Shared Experience: Art and War
Roger Tolson introduces a new exhibition of Commonwealth war artists at the Imperial War Museum, London.
During the First World War, the development of official artist schemes took the role of art during wartime to a new level. Officially commissioned art was no longer unquestioningly supportive: the honesty of eye-witness artists allied to deliberately liberal patronage resulted in a complex set of imagery that embodied contemporary cultural values but grappled with the complex consequences of war. The impact on a young Kenneth Clark, taken to see the exhibition of Canadian War art at the Royal Academy in 1917 which included work by many leading British artists, was significant. Clark, later to become Keeper of the Queen’s paintings and then Director of the National Gallery in London, was the driving force behind the British War Artists Scheme that was ready to appoint artists at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 and would ultimately commission some of the finest British art of the twentieth century.
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