I'm Carl Miller and I'm largely a podcaster and writer nowadays, but I did, I feel a bit like, I'm 10 years old again, 'cause a long time ago I did study war at Kings College London. It's all kinda simmering back up.
Welcome to the Imperial War Museum, Carl. My name is Claire Brenard. I'm one of the art curators here. I'll be very glad to show you round and talk about what we have here today.
Please do.
Carl has joined Claire Brenard at Imperial War Museum London to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask about how recent conflicts have shaped our world. And in this episode, we are looking at how art, photography, and film have depicted our war dead and our wounded.
The months are coming closer as the exhibition's about to open and everyone's like, you can't show it. And instead of taking it off the wall, he puts brown paper all over it and the word censored across.
From the trenches of France to soldiers in Iraq, we'll discuss the artists and photographers who chose what to show us of the horrors of the front line.
Everyone has seen the mustard gas. Everyone has seen that kind of flat, no man's land kind of thing. Whereas this I've never seen an image of a world war I scene with mosquito nets.
On our way, we'll encounter artistic works that have rarely been seen by the public. Also that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.
These ladies cut their teeth on the front lines in France working on men. And yes, it was scandalous. And yet the men who went to this hospital actually loved it.
All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest. . Carl Miller is the host of one of the biggest podcasts of the last 12 months, the Kill List; an investigation years in the making.
So I'm an associate at the Imperial War Museum, that's one of the things that I look at and I study a lot, is basically how information spaces have become theaters of war. And I know that the museum's kind of been having conversations around how they might capture that and exhibit that. So yeah, I came here quite a lot.
It's a very different area to what we're looking at today, 'cause we are looking at art and conflict.
No. I've been carefully cultivating my ignorance on this topic for many years.
Carl and Claire will be joined by another expert, Professor Ana Carden-Coyne, who runs the Centre for the Cultural History of War.
And what we do is we study the impact of war on people and culture... So not so much the battles but really how culture has changed by war and conflict and art plays a massive role in that.
I genuinely feel like I've won some kind of competition. Like, I got the, I cut out the coupon and I sent it in and I've won a kind of tour around the gallery with two world experts. This is brilliant.
Right. We're going into the Blavatnik Art Film and Photography galleries now, and obviously it's so broad what we have in here. So we're going to take a special look at one particular subject. We're looking at representations of the war wounded and the dead. So we're going through now to probably, I think it's fair to say, one of our most famous, if not the most famous work of art in the collection. The iconic, yes, Gassed by John Singer Sargent.
Gassed by John Singer Sergeant is set against the battlefield landscape of the First World War spanning almost four and a half meters in width. You could see Allied soldiers standing in a line all with bandages across their eyes, but there's more to the image than this first impression. On certain podcast apps, you can glance at your phone as you listen to see some of the works we are discussing.
There's bodies lying on the ground. I mean, it's the aftermath of a chemical warfare attack, isn't it? Oh my gosh. I've just spotted, that's incredible. They're playing football in the background.
Oh, yes. That's a lot of discussion about that. That's very iconic too. But yeah, so they're blinded, they're covered in blindfolds this is commemorating the-, probably one of the earliest German attacks of the use of mustard gas in 1917. But also we should say that the British and the Allies also did use chemical warfare of course, as well.
I mean, this is a very frightening thing. Of course, the first time, really that chemical warfare is used and, you know, it becomes, associated with this conflict, very famously through the work of the war poets like Wilfred Owen. It doesn't matter that actually it wasn't the thing that killed most of these soldiers. What's important to remember is the soldiers in this painting, they would recover from this, most of them. And they're being led as you can see, the tent, ropes, the guy ropes.
They're being led into the medical tent and there's the sense of, you know, whatever the terrible thing they've gone through is over and they're being looked after now. And the idea of the football game is afterwards, there's a life for them. You know, it's, this is not the end.
There were about 6,000 British dead from chemical attacks. And so they counted in the war statistics, and you'll be interested in this in terms of contemporary ideas about who are the casualties? But it's not just the psychological effect and the fear. It's a terror weapon, but it's also the chronic illnesses that people had afterwards. So those people who died many years later from respiratory conditions weren't counted in the statistics.
So in terms of John Singer Sargent, then, what function might we say this painting is doing? I mean, is this accusatory, is this really going after that kind of, jingoist kind of like Victorian idea of war?
It's part of a memorial scheme. And a memorial scheme that was started in 1918 while the conflict was still going. It was actually commissioned by the Ministry of Information, and there was this idea that a committee would get together and commission the whole spectrum of British art. Sargent was very well established, he was a society portrait painter. He was painting the great and the good and lots of ladies and beautiful frocks and things like that. That's what he was known for.
And he was in his early sixties at this time. And then he gets commissioned to do this painting amongst other artists like him, but other artists also that were very young, part of the avant-garde. So it's this idea, there's a spectrum of British art, but he's the only one that finishes this painting at this scale. There was a sort of vague idea, we'll commission all these artists and maybe we'll have a building.
We'll have a building which we'll call the Hall of Memory or the Hall of Remembrance. All these paintings will line that building and the idea behind this was, you know, saying to the people, your effort in this terrible, terrible war has not gone in vain. Your sacrifice is worth it, look what you've done. But the irony, of course, when the war ends, the money's run out. There's no money to spend on building a hall of remembrance.
But luckily for the IWM, all these paintings that were completed, not everything got completed just 'cause it got shut down. We were the happy recipient of these incredible paintings, we'll look at a few more as we go along. And when we open in 1920 at the Crystal Palace, this painting takes pride of place and it's pretty much been on display ever since.
Wow.
You can just imagine the impact on the British public at seeing this hugely colourful piece of history, immediate history, when most of the war to them was black and white through photographs, through Pathé film, newsreels, And this was a very visual war. It was like the digital war of its time. There was a very famous Canadian surgeon, Sir William Osler, who went to see the painting when it was on at this exhibition. And he had lost his own son in the war to an abdominal wound.
He gave an address to the British Classical Association and he said, I am sorry to have seen Sargent's Gassed. I'm sorry. Because it haunts the mind like a nightmare. So there's the hard bitten surgeon actually being haunted.
Yeah, it was shocking wasn't it? I think the reports of ladies fainting, having seen it and everything, I mean, because you can't get away from it. It's absolutely massive, isn't it? It's an epic, and Sargent wanted to do an epic. He was asked to do an epic, but it was difficult because when he went to the front line, the closer he went to the front line, the fewer men were there. They were all hidden away. So he came back and he came- and this is when he witnessed-
He was-
He witnessed the scene.
He was there. Okay.
Because he was sent to France, yeah. And he witnessed the scene in the medical area that at the dressing station and here's his epic. He's got all the bodies. It relates to those older sort of paintings, when we think about the glorification of more Victorian sort of paintings, the battle paintings, where you would want a lot of bodies to really show this sort of action.
So it's got that relation to that, but at the same time, it's very, very new because it's dealing with this horrific new subject of gas.
We move on to a smaller portrait, but one that is by no means pulling its punches. Carl is asked what he can see.
Alright, well, no respite, so- There is a man right in front of you in this painting with a blood-soaked bandage on his head. He's on a- stretcher, thank you. That was a technical term. His top's been stripped off. He's got blood dripping down. He's quite emaciated. The whole kind of picture, the kind of cue of the painting is kind of white. It's quite stark. He looks thin and unhealthy. He's kind of grimacing and there's a doctor peering under his bandage.
In the background there are more wounded people with slings and then bare buttocks. I wanna say that maybe this is earlier than first world war? I don't know. The kind of red, no, is it the same with the kinda magenta?
Perceptive! It's 1916, whereas that's 1919.
Oh, nice. Yeah. make sure that gets in.
Well... Nevinson, was a pacifist and-
Well, he wasn't exactly... 'cause he was a futurist for a bit, wasn't he?
Oh I suppose, yes. So. this is super Vorticist.
He did ditch the futurism. So maybe we need to explain that.
Oh, let's dwell on Vorticism, because that's a new word to me. So what's Vorticism?
Well, see all these sort of angles and it was about speed and about the glorification of war, and it was an idea. And then of course a lot of those artists ended up actually being in the first World War, and then they had a sudden realisation that maybe it wasn't all about modern machinery and an exciting future that we're going to have. It was sort of futurism.
Vorticism is like the English version of Futurism, which is an Italian movement.
And is that linked to modernism?
Yes. Yes, they're all modernist movements-
Fritz Lang, and that sort-
Sort of like the umbrella term. Yeah. So, Filippo Marinetti, who's this poet and provocateur, he's Italian, devised this idea of futurism. And like you say, weirdly, we think of artists as being pacifists, rather than glorifying war. But Futurism embraces war because they wanted everything modern and new and they embraced the machine age. And the idea was it would sweep away everything old with a war. We'll start again.
So Nevinson, being a good Futurist, thinks right, the war's started, I have to-
-join up. But he joins the field ambulance. Because... So he's actually... this is a regimental aid post. See how it's underground?
It's actually- It's this notorious place called The Shambles. It's just- it's just a wonderful- horrible.
And there's someone actually dead next to him there isn't there?
Yes. Likely to be dead. And it's this goods yard outside Dunkirk. We're talking very early in the war, 1914 when he goes off and volunteers. He's a medical orderly, he has to basically pick up the injured and ferry them back to this massive goods yard where they haven't really organised proper medical services yet. They're just dumping these men-
See this... see there's like straw, like scattered on the ground there.
It's just very, rough, very basic. And these men are just shoved into this place and left to fester for weeks on end without any kind of attention.
Which was scandalous at the time.
It really was. And part of his painting was kind of saying this is the reality of war. And this is absolutely shocking. No one's shown this before. He, you know, after a week he said he felt like he'd been born into this nightmare. And then he's, you know, he's seen things that man can hardly conceive of in his own mind. You shouldn't have to think of these grotesque things. And then, I think he manages about two months and he has a breakdown. Like you would, right?
And then he comes back to Britain and he starts painting. He eventually has this show in 1916 and this is one of the works. And you can imagine it just causes this sensation and no one's seen this stuff before.
And a bare buttock. A bare buttock with a very bloody wound. How undignified, you know, the glory of war and this great indignity and the pain, I mean, this man is groaning. So to make something as difficult as men's pain, not men's honour, but men's pain in a painting, and to convey that through this gaping mouth was really something.
So he exhibits this during the war?
...during the war.
How does the government react to that?
Well, he's not an official artist at that time. There's not the- there's this kind of growing momentum to call for an official artist scheme because what's coming back off the front are photographs and the Ministry of Information - well, its predecessor - has to sort of clamp down a bit on that because there was just no filter. You know, people started having smaller handheld cameras and they were showing all these things. They had to say no dead bodies.
They had to set up this sort of censorship idea so they could have some kind of control. So what was coming out was just small, black and white photographs of a few, you know, muddy fields, suppose, you-
No, basically, any of that.
Yeah. no. nothing like this.
Definitely no dead bodies.
But he was a free artist. He could, what's interesting at this time, we don't really think of this too much, but it was a Liberal government and there's this- and the elite are liberal-minded. They kind of had this idea that, you know, artists should be free to express themselves and this is kind of what we're fighting for as well. So he has this show, and it's not just his show, it's other, you know, people like Paul Nash as well. And people are saying, we need to have something more official.
We need to send artists out under the aegis of the government and to show us what the war is because we're not getting the images otherwise.
And so the official war artist scheme begins and commissioned within it is our next object by the artist Stanley Spencer. Carl attempts to make sense of it.
Gosh. And now this one I genuinely have never seen before. I mean, I didn't even glance at this one when I was, I mean, I think Gassed was taking up all of my attention a moment ago. It feels like a different style of painting, certainly a different perspective. So we're looking down on the heads of a series of medical orderlies. There are stretchers, but this time they're attached to horses, donkeys? I wanna say world war
I again. It is.
But I'm somewhere that is certainly not the Western Front. Africa?
No, it's the Macedonian front, north Greek border. To keep out the central powers of Austria, Hungary and Germany.
-Bulgaria and Turkey from invading Greece. These poor men on these stretchers that would've gone over some fairly rough terrain. It would've been pretty painful, that journey.
Yeah. They would've been bumped along.
if you had a compound fracture, you possibly could have died.
To summarise, so it looks like we're in basically a long queue for the surgeon's table.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So this is a painting by Stanley Spencer and you may notice - a geeky fact, it's a-
We love geeky facts!
-a similar frame to the Sargent. It was part, again, of the proposed Hall of Remembrance scheme. And Spencer also, like Nevinson, volunteered. He volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps, and at first he was serving in a hospital in Bristol, in the west country. But he, decided, no, he wanted to see action, and he was sent out to the Macedonian front and he was really struck by the scene.
This is actually painted from memory, he did sketch when he was out there, but he was really frustrated that he lost his sketchbook. But he admits that it's not exactly truthful. He was struck by finding something that was peaceful within the chaos of war. So these poor men have come from whatever they come from, chaotic, unpredictable, dangerous.
And although yes, we have said about them being dragged unceremoniously, clanging along on these poles to this place, to this, converted church, it's an operating theatre, as you say. But they're being looked after and they will be all right. And I think he wanted to find some kind of positive message within all of this. I mean, obviously he knew he was being commissioned, but this is his own vision. I mean, these artists were commissioned to be themselves, you know?
The reason he was engaged because he, again, a young artist like Nevinson, they both went to the Slade School of Art before the war.
What's this man doing here? He's putting his hand- is he checking to see if that patient is breathing? He's putting his hand- because people did die on the way. Lots of them did.
I dunno if he was just comforting him. 'cause like, it, what is slightly striking actually, both in that painting and this, is there's, care happening, but there's not a lot in terms of human comfort. You know, it's quite, mechanical, isn't it? That they're being saved, but they're not, there's, not a lot of human touch, for instance.
Well, Spencer described it as a never ending stream. These men coming off the battlefield. . But I'm, but what always strikes me, it's the angles, again, they're being brought up to this place. It's like a portal in the, at the top, which is, it's the bright lights of the operating theatre. So this sense of hope-
There's a bit of a religious feeling about it, I think because, what do you think about this aerial view that he's taken? This is so unusual. It's not, we're not at eye level. We're looking down on them and there's something a bit, I mean, do we take a God-like view when we look down at them?
Are we a spirit? Kind of floating above the place of our departure?
Um, he was quite spiritual, wasn't he? Actually, he did, He was interested in resurrection ideas.
Yeah, he talked about the crucifixion. He's talked about how early painters painted the crucifixion, a scene of horror, but made it beautiful and hopeful at the same time. And this is what he was trying to do. And for him, he found the spiritual, found the religious in everyday homely activities.
The pillows. I mean, it's almost like halos around-
Yeah. Right, yeah.
Is that... what do you think is happening there? Why? Why is like-
Oh, those are the mosquito nets, aren't they?
Oh, are they mosquito nets?
The Mesopotamian campaign was a big scandal because of medical evacuation, and there was a parliamentary investigation, full committee, with a hundred witnesses and 60 meetings, and, all based on the fact that, you know, people had, there were inadequate medical supplies and all the medical evacuation issues. And the Surgeon-Generals, several of them were, censured in parliament for that. So it was considered a bit of a coverup at the time. So it was a big scandal.
it's interesting how actually each, then, of these paintings is linked to scandal and almost like they're the exposés of the time. You know, they were kind of, so this was, this came out afterwards, but each one is trying to bring the realities of, also like the failure of their own governments to care for their troops, like to, a watching British public. Tell me a bit about the Mesopotamian camp, 'cause that is genuinely not remembered in the same way that the Western Front is, is it?
So was it a particularly bloody part of the war?
It has been forgotten I suppose because, well, as was sort of Gallipoli, unless you're Australian, because I suppose the focus was always on the Western Front. And think politically it was closer to Britain. There was always that big focus on the Western Front as being sort of the one singular experience. And so that is in a sense why art and the commissioning of artists is so important because this provides us with a cultural memory that we wouldn't otherwise have had.
You just don't imagine a world War I with mosquito nets. And it's great two are next to each other. Yeah. You know, you've got Gassed, which is haunting and striking because it is in many ways so iconic. Like those images, everyone has seen. Everyone has seen the mustard gas. Everyone has seen that kind of flat, no man's land kind of thing. Whereas this one, I've never seen a, know.
And I studied war a while ago, you know, and like I've never, I've never seen an image of a world war I scene with mosquito nets and the kind of Sahara sun blockers on the back of their caps. Yeah.
it is time to move on, and for the first time in this series, we are going beyond what the public are allowed to see.
Right, so now we're going to leave the Blavatnik Gallery because we want to go into the art store to see a painting that Ana has suggested we look at. I won't say anything more about this painting now, but our colleagues, Leila and Emily are here to show us the way and, let's go.
Would it be accurate to call the art store heavily guarded?
Well, look at these heavies...
They are led through corridors, out of sight of visitors to a network of rolling metal racking. Each holding artworks. Finally, Carl, Claire and Anna reach their chosen work of art. It is called an operation at the military Hospital, Endell Street by the artist Francis Dodd.
So, first impressions?
So, first impressions. Well, it's a portrait of female surgeons. For the first time we have medical professionals outnumbering the injured.
Good point!
Which is great.
Great point!
So women all kind clad in white. There's a bit of blood splattered around and then a man being operated on, it looks like his stomach or his chest or something like that. And so my first question is an obvious one, so - and forgive my ignorance - there were women surgeons in the First World War?
Yeah. I mean, these, women were pioneering doctors because, and, actually they're all suffragettes. Is that right? Or were they suffragists? So
So your two main ones are Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson. And they were both leading members of the, WSPU, the Women's Social and Political Union, the main suffragist union at the time they were really hardcore.
So, these aren't generic female surgeons. These are celebrity-
Depends what you mean by generic, because there weren't many, they weren't really allowed to do this sort of thing. Louisa, she did, she'd done some time. She'd actually been in jail. Hard labour. She's a convict, a posh convict, I should say. 'cause she's also the daughter of, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who's one of the first British doctors to train and be qualified. And Flora was a doctor as well.
So she was also an activist, Flora Murray, she spoke out against the forced feeding of suffragists in jail.
Wow.
So, and they were really wanting to set up a hospital, but the British said, no way. We don't have women doing that. And so they went to France and said, okay, we'll just take our skills and go to France then. And as you do.
Outside of any kind of permission from the Government... or
They didn't really need to...
...from the government, so they just took off to France, to set up their own hospital?
With the Red Cross in France and in Paris and in Wimereux. And they were so successful that the British had a change of heart.
Wow.
So they came back under the auspices of Sir Alfred Keogh, who was the Director General of Army Medical Services. And they set up this hospital in an old workhouse, I think it was in Endell Street, in Covent Garden.
I know a bit about the painting, how it came to be. IWM was founded in 1917 and the way it went about collecting, on various themes. So Army, Navy, Air Force, Munitions, but crucially, the women's work committee was set up by a Lady Priscilla Norman, who also was a suffragist, and she was really really keen to show what women were doing in the war. , But this comes about in 1920. They were still doing their work then. And they contacted Francis Dodd, who was a well-respected portrait painter.
In fact, and draughtsman, amazing draughtsman. So he'd drawn a huge number of portraits of these military, senior military figures, generals and commanders and things like that earlier on in the war. and so he's the man to do this sort of work. And they said, well, you know, this hospital, Endell Street by then had been closed down, oh you can still visit the operating theater. Everything's been dismantled, but the women will come back and they'll pose for you.
And they made it happen, which I think is really fascinating. They thought, okay, it doesn't matter. This is all over, this is so important. We want to commemorate this and we're gonna make it happen.
What do you think of the patient being a man surrounded by all of these women?
Rather what... than I- Was... was that seen as scandalous?
Well, women were not allowed, before the first World War, to work on men's bodies. They worked on children and they worked on other women. So, these ladies cut their teeth, so to speak, on the front lines in France working on men. And yes, it was scandalous. And yet the men who went to this hospital actually loved it. They felt the women's care. It was both highly professionalised but also really caring and nurturing. So men actually preferred.
And do you know what happened to these women afterwards? 'cause obviously this hospital was shut down, but they must have continued elsewhere.
So do you know what it, this is such an important point about why this art is so important and why the women wanted it was because out of the 37 doctors and surgeons that worked at Endell Street, none of them were able to go into civilian surgery afterwards. It was like thanks, your role was for the duration, off you go back to the-
Yeah. war was an extraordinary circumstance.
Also, these women weren't allowed to have any rank. So it was, they really wanted to be called Major or Colonel or what have you, but they couldn't. And so they struggled and that's the story, I guess, of women in medicine. It's been a big struggle. So this painting is really saying, let's talk about that missing history.
Ana, do we start a movement to get this onto the wall of the gallery?
Yes, let's do it. Do it!
Will I mean... will they let us include that in the podcast?
These, gallery walls are not static, things can be rotated and I think it's important that things are changed round to show, you know, the breadth of our collection.
And inspire the next generation of female surgeons.
So far in this tour, we have looked at the various ways in which the wounded have been depicted. Often prompting a reaction from the public, but Claire now turns our attention to an even more taboo subject, how artists depict the war dead.
So we're looking at this painting here, and this one here.
Okay, wow.
And they're both from the First World War. I'll give you that.
If each painting could become more horrifying, I think somehow that's being achieved. On the left we have two corpses surrounded by barbed wire face down, sinking into the mud. And on the right there is, it looks like a kind of skeletal, kind of corpse, like a corpse that's been there for a time. And then another, and then one of them, the skeletal corpse is kind of facing right at you as the viewer. And both of them have been killed, in a trench.
This would've been very, very hard surely for anyone who had either gone through the war or had family through the water to see.
On this side,
It's Mr Nevinson again.
It is Nevinson again.
How different is this to The Doctor?
Completely different style.
Yeah. He's gone realistic on us.
He's gone realistic.
Yeah.
I mean, this is Nevinson having gone back as an official war artist. In fact, when he- he'd had enough of the war, but of course, crucially conscription comes along in 1917 and he doesn't want to be sent out to fight. And when he hears about this official war artist scheme that's just started, he says yeah, okay, I will go, you know, I wanna get in on this. And I wanna go back as an artist, which is a bit safer. So he does, he goes back in 1917.
Obviously he was already questioning the whole futurist ideas that we talked about, but he'd completely ditched them by then. He just thought it wasn't right to use those methods to show what he's been seeing. And he kind of developed this rather crude realism.
So he thought that, he thought the- so what was it? It was called Vectorism?
Vorticism!
So he thought that Vorticism, even stylistically, was immoral to use, to portray war?
I mean maybe immoral is a bit strong, but-
Inappropriate.
Yeah, it does seem in- yeah, yeah.
Because he'd seen it for himself. And so all the mythologies about what modern war would be like. Turned out to be actually horrendous and horrific.
And so he's dropping even the style and he's like, the only way this should be shown is what it actually looked like on the Front.
And maybe the secret is in the title.
Paths of Glory.
Yeah.
This is the most inglorious-
It's Inglorious. You've got the barbed wire, you've got two British soldiers faced down in the dirt.
So he comes back, so you can imagine he's a commissioned artist, officially commissioned by the British government, a part of the British government. He comes back with this.
This is an odd thing for the British government to want to be- again, from, I suppose-
They weren't happy, shall we put it mildly....
Yes, so I mean, he had, so again, he has this exhibition, everyone's very excited. This famous artist, he had warned some of his friends that he'd changed his style, but I don't think the authorities were that excited that he had. There's other works that were also scandalous.
So he did this group of soldiers painting, and it was criticised for looking, you know, the uncouth- these soldiers were not, they're not the sort of heroic looking soldiers that the authorities would've liked to have seen. So he puts this exhibition up and it's well known that images of dead bodies of British servicemen cannot be shown. The sensor will
not past
That, is a, that is a hard rule.
Whether it's painting or photography or newsreel. You definitely cannot show-
And he must have known that?
He knew.
Or any dead body for that matter at that point, you really... it wasn't just British, they didn't really like any real deaths being shown.
But I always think that he would've- what, would he have been like in this age? Because he did what he called a publicity stunt. I think he would've been excellent on social media.
So do I!
His father was a journalist, he came from that sort of background. And he was like, I'm gonna hang this work, whatever happens, and the months are coming closer as the exhibition's about to open and everyone's like, you can't show it. And instead of taking it off the wall, this is what you do, when something's censored, you just don't show, it doesn't be seen. He puts brown paper all over it and the word censored across.
That's a very 21st century-
They actually objected to that word, didn't they? They didn't like him writing the word censored on it it.
They tried censor him him using a censor.
Exactly!
And there was a photograph of him in front of it. I mean, it's, yeah, it really worked because of course his exhibition was his sensation.
And yet The William Orpen painting was allowed to be shown. And why do you think that was?
I think it's probably 'cause they're Germans.
Yes, And it does say that in the title. So-
Oh, it does...
We'll let you get a bit closer, we can.
I was trying to peer at helmet. I always... the helmet's my only clue. I get, I suppose and maybe the color of the uniform, but- alright, so this is a victory then for the Allied powers. Yeah. I mean it's interesting what happens with Orpen, so he's another official war artist and he spends longer than anyone out there. I mean he's like Sargent, he's a society portrait painter, and he is very, very successful. He's probably the best known artist of the day.
Gosh. Can you imagine the change in context? I mean, all of these- used to painting royals in their palaces or aristocrats-
Aristocrats. Absolutely. And he, know, had he, you know, the life of riley, he was a celeb actually. But he thought, oh, I'm missing out on something. I need to be out there, because creatively he was probably at a bit of a dead end. He was just doing the same thing again and again. So he pulls some strings 'cause he knows a lot of people and he manages to get this commission to be a war artist. And at first he's painting generals and portraits. You know, quite traditional portraits.
But eventually he gets to do more and more. And at this point in 1917, he's just wandering-
He's there for what , two years or something?
He's out there for years. And he's, wandering the battlefields, which is where the Somme was fought. But they'd moved on, the Germans had retreated. And it was just, this is the empty battle field- well, not empty, but, deserted battlefield, by himself with his easel. And I think he, you know, he drives himself a little bit mad in this situation by himself. And he talks about this moment where he sits down on a tree stump and suddenly he's on the back of his head.
And he's fallen over and his easel's up-turned and there's a skull gone through his easel. Who knows what-
Sorry, what? A skull?
A skull. A human skull. Because he's going around and there's just skulls and there's like shallow graves and-
Yeah. People who didn't get buried in time or-
yeah. I mean it's
bodies everywhere. Bodies were used to shore up the trenches, in fact, you know?
Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean,
And you can see this trench, I mean it's been there for a while. These bodies haven't been collected by the German side. They haven't been buried. No. There's just not the time to do it. They just left. They had to abandon retreat, and it's this- and also what's distinctive about his work of this period is the sun. And everything's baked white. This mud, was-
I was gonna ask if it was snow. But it's not. it's
Chalky. Well, suppose, when you bombed a lot of areas, the white chalk came up. And he did a whole series of other paintings, which are absolutely gorgeous, actually they're weirdly stunning, of these white, lunar-looking landscapes that are white and chalky. But look at, I think this person's been dead for a while. They're looking very green and the, again, this gaping open mouth, they look like they died in pain.
Those sightless eyes and that grimace might be one of the most horrifying, kind of microcosmic things we've seen in any of these paintings. And there's absolutely nothing glorious or honorable or, or victorious about this, is it? That is just simply a kind of picture of human suffering.
did
Did Orpen and Nevinson like know each other? This kind of like group of official artists, do they
form
a kind of community of sorts?
Well, Nevinson doesn't really form a community of anyone. He just-
Individualist! As a lot of artists are.
He just annoys people. But I think, and Orpen spends a lot of time in France, as I said, that strange thing that happened to him has this deep impression when he falls over and he doesn't know why, and he ends up hitting the bottle and he actually becomes really good friends with a lot of the military. He's good friends with Earl Haig of all people. And he gives all his work he does as a war artist, to the Nation. And we interpret that as to the Imperial War Museum. So we have a lot of his work.
The great interpretation.
Yeah. Yeah. Is, yeah.
This must have felt like the whole of civilised society, the fabric of kind of human civilization in general was being ripped apart. This would've been absolutely terrifying to contemplate the scale of all of this.
Can you imagine just coming down, setting up an easel in this trench?
Yeah. I know, and I'm gonna spend, God knows how, even how long this takes to paint, but you've gotta contemplate that face.
And also that, you know, most people, their only access to what was going on in any frontline was through black and white images that were highly censored, very sanitised, and told a really glorious story of, you know, efficient medical system or what have you. And these artists really showed absolute opposite of what war propaganda had shown them.
The green of rotting flesh.
The green, yeah, the colour. This is the- this is a war in colour that you now see.
We have reached our final object, and as first impressions go, Carl is not sure what to make of it or even what it is.
This?
Yeah. ... Carl: box? Yeah.
My gosh.
You can touch it.
You can touch it?
thank God. Oh, wow. So it's a box of, wooden slides. It's quite long, isn't it? It's... and they're stamps. I should have said, I mean, they're stamps of people that have been killed, aren't they?
That's right. Yes. They are. Absolutely right.
And these would all be, Iraq and Afghanistan?
This is Iraq, actually.
Just Iraq. 2003 to 2008.
That's extremely haunting, isn't it?
Very moving
So the artist is Steve McQueen, who's much more well known as a filmmaker. I mean, he's an artist and he's a filmmaker. He was actually commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to make a work about Iraq. And it was really difficult. He was sent out to Basra, he did go with the British Army. But it was in late 2003, after so-called mission accomplished, But it was a very unstable situation in Iraq and, you know, lots of different militant groups.
The Army was saying, we can't really let him even leave the base.
It was all the, counter insurgency... it was the insurgency was flaring wasn't it?
Exactly. But he got to know the young soldiers and he was really moved by their commitment to the cause. And then he was hoping to go out again and then lots of delays and never happened. As time wore on, he just came up with this idea as a way of commemorating all those who died, whether they were killed in action or whether they even killed themselves, which was the, I mean, there's quite a lot of controversial things about this commission about this artwork.
The MOD weren't happy to release the details of the soldiers' families to the artist. They felt that was something they couldn't do. We had to obviously work with the MOD and-
And the identities of the casualties.
Yeah.
So they could-
The Ministry of Defence would've being very sensitive to just releasing information like that. But also, I guess there's a political cost of doing that as well. It's, again, back to the question of the explicit sensor and the implicit sensor. It is also incredibly fraught and delicate. I mean, think about whose lives we can commemorate and whose lives we can't and in what public format that can be done.
And so, but he does manage?
So what he does is he's got a team of researchers and they do their own research to find all the soldiers' families who're really supportive of the project. And so yeah, as you say, they supply the images. But he wanted them to be postage stamps, as you can see-
To be released?
To be released... ... Ana: through the Royal Mail. So we approached the Royal Mail, and the Royal Mail were really worried about this as well. And they thought if the MOD weren't on board they couldn't be on board. And so they are sort of, I don't know what you call them, facsimile stamps. They're not official stamps. You couldn't, you know, put them on a letter, they wouldn't work. And in the end he thought, right, I'll make this artwork to house them.
The whole equality of this box holding them. I mean, it's obviously got this, it's an old school museum-style sort of cabinet, but also it's reminiscent of a catafalque, which is, you know, something that holds a coffin. It all plays into this. And, it's a memorial piece, you know, and a bit like Gassed, ever since it's been made, we've pretty much had it on display, the whole time for people to browse.
But I think there's something deeper here, which is about perhaps something as profound as death in war serving your country. To put it on a stamp, and he's still campaigning to get the Royal Mail to agree to it, is to turn it into something very every day and banal. And so everybody who's posted a letter through the weeks and years of the war would actually be reminded of the cost of it.
I mean, the photographs they use, whether these are kind of- they mainly look like the official military photographs, don't they, they hit very hard, don't they?
...hit very hard...
in a way, which is really different the paintings, 'cause there you have injured men largely in paint. But these are all men in the prime of their life largely. I mean, they look healthy, happy. You know, they're all fighting-age men and the fact that they are all real people, were real people who are now dead, kind of really does hit hard the way that they look-
And some of them in civilian clothing, maybe it's a photograph from a wedding. I mean, these are really personal, personal photographs for families.
I mean, it's the only work that is personal, isn't it?
We have reached the end of today's tour of the Blavatnik Art, Film, and Photography Galleries. But there's just time to pop down to the cafe and decompress.
I mean, I have to confess, you know, I mean, I love the Imperial War Museum, I come here often, but I probably have been sucked into looking at the weapons as a kind of schoolboy and being like, just loving the whole, those those, are enormous.
The hardware appeals.
Yeah. Those are enormous cannons. Oh my God, look, that's a tank over there, that's a spitfire. And there's always gonna, I mean, there's always gonna be that, I think. But I'm far more upset today. I think that's a good thing.
Yeah, 'cause is at the other end of the cannon.
Yes, exactly. The other end of the cannon. With the skeletal...
Yeah!
...green, ghostly... I can't unsee that one actually, that is the other end of the cannon as well. And I think that's basically what the art we were looking at today really was about, wasn't it? Well thank you. Such a joy to go around with both of you, and you to just talk about the things that you are world experts in is, this is amazing. And I think, yeah, I mean if we can rename the gallery The Other End Of The Cannon,
I like that.
You know, that would be, great.
And that's where we must end this conflict of interest. Thanks again to our guests, Carl Miller, Claire Brenard, and Professor Ana Carden-Coyne. Next week on Conflict of Interest
I've often talked in recent times about how easily people put dead children on the news and on social media now. And I didn't know that it wasn't a modern- I didn't know they used that It's really horrific.
Rachel Parris picks up the propaganda thread and explores its relationship to protest art. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.