Women at war

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Veronica Davies visits

The exhibition 'Women War Artists', currently showing at the Imperial War Museum, covers the period from the start of the First World War in 1914 to the present day.  Rather than offering a chronological view, however, it is organized into three themes, Working Together, War Zone, and Costs of War, which together encapsulate the way women artists have responded through their art to the wars and conflicts of the 20th and early 21st centuries.   Some of the women were officially commissioned as war artists, such as Anna Airy in the First World War and Dame Laura Knight in the Second.  They were not, however, permitted to cover the same range of experiences as their male colleagues; as late as the 1980s, Linda Kitson encountered restrictions when covering the Falklands War as she could not travel on Royal Navy vessels.

Entering the exhibition, one of the first works that the visitor sees is one of the most well-known examples of work by a woman war artist, Dame Laura Knight’s  Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring  of 1943. At the time, Knight was a celebrated painter who had been the first woman to be elected as a Royal Academician since 1768, and undertook work for the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) at much less than her usual fee, as her contribution to the war effort.  It is therefore especially interesting to see her painting of another woman also undertaking war work of a kind that would previously have been closed to her, and to view newsreel footage about them both. 

Knight was one of only two women artists sent overseas by the WAAC and, in a later part of the exhibition, we see her large and rather surreal 1946 painting of the Nuremberg war trials.  Doris Zinkeisen was commissioned to go to Germany by the British Red Cross, and produced chilling images of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp such as  Human Laundry, Belsen, 1945.  These have not lost their power to shock more than 60 years on, and in the knowledge that atrocities continue around the world.  Frauke Eigen’s  Fundstücke Kosovo series (2000–2) of photographs of the personal effects of victims of ethnic cleansing testify to the continuing cost of war.

Other artists also depicted the range of work that women did in factories, farms, hospitals and canteens in both World Wars, as well as their everyday lives in wartime, and there is a wide and representative selection of these.  Some of these were produced by artists working officially, as did Anna Airy, recording First World War munitions work in paintings such as  A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London  (1918), and Evelyn Dunbar, who was a full-time salaried war artist throughout the Second World War.  Other women artists produced much less official records of life in wartime, such as Priscilla Thornycroft, who drew and painted ordinary life going on in extraordinary circumstances in the Camden Town area of London where she had her studio.

Restrictions on employing women war artists until quite recent times, combined with the nature of much of the work women artists have produced in response to war and conflict over the last century, mean that this is not a huge exhibition.  It is, though, rich and thought provoking in many ways, and will offer the visitor a perspective on the response of artists to the experience of war often subtly different from that offered by other parts of the Imperial War Museum collection.

A book,  Women War Artists,  has been published to coincide with the exhibition.  It is written by Kathleen Palmer, Head of Art at the IWM and curator of the exhibition, who also curated the 2009 exhibition ‘Witness: Women War Artists’ at Imperial War Museum North.

While Palmer’s book would serve as a useful catalogue/guide to the current exhibition, it can equally stand on its own as an insight into an absorbing topic which has aroused a lot of interest in recent years, which have also seen the installation of the Memorial to the Women of World War II near the Cenotaph in Whitehall in 2005.  Women War Artists  is likely to have wide appeal to readers with an interest in war art, in women artists generally, and also in the history of war and conflict and the war roles and experience of women during the last century.

The book follows the same thematic organization as the exhibition, with well-illustrated chapters titled ‘In the War Zone’, ‘Working Together’ and ‘The Costs of War’.  The first takes a chronological look at art from the First and Second World Wars and more recent conflicts, while acknowledging the restrictions placed on women, whether as artists or service personnel, during most of the period.   ‘Working Together’ covers many aspects of work undertaken by women in wartime, including that of the artist.  The final chapter on ‘The Costs of War’ reflects on issues of witness and identity, morality, memorial and memory.  Palmer finishes with an Afterword, ‘Women as War Artists’, which helps to draw all her themes together, while opening them up for future debate.  To assist with this, useful bibliographical and biographical material is provided, and it is to be hoped that this will inspire further research in the IWM collections into the topics Palmer has covered in this most interesting book. 

Women War Artists  by Kathleen Palmer is published by Tate in association with the Imperial War Museum 2011. 96 pp., 100 colour and mono illus, £12.99. ISBN 978 1 85437 989 4