SKETCHBOOK WAR: Saving the Nation's Artists

The Bombing of GHQ Boulogne by Edward Ardizzone, Dunkirk: Embarkation of Wounded by Edward Bawden, An Old Battleground by Richard Seddon, Dangerous Work At Low Tide by Eric Ravilious and September 3rd 1939 by Henry Moore with barely human half drowned figures staring wildly are among the colour plates chosen for this collection of nine stories of courage, tenacity, inventiveness and persistence. During WWII, British artists produced over 6,000 works of war art, the result of a government scheme partly designed to prevent the artist being killed. The book tells the story of these nine war artists who ventured closer to the frontline than any others in their profession. In addition to the above mentioned were Barnett Freedman, Anthony Gross, Thomas Hennell, Albert Richards, and John Worsley who all travelled abroad into the dangers of war to chronicle events by painting them. They formed a close bond, yet two were torpedoed, two were taken prisoner, and three died, two in 1945 when peace time was at hand. Men who had previously made a comfortable living painting in studios were transformed by military uniforms and experiences that were to shape the rest of their lives, and their works significantly influenced the way in which we view war today. Some of the artists paintings and sketches have been included such as Henry Moore's Swimming Off the Southcoast on the Day War Broke Out - the stark coming together of a blue late summer's day and the looming blood-filled threat of war as a sky in the near distance, the first sight of the war the reader gets in this pictorial record of those six tragic years. The sequence of dates and locations provides a different kind of diary or journal. Full of biographical detail and so many aspects caught through the fine artists' eyes and into paint - the phoney war, evacuees harvesting, portraits of the great and the good, and the ordinary like gun manufacture, aerodrome runways, tanks rumbling through France, small boats at Dunkirk, anti-aircraft defences and bomb damage. 'John Worsley stood disconsolately near the wire, hands in pockets, eyes fixed on a point beyond the perimeter fence. That was dauntingly high, well over a man's height, with concrete posts at regular intervals... To his right was a wooden watchtower, under whose shadowy roof were more guards, crouched over machine-guns, watching him as he stared at the point where freedom began.' 240pp, well illustrated paperback, colour plates.