I'm Sanjeev. You may have seen me before. Possibly on Unforgotten. I dunno if you've seen that. But we've got series six about to start. But I think you may have seen me in person before at Sussex University, where you graduated. And I gave you your degree.
That's right.
This is so exciting.
Sanjeev Baskar has joined curator Iris Vasey at the 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. In this episode, we discuss history's most private thoughts as we explore the inner minds of civilians as their society descends into war.
He talks about seeing the smoke rising from the bombings on the radar stations, but also to what he was hearing from his friends in London, which is why you had this funny combination of a very built up area and then rolling fields.
From artist diaries to the most surreal work in the IWM's collection, we'll discover how the often violent changes to everyday life were understood by those that lived through them.
But it's such an abstract notion to a child that a bomb's gonna fall that you couldn't compute it as pure terror, you know? Some of it was just quite exciting.
On our way, we'll be joined by an expert in the psychological impact of warfare also, that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.
It both captures the blackout, but it also captures what it was like to live in a city that had absolutely no light, and you didn't know what was lurking behind the walls.
All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest. It is January, 2025 and Sanjeev and Iris meet in the gift shop before making their way up to the museum's dedicated art space. The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Gallery; and Iris has invited another expert along today.
I'm Beryl Pong. I'm an academic at the University of Cambridge. I research literature and culture about modern war. So from the First World War right up to today's drone wars.
What we want to do in this episode is to look at the different ways that artists and visual practitioners responded to conflict, in forms that were abstract or surreal, and that seemed to evoke a sense of a dream world or a nightmare world. You can never know for sure what is going on in someone's head, but I think that the artworks that we're looking at today do offer a fascinating insight into what these individuals may be thinking or feeling in a given moment.
Sanjeev is led to a glass case. Enclosed within, is our first object: an artist's sketchbook. On certain podcast apps, you can glance at your phone as you listen to see some of the works we are discussing.
Okay, so this is, a sketchbook from 1939. There are three sketches on the pages that are open. One is of a lady's face. She seems middle- aged if that's not too judgmental, I don't mean it in a judgmental way, but-. And on the opposite side of the page there's a picture where the caption is 'the vampire cap has sucked my brains'. And that is also, I think, a female face, but much more abstract with very bloodshot eyes. The top half of her head above the eye is missing.
And between the two, there's a caption of 'who goes there?' And this is quite abstract. There's some sort of tree. This is quite a colorful picture, and a creature on the right, which is, it's some sort of antelope. It's got long horns, but it's got markings, I dunno, maybe like a zebra or something.
Yeah. So this is by a young woman called Beatrice Ferguson, and it's a sketchbook, and it's a personal sketchbook that she kept in the late 1930s. She would've been about 20 when she kept it. And she was actually briefly a student at the Slade School of Arts. But what's really interesting about this sketchbook is you can see her responding to what's happening in the world around her.
So it's the late 1930s, the Second World War is looming, and all through this sketchbook you have these quite sort of bizarre, sometimes funny, but also quite foreboding, drawings that she's created. It includes satirical drawings as well. So you can recognise figures throughout the sketchbook. You know, there's Hitler as a skeleton at the end and it's captioned 'I am monarch of all I slay'.
So it's quite unique, really, as a sort of- well, it's called a snapshot sketchbook, but it's a snapshot of her life really in this particular moment. And it's somewhere between a sketchbook and a diary, almost.
So you said she was about 20 when she did this, so that means she would've been born just after the First World War?
Yeah.
So are the indications within this book an indication of fear primarily? Or was she seeing war as abstract?
Well, I'm sure. It's a good question, isn't it? 'cause you can never really tell what is happening in someone's mind.
Yeah, I think a lot of 1930s culture is about dread and anxiety. I think particularly for a generation that hadn't experienced the First World War, for them it's not a memory, but it's a kind of anticipatory trauma to come, right?
So they've heard about this Great War that's happened, and then from the rise of fascism and kind of as we move slowly but clearly towards another global conflict by the end of the 1930s, this generation had time to kind of sit with and think through and think with the fact that they are going to be embroiled in another war that they hadn't experienced before.
I think also, just listening to both of you talking about it with- she's 20, so this is a young person's view. Also I know from personal experience, so my parents were both displaced in the partition of India in 1947, and so, although she would've been too young to have experienced the First World war, she'd be surrounded by people who had, and so there is that thing of generational trauma.
The fact that most of them didn't talk about it was actually more traumatic in a way because it's left to your imagination, than talking about it. And also just how quickly really those two wars came about. You got double generational trauma for a lot of people who came out the other side of it.
Yeah.
But also, with the Hitler one as the skeleton with the caption 'I am monarch of all I slay', that's almost premonitionary...
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
...in 1939. I mean, nobody would've had any idea of how bad it was gonna get, but that does sum it up. Quite...
well
Part of what I looked at in literature and cultural forms of expression from the wartime period, so I looked at paintings, photography, film and works of literature from the 1930s to 1950s around the Second World War, is that there was this impulse to set down in the diaristic mode what was happening. Not because one knew what was actually the meaning of what's happening now, but for future retrospection.
I term this the anticipation of retrospection, which is setting memories or vignettes or impressions down now during a time that was tumultuous when the future was uncertain, with the hope that after the event, which is the war, you have a kind of document that you can come back to.
Would that have been for the person that was-
Yeah, it's very much a kind of psychological experience. I don't think they were setting it down necessarily for posterity for their loved ones read about their chronicles. I think a lot of it was this psychological impulse to set something down about the tumult of the times.
That's really interesting, you know, given the generational trauma I mentioned, so many people chose after the event not to talk about it to anyone else. And they had their thoughts and their, those were in their head and their memories were in their head. So it's interesting a lot of people kind of put it down in some way to document it for themselves.
it's time for object number two, and Sanjeev is already struggling to articulate just what he can see in front of him.
Do you know what, it's really difficult to describe abstract paintings. I mean, if this was an exam, I would've failed by now. What can I see? Well, they, I mean, it's either- it's the sun and there is kind of darkness everywhere. Or it's the moon and it's nighttime. And these kind of horn type things that look like drill bits, actually some of them, appear to be coming out of some of the windows of the buildings. You know, in terms of a feeling, it's bleak.
So this artwork is called Echo of the Bombardment.
Right.
And it's by an artist called Keith Vaughan, who was a British painter. And it was painted in 1942, so it's after the Blitz in London. And it was one of a series of artworks that Vaughan created in response to the Blitz, called Destruction of the Human City. What's really interesting about this artwork is one, of course it is incredibly foreboding, gives a real sense of. how the Blitz might have felt.
You know, it's very sinister, it's very dark, and the city has been transformed into this strange landscape. The buildings are sort of abstract. There are these strange creatures or machines that seem to be spilling out onto the street. And so it does feel very evocative of what Vaughan would've seen and experienced during the Blitz. We were talking about diaries, and actually Vaughan was somebody who kept diaries throughout his life and those diaries have been published.
So we do actually have a fairly good sense of how he felt during the war. Vaughan was a conscious objector. He joined the Royal Medical Corps, , but at the start of the war in 1939 he wrote very frankly in his diary about how frightened he was with the Blitz. And I actually do have some quotes from his diary here, which I think really kind of play out in then what he experienced that you can see in this image. He said, 'One wondered how loud the first explosion would be.
Try to anticipate the shock. Wondered how much the nerves could stand before they cracked, but all the time, silence.' And later on he talks about the effort of maintaining the conviction that one was not dreaming. So you really get the sense that this whole experience felt very surreal to him. And that is directly reflected in this image, I think.
To me, this is definitely nighttime. For me it evokes blackout. Everyone, after a certain hour, had to shut their blinds, minimize light to reduce visibility against the bombers that would fly through during the Blitz. And there's a lot of really surreal, interesting and quite disturbing works of literature just about how strange the moon looked in the blackout. I mean, imagine London being completely quiet.
Completely dark, and then just this white moon, and the light that you can see in the city just comes from the moon, right? So there's a short story by Elizabeth Bowen called Mysterious Kor, which is all about these hallucinations and these fantasies that come up when the moon comes out during the Blitz.
And there's another great novel by Henry Green called Caught, which is about an auxiliary fireman's trauma from the past coming back to light, so to speak, when he sees the moon appearing on one of his shifts. It both captures something that happened, which was the blackout, but it also captures this surreal, fantastical atmosphere of what it was like to live in, a city that had absolutely no light. And you didn't know what was lurking behind the walls.
This is something I've experienced, So, as a kid I was in India, I got stuck in India, during the Bangladesh independence war. I... I experienced the blackouts and bombers going overhead, didn't experience, you know, bombs falling or any of that sort of stuff. But it's an interesting thing about anticipation that you were mentioning is, as a child, it was, the anticipation was a mixture of kind of fear and excitement. especially as a 7-year-old, this was kind of melodrama at its highest.
And the interesting thing about the blackouts were, the air raid sirens would go off and all the lights would be off. And I remember everyone would go onto their roofs, flat roofs. And as you say, the only light was from the moon. And so that casts a surreal view of this town that you've been wandering around in the day and shops and cinemas and everything else.
And the one thing I do remember from that was, one person who'd left their lights on, which was probably about a mile and a half away, and it glowed like some sort of gem stone, with people kinda shouting to kind of like switch the light off. So, you know, it was, it was a strange mixture of kind of, well that's a scary idea, but it's such an abstract notion to a child that a bomb's gonna fall and things fall down, that you couldn't compute it as pure terror, you know?
So some of it was just quite exciting.
We move on and for the first time in this tour, Sanjeev is starting to get into his surrealist groove.
Well. Well, this is properly abstract. These look very much like two people I dated, quite early on. All the proportions are irregular for a start. Slightly Picassoesque sort of way. And the ears aren't in the right places. And the- I mean, the eyes aren't in the right places, but they're hardly eyes. But I mean, you've got the shape of faces. So you've got mouth, you've got suggestion of a nose, you've got eyes, you've got ears. But each of these characters has one eye.
It could be a round skylight of some kind. The other eye on one character looked like a bunch of cannons or gun barrels of some kind. I hasten to add, the two that I dated that looked like this, it didn't last.
So this painting is called Premonitions of the Blitz. Julien Trevelyan was a surrealist artist. And I think what's really interesting about this artwork is, one, how it is an example of artists working in surrealist and abstract ways to respond to the conflict. The title, Premonition of the Blitz, it really evokes that sense of foreboding. It's looking forward to what may happen to the city.
You have these people who've been transformed by machinery and weapons as this beam of light that may or may not be coming from their eye or from the sky as though they are seeing the future. So there's a sense of foreboding and it also ties in a lot to, you know, other surrealist artists. But what's really fascinating about Trevelyan is that actually by the end of the war, he felt that surrealism was no longer relevant.
For him, he thought the war was so surreal in itself that there was no need to create surrealist art.
Here you have an aesthetic movement that was all about rendering or putting expression down of the inner psyche. And oftentimes these surrealist images would have cropped limbs or strange objects that would be hanging from trees. And, you know, I'm thinking of Dali's Persistence Of Memory as a kind of, famous example. But what do you do when you actually see surrealist scenes from violence and from bombardment, right?
Does that give new meaning to surrealism or as Iris says, does it make it kind of irrelevant or defunct?
I find this much more disturbing than the- the first one was kind of, was bleak, but this one I think is horrifying.
I mean, for me the thing that is most disturbing about this image is the dehumanisation, as Bowen says of, the figures that have been completely transformed by the mechanisation of war, by what's coming for them. So, although the Vaughan is very eerie and unsettling and foreboding, this feels more bodily more kind of physical manifestation in the body of that terror.
Over the course of this series, we have considered the changes aerial warfare made to our landscape. How we view the battlefield, and in our last episode, our technological prowess, but now we focus on its psychological impact.
So, the artwork that we're going to be looking at forms part of this display which is all about aerial warfare. And what we see in this set of artworks here, all along this wall and round to our right, are artists responding in different ways to the war in the air. So one of the artworks that we have on display here by Edward Burra, which we're gonna look at now, particularly speaks to that experience for civilians.
What did it mean when war was no longer something that was just fought on the ground, but you know, was taking place in the air above you and was taking place above you even as a civilian. Not just when you were in the trenches, in the first World war, but, you know, at home.
Yes, another abstract. So we've got some sort of giant blue figure- human figure- humanoid. Except the arms, actually and the feet and, like tentacles from an octopus. And the face is a bit like a kind of a predatory bird, and it appears to be flying over some sort of landscape, which has got smoke billowing up, from various places. Lots of, again, humanoid figurines that are cowering and in great fear.
I don't find it particularly frightening, but when you look at the people on the ground, the closest thing, you have two human beings. That is what makes it scary.
So, this is Blue Baby: Blitz Over Britain by Edward Burra. Burra was a British artist and during the war he was living in Rye, on the South coast, which is where he was from originally. So we've moved out of the city that we saw in the Keith Vaughan image and the Julian Trevelyan, and we are into the countryside. what's interesting about this as well is, one, the kind of particularity of its location where they had these radar stations, which were being heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe.
So he was seeing the bombing on a daily basis. It's also, I think, the only artwork that he made that responded to the war in the air. He really wasn't interested in planes or in aviation the way that other war artists of the period. So artists like Paul Nash were really captivated by flight and captivated by the sight of the planes and the sky. Burra wasn't taken with them in that way. He did create some artworks that were of soldiers in Rye.
People were posted around, but this is the kind of only one that he's responded to in this way. But I think, you know, it is very typical of his work. You have this sort of grotesque figure, as you say, humanoid. Is it a bird? Is it a monster? Kind of gliding over the landscape and wreaking havoc below.
It's really interesting that Burra chooses, I think, the figure of a heartbeat. I mean, it looks like these are wings even though the figure is humanoid, to represent the war in the air. And I think the way you described the colours of the sky's blood orange is completely spot on. It suggests burning flames, but also some kind of apocalyptic feeling to it.
It's almost like Pop art or comic book art, which came later. And maybe that- my to that on its own is why I find that less frightening in itself, because I think that's part of the story that will be told in panels on a page. When you get down to the bottom and the human figures that are kind of heaped on top of each other, or cowering, or seem like broken people, that's where the horror for me, kind of like, then it's almost juxtaposing. 'cause that looks fairly real, a depiction of reality.
Whereas the figure above it is almost a comic book mythological sensibility.
Yeah. And the kind of play with scale evokes exactly that narrative, right. You're drawn to the figure as the main story, but actually the real story you have to focus your attention on, which is the people who are kind of cowering living under this mythological figure.
Always read the small print.
Yes.
Burra, as far as I know, didn't keep a diary or not one that was published extensively, but he did write letters and we do have quite a few of those. And I think it's interesting in the letters you see, it feels that this is probably a response to what he was seeing in why.
In some of his letters he talks about seeing the smoke rising from the bombings on the radar stations, but also to what he was hearing from his friends in London which is of course not far away at all from Rye, and from his own visits to London after the Blitz.
So it's a combination in that way of a response to his own lived experience of being under bombardment in Rye, but also to the stories perhaps he was hearing coming out of the city, which is why you had this funny combination of a very built up area and then rolling fields in the background.
It is time for our final object of the series, and it's a piece that takes us from the Second World War right up to the present day.
Wow. This is interesting. From a distance, a very, very colorful aircraft taking off and traveling down a very sepia street. And to me, I mean, sepia streets suggests olden days, whatever that means. it suggests the past. Whereas, colour is bright and it's vivid. I dunno, is it like a magic eye painting? You're gonna tell me it's a cat now, aren't you? It's a cat sitting on a cushion or something.
So, this artwork is called By The Moonlight and it's by an artist called Mahwish Chishty, who was born in Pakistan and now lives in America. And this is one of a series of works that Chishty created starting in 2011, responding to the prevalence of armed drones on the border of Pakistan. So what she's actually done here is she's recreated the shape of a reaper drone. This artwork sits alongside an artwork about a stealth bomber.
and it's sort of representative of what's sort of what we see in contemporary art, certainly art since 2001 and even earlier which is more and more artists responding to drones and to unmanned aerial vehicles and their use in conflict. And she describes the drones that she draws in this way as being like beautiful but deadly insects. So they have these vivid bright colors, they're sort of enticing, they have this quite elegant shape. But of course they are deadly.
And so that's what she's trying to get to here. This idea of a tension between what you see and what you might be drawn to, and what might harm you.
So nowadays, you know, in Gaza, Ukraine, you see drones everywhere. But this is from 2013 and she started doing her drone series around 2011 at a time when there just weren't that many public images of drones available. So she's taken the silhouette of something that people knew about and kind of furnished it, given her own take on what drones are, which is that it's not this kind of black stealth shadow that you can't see.
Drones have a very high up... this model would be 5,000 feet at least, in the air. But, yeah, furnished it with bold eye-catching colours that she takes from Pakistani truck art, actually. So a lot of the patterns are meant to be flamboyant, so I think there is this play with using the aesthetics to try to draw attention to something that's not meant to have attention drawn to it.
It's interesting you said, because when you mentioned the decorative thing, I did think about trucks in India and Pakistan, both of which I've seen, and there is, and buses as well. I don't know why...
There is a specific kind of desire to decorate your trucks, but it is kind of across that whole way which, you know, coming from here always struck me as really weird that you go there and it's just a regular truck that's transporting something every day, but it's been kind of, it's zhuzhed up to its most extreme. But that all then makes sense actually of the colours and the designs and stuff.
I think we have these cultural narratives of the Blitz as pluck and resilience. But when we talk about contemporary drone wars, we don't tend to think about that psychological experience of those who live with these warring machines that you can't see, but you can hear, I think oftentimes with drone wars we, in the media, we fixate on images of drone strike damage. We think about numbers of casualties, but we don't think about the feeling of being watched, right?
An important difference here is that the drone is unmanned. It's flying many, many miles away from where the pilot would be operating the drone. And it's got cutting edge technologies that can survey a really wide geography and capture it and record it for people to look at later. So it's very much a surveillance technology. So something that strikes me is that we have this ready story about aerial violence for the Blitz that is about people, people surviving.
But we don't, I think, talk enough about the way drone wars are affecting people's mental health, the way communities live, in places like Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and, elsewhere.
We have reached the end of this tour of the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Gallery, but there's just time for Sanjeev to return to the cafe and make sense of what we've seen today.
Is there a way of approaching, looking at a painting? Is there a kind of shortcut system that I can employ when I look at the painting first? Is it-
You know the answer to that but I'll let Iris answer!
No: there isn't.
Damn!
There's no wrong way to look at a painting. There's no wrong way to look at art. The first thing to do is simply that, is just to look. Through this recording we asked you to look at the artworks with no context really, or further information. But I think that what you see through that process is just looking at it. What are the shapes I'm seeing? What are the colours I'm seeing? How does it make me feel? So no, there's no shortcut, but there's also no wrong way. So you can't do it wrong.
A colleague of mine uses the term slow looking Sit with it, which is exactly what you did. There's a journey that happens when you look. You start with one impression and then if you spend enough time to sit with the elements and to think about the questions that you've mentioned, Iris, then another story starts to emerge.
And sometimes it might be in tension with your initial impression, sometimes it might corroborate it, but I would say that's part of the experience of what it is to look at or appreciate art.
I think I've found the right way.
I think you're onto something.
Thank you very much. I may just publish this, but I'll tell you anyway. Iris and Beryl, thank you so much for your time and your insight. It's made me view not just pictures of art, not just the ones here, in a completely different way. I didn't know there would be art at the Imperial War Museum. And you come here expecting stuff, physical things, maybe some photographs and stuff like that. So art was not what I was expecting.
But also I kind of realise that the art enhances the physical stuff and the physical stuff enhances the art. When you can see the physical things from that time or photographs from that time, then the art actually gives you, it's almost like a hidden piece of a jigsaw that kind of completes a fuller picture of what people went through or the way they were thinking or whatever. And I didn't expect that, actually.
And that concludes this series of Conflict of Interest.
something a little different, as we invite an artist to discuss his work and how it intersects with modern conflict.
They weren't charged. They were never charged with anything. Yet they go home to live in the British homes that they came from, forever associated with that exotic, dehumanising, demonising representation and spectacle on our screens. So I was really interested in looking at how these men, looking at their environment to say... these are British homes.
That's Edmund Clark, next week on Conflict of Interest. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Cordio, with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel Ben Chorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.