"Doing justice to history:"
Canada's Second World War official art program
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Second World War official art program
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The Canadian War Records (CWR), Canada's Second World War art program,
produced two kinds of art: field sketches and finished paintings.
When the War Artists' Committee (WAC) recommended in its instructions
that the artists share in the experience of "active operations" in
order to "know and understand the action, the circumstances, the
environment, and the participants," it viewed this only as an
information gathering and research stage. This stage, as the
instructions note, existed solely to meet the committee's ultimate
goal: "productions" that were "worthy of Canada's highest cultural
traditions, doing justice to History, and as works of art, worthy of
exhibition anywhere at any time."
The instructions charged the artists with portraying "significant events,
scenes, phases and episodes in the experience of the Canadian Armed
Forces," and required each of the 32 artists hired to produce a certain
number of paintings. The instructions make it clear that the WAC highly
valued these finished paintings. "Cartoons and sketches" were useful
only, the instructions note, "for the re-creation of atmosphere,
topography, and details of arms, vehicles, equipment, clothing,
participants and terrain, of aircraft and ships."
Colonel A. Fortescue Duguid, director of the Army Historical Section in
Ottawa and WAC member, had, since 1941, sent "service artists" (those
artists hired before the official program was in place) to study the
few exhibited First World War paintings in the Canadian Senate Chamber
as part of their initial training. Duguid also encouraged newly-hired
artists to sketch. His unique method of training service artists, from
whose numbers later emerged a significant number of official war
artists, included a series of timed sketching exercises to assess the
artist's ability to record military subjects with "speed and accuracy
in observing and recording essentials of mass, line, colour, atmosphere
and attitude."
In the field, however, many sketches could be criticised for being less
than useful because either the artist was too far away from the scene of
action for much that was of documentary use to be depicted or,
alternatively, was so closely focused on detail that the work missed
the larger picture. A majority of the sketches and small watercolours
swiftly executed by Canadian air force artists, for example, were done
on the ground at various bases in England. Most of the naval war artists
from Canada spent a great deal of their time in the relatively secure
ports of Halifax or St John's. On land, shortly after the June 1944
invasion of France, a few distant puffs of smoke in a rapidly painted
watercolour are all that indicate an army artist's record of this
critically important battle. But there was also prejudice in favour
of more traditional art among this military community, whose members
simply did not view field sketches as "impressive" works of art compared
to the generally far larger and more dramatic oils on canvas.
By the time the war artists settled down in their studios in London or
Ottawa to paint, other factors had come to bear on what they would
eventually produce. One was the influence of the official historians
to whom they reported. It was not uncommon for an artist, on historical
advice, to replace one vehicle for another in a composition in order to
make it a more "accurate" reflection of what had happened, even though
the artist's field sketch gave evidence to the contrary. The official
instructions also played a role in the final compositions. "Action
Episodes", defined as "Eye Witness Records" and "Reconstruction", the
instructions stated, were, in order of importance, the first subjects
to be tackled. To achieve this goal, Stanley and Stacey, for example,
encouraged compositions that drew on the artists' own field sketches but
incorporated other material including that contained in photographs and
war diaries. This often resulted in scenes more dramatic than those they
had actually witnessed. Inevitably, therefore, those paintings that
depict action, such as Charles Comfort's The Hitler Line, are
reconstructions and, to a large extent, fictional.
The paucity of combat actually witnessed by Canada's Second World War
official war artists made reconstructions inevitable. None the less,
while the artists may have believed themselves encouraged to paint a
form of fiction, they were also complicit. Faced with field sketches
and photographs that took care of the details rather than any dramatic
whole, they instinctively focused on creating good compositions.
Artists could also be prejudiced against scenes of action, with
inevitable consequences for the works they produced. Former bomb-aimer
Miller Brittain found the "sinister fairyland of a target" too
disturbing (although he painted it in Night Target, Germany) and
preferred to depict off-duty images such as Airmen in a British Pub.
In many ways, Canada's Second World War artists were essentially
"embedded" with Canadian forces. Limited in much the same way as
journalists have been during the recent war in Iraq, the artists'
field sketches record only what they saw, and what they saw was a
very limited slice of a much greater subject. This raises the question
of whether their studio canvases and watercolours, completed many months
- even years - later, and with the benefit of more knowledge, greater
reflection, and understanding, convey more fully the meaning and
implication of what they sketched. The evidence suggests that the long
view, tempered by a wider contextual standpoint, is the more valuable
testimony of events. That the canvases contain elements of imagination,
rearrangement, and synthesis, which sometimes led to charges of their
being "faked", should not detract from their overall value as
expressions of the true experience of the Second World War. They
may, in fact, represent an artistic truth and, in this sense, provide
a more valuable record of the historical experience of the war than
the field sketches.
Laura Brandon
Canadian War Museum
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