Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
The first instinct must have been to run away, as far away as possible. To run away and hide. The second, once terror had mutated into rage, would be to pick up some weapon and strike back. A stone, a gun, a missile of some sort.
But just about the most unlikely response to a devastating bombing raid on one’s city would be to set up your easel among the rubble and coolly paint the still-smouldering – or blazing – wreckage. Yet that is what dozens of British artists did as World War II got under way, leaving a record that has no parallel in any of the other combatant countries.
In 2020, London’s Imperial War Museum published Wartime London in Paintings, edited by Suzanne Bardgett, a rich collection of the work that resulted from this endeavour. Now the museum is showing a fascinating selection of the same paintings in Beauty and Destruction: wartime London in art, a tightly edited free exhibition that is open until 1 November.
Ghastly beauty
Painting, as the Nazis and Soviets well understood, could be a powerful propaganda tool. With London braced for invasion, its bridges wired with explosives ready to be blown up, and German bombs raining down for 57 nights in succession during the worst period, artists might well have been waiting for the call to do their aesthetic duty in the crudest way possible.
The call duly came. But the brief was not to wind up popular fury – people were angry enough already; nor to demonise the enemy – the Luftwaffe was doing a good enough job by itself. It was simpler than that. All those raging fires, spurting fire hoses, jagged ruins, huddled masses sleeping in Tube stations – they presented wonderful artistic opportunities. Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the Wartime Artists’ Advisory Committee, put it crisply: ‘Bomb damage’, he said, ‘is in itself picturesque.’
It is a provocative remark. There is a certain sleek cruelty to it. You might equally well say, human misery is in itself picturesque. Starvation. Atrocity. It’s of a piece with the ‘art for art’s sake’ viewpoint for which Clark, Director of the National Gallery at the time and later famous for his BBC series Civilisation, became notorious. But actually, it is the coolness of the pictures on show that makes them so moving, even today.
Take Matvyn Wright’s A Parachute Bomb (1941). It is a riverside scene which at first blush is idyllic, showing the river bathed in a rosy glow, a Thames barge lying at anchor, while fireworks light up the night sky. But of course they are not fireworks but tracer bullets, the rosy glow is raging fires, and the oblong object floating gently down towards the riverbank under the umbrella of a parachute is, as the painting’s title indicates, a bomb powerful enough to destroy a street.
Wright was one of the group of fireman-artists who lived together in a house in Blackheath, and whose extinguishing duties gave them unrivalled access to disaster. All their works on show are marked by a ghastly beauty – and the coolness of men who had no need or desire to sex up what they were depicting.
They, like all the commissioned war artists but one, were men – in retrospect a bizarre decision, considering how much of the raw material was inherently domestic. But, in time, the Committee identified a number of women artists as well, and in their work we see the suffering of the blazing night skies turned inside out.
Shared suffering
Life had to go on. In Bermondsey, only four houses in a hundred were left undamaged by the war, and those driven from their homes fetched up in the local Rest Centre, where they could drink tea, eat Spam sandwiches, and get some peace. Mabel Hutchinson, at 22 the youngest of the war artists, in her wonderful painting A Bermondsey Rest Centre, finds a small boy in a cap with a question for the nurse – she is lit up somewhat like an angel – and puts the two of them in the middle of her picture, which is so vivid you can almost smell the powdered eggs.
Three miles away, bombs killed ten staff and two fire-fighters at St Thomas’s Hospital and reduced the nurses’ home to ruins. Relieved of their normal duties, the now-homeless nurses got down to stitching camouflage nets in Evelyn Dunbar’s Convalescent Nurses Making Camouflage Nets, where one senses that their utter absorption in this task rescues them from despair.
Kenneth Clark was right. Bomb damage, including the mental damage, is indeed picturesque, which means it is in a sense beautiful, and because it’s beautiful it is also moving. The traumatised women immersed in making these wretched nets, they could not be more stoically heroic. London and the larger British public got it. These pictures were shown in galleries all over the country, and as contemporary film shows, they attracted hordes of visitors – many in uniform, and many, one suspects, finding themselves in such a place for the first time in their lives.
The art did have a propaganda effect, too, conveying a new vision of the capital: as a city, so rigidly class-structured in peace-time, from which all such divisions had been burned out. It wasn’t true, of course: working-class districts suffered far worse than posh ones. But atrocious suffering welded the city together, as the haunting depictions by Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone of Tube-station platforms lined with sleepers captured so well.
The Houses of Parliament were damaged in air raids 14 times while continuing to function. Harold Nicolson MP wrote in his diary, ‘I go to the House… which has been smashed by the Nazis… there are steel girders and scaffolding keeping the thing together.’ Leonard Rosoman, another of the fireman-artists, painted the scene in May 1941 after a devastating hit, with the sky lit up a ghastly white as if by phosphor, and Westminster Abbey like a great wraith behind it.
‘Since the Blitz,’ the poet Louis MacNeice wrote, London ‘has become more comprehensible. Because the great, dirty, slovenly, sprawling city is a visible and tangible symbol of freedom.’
Beauty and Destruction: wartime London in artUntil 1 November (Free entry)
Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London, SE1 6HZ
www.iwm.org.uk/events/beauty-and-destruction-wartime-london-in-art
+44 (0)20 7416 5000
MHM visits
EXHIBITIONS
Scotland’s First Warriors
Until 16 May 2027
National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1JF http://www.nms.ac.uk/exhibitions/scotlands-first-warriors
Admission free
Who were Scotland’s first warriors? This exhibition reveals the origins and impact of conflict in prehistoric Scotland, exploring the first signs of organised warfare, from the Neolithic to the Romans. Through more than 250 objects, Scotland’s First Warriors examines how and why people fought, the impact of war, and the legacy of prehistoric conflict.
Close to Conflict – Canada and the American Civil War
Until 28 February 2027
Canadian War Museum, 1 Vimy Place, Ottawa, ON K1A 0M8
http://www.warmuseum.ca/exhibitions/canada-and-the-american-civil-war
Entry included in museum admission
The Canadian War Museum’s new exhibition Close to Conflict invites visitors to discover how the American Civil War set Canadian society, politics, and military on a transformative path. Five zones, each anchored by a contemporary perspective from a current expert, explore specific legacies of the Civil War in Canada and their relevance today.
EVENT
We Have Ways Fest
11-13 September 2026
Blackpit Brewery, Buckinghamshire, MK18 5LJ
https://wehavewaysfest.co.uk
Ticket prices vary
The popular Second World War history festival returns. Hosted by historians and broadcasters James Holland and Al Murray, this three-day event is inspired by the hit podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talkand brings together leading Second World War historians, authors, veterans, and experts.
