thin Red Line’. In the extraordinary range and scope of Scottish war art of the 20th century, however, which this book so effectively reveals, it is very much khaki, not scarlet, that becomes the dominant colour.
In her Introduction, Patricia Andrew explains that ‘war art’ and ‘war artists’ have been given ‘generously wide definitions’. Her book covers much more than just painters and paintings; ‘both fine and applied art, together with memorial sculptures, and some propaganda work and ephemera’ are all included. The definition of ‘Scottishness’ is equally generous. Scottish-born artists predominate, but work produced, while they were based in Scotland, by artists from England and a range of other countries, is also well represented.
Some familiar names appear: Muirhead Bone, John Lavery, Stanley Cursiter, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, D Y Cameron, J D Fergusson, Stanley Spencer (who ‘did Scotland proud’ with his fine variety of works depicting the Clyde shipyards during the second world war), and (perhaps surprisingly) Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. But represented here are over 150 artists – the vast majority of whom I imagine will be unknown, not only to me, but to most readers. Again the majority are trained professionals, career artists who turn for a time to the subject of war. But a few are non-professional, self-taught figures successfully producing powerful images of war.
A fine example is Hiram Law Sturdy’s ink and watercolour sketch of the Western Front in the first world war called ‘Blowing Bodies to Smithereens’. Sturdy, from Lanarkshire, a miner and house painter, was an amateur artist but, unlike the large number of professionals who, from 1916 on, acquired official status in either or both world wars as designated war artists, he was free to record exactly what he saw. The official artists on the other hand, though able to record the desolation and destruction of trench warfare, were not permitted to portray killing and death. (Sturdy survived the first world war and went on to produce sketches of the Home Guard in the second.)
Another amateur was Fred Farrell, a civil engineer who became a self-taught painter and etcher. So impressive was his work that, after his discharge from the army on medical grounds, the city of Glasgow uniquely appointed him its official war artist in 1917 and 18. Many of his simple and direct, but atmospherically powerful, sketches were published in 1920 as ‘The 51st (Highland) Division War Sketches’ with an introduction by Neil Munro.
In her Introduction once again, Patricia Andrew insists that her book ‘is aimed at the general reader, not the academic art historian’. What this means is that ‘A Chasm in Time’ is refreshingly free from theory-ridden jargon and over-intellectualisation. Equally there is a welcome absence of naïve political point scoring over the horrors of capitalist warmongering or imperialist propagandising. No attempt is made to find underlying structures or themes that will handily explain away all we need to know about Scottish war art and war artists.
What we have instead is an immensely comprehensive account of the amazing range of forms (including posters and cartoons), styles, and objects, through which Scottish and Scotland-based artists, major or minor, have documented two world wars and subsequent conflicts in the 20th century. Many readers I feel sure will be reminded of realities we should never forget – the bombing of Clydebank in 1941 for example, evoked so dramatically in the work of Ian Fleming, Hugh Adam Crawford and Tom McKendrick. And how many of us knew that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s final piece of architectural design in Glasgow was for an extension to Miss Cranston’s Willow Tea Room in Sauchiehall Street in 1916-17? The basement extension was specifically intended to be both a celebration and memorial of the ongoing war. Lacking any kind of natural light, it became known as the ‘Dug-Out’.
In the second world war Kenneth Clark devised a scheme he called ‘Recording Britain’. The idea was to record the kind of Britain the war was fighting to preserve, and watercolour was to be the sole medium employed. More artists took part than in any other war-artist scheme. Despite its success, however, the scheme had a major flaw. ‘Recording Britain’ in fact recorded only England and Wales. The result was that in 1942 a separate ‘Recording Scotland’ scheme was set up in which artists could work in any medium, and the organising committee was free to purchase works already completed. A single volume, ‘Recording Scotland’, was finally published in 1952.
‘A Chasm in Time’ is a Scottish record in itself. This book tellingly and vividly preserves, restores and represents the link between war and the painterly or visual imagination throughout the 20th century. Better still, the book is a work of art in its own right. The writer, publisher, designer, and all those individuals and trusts that have contributed to its production for only £30, deserve the highest possible praise. The quality of illustration is a joy in itself. Appointed the official British war artist for Bosnia in 1993, the Glasgow painter Peter Howson described his role in the following terms: ‘My job is to do the things you don’t see, that the army doesn’t even get to see, not to be an illustrator, not to tell stories, but to produce strong images of things’. Some of Howson’s fellow war artists do indeed provide illustrations and tell stories, but readers of this beautiful book will find ‘strong images of things’ on almost every page.
By Andrew Hook | March 2015
