The Man Who Drew ‘The Better ’Ole’
Mark Bryant examines the wartime work of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the famous ‘Old Bill’ character.
Art
A War Cartoonist at the Foreign Office
Mark Bryant examines the wartime work of Osbert Lancaster, the centenary of whose birth this year is marked with a new exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London.
Hollywood Blockbusters and Historical Reality
Michael Morrogh sees value in historical films, despite their evident imperfections.
Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters
Lucy Riall explores the social and political issues in Italy following the country’s unification. She shows how these issues became the focus for a dynamic new artistic movement of the 1890s, Divisionism, a forerunner to Futurism and the subject of a current exhibition at the National Gallery.
‘Jane’: the Strip That Teased
Mark Bryant examines the history of the Second World War’s favorite cartoon pin-up.
Honest Abe’s War
Mark Bryant examines how cartoonists saw the most traumatic years of American history.
Art on the Street
Manus McGrogan traces the radical posters that flowered on the walls of Paris in the spring of 1968, while a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London offers a chance to see them.
Change Me: Facial Injuries in the First World War
Paddy Hartley describes how an interest in the treatment of facial injuries in the First World War led him to develop a new form of sculpture.
Arts, Crafts & Socialism
Sheila Rowbotham introduces the ‘hands-on’ utopian, C.R. Ashbee, and the Guild of Handicraft he established in 1888, shedding light on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arts and Crafts ideas about work, consumption and society.