“Women War Artists” at the Imperial War Museum

It so happens that last week I found out the results of my finals.  I can breathe a sigh of relief: all went well.  I had a good time celebrating at Bob and Ray Davies at the weekend (as well as in making an industrial amount of chocolate biscuit cake).  But my trip to the Women War Artists exhibition yesterday – a week after the results came out – struck me as perhaps the most appropriate send-off for my undergraduate career, even if this only occurred to me as I was leaving the grounds of the Imperial War Museum.  The show was strangely apt in the light of my last academic year; not only did I do a course on the subject of women’s writing during wartime (focussing on the two World Wars), I wrote my dissertation on a closely related area (the depiction of women’s wartime work in women’s fiction in the Second World War).

As such, I was well prepared for the exhibition, and it by no means disappointed.  As with my reading of women’s writing, it was refreshing to see that the category of women’s art was so diverse, ranging from the disturbing, faintly surrealist Runaway Horse in an Air-Raid Alarm by Priscilla Thornycroft (1955) to the muted landscapes of Olive Mudie Cooke, by way of the almost pre-Raphaelite Women’s Canteen at Phoenix Works, Bradford (1918) by Flora Lion.

Evelyn Dunbar – The Queue at the Fish-Shop (1944)

I was also delighted to see a cross-over with my course, with the inclusion of Evelyn Dunbar’s witty The Queue at the Fish-Shop (1944), a picture which graces the cover of Jenny Hartley’s Millions Like Us (a relatively rare deep critical study of women’s wartime fiction which – both for its rarity and its quality – quickly became the touchstone for my dissertation).  My reaction to this painting clearly demonstrates that I am not really a sophisticated person; as when, in Liverpool, I unexpectedly came across a painting I knew but hadn’t been expecting to see, I made some sort of astonished noise and went and clucked over Dunbar’s painting like an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.  I suspect proper art historians do not do such things.  As well as the Fish-Shop painting, there were some other of Dunbar’s works, including a lovely one of Army Tailor and ATS Tailoress (1943), full of peaceable co-operation between the sexes, concentration and contained activity.

Easily the single most striking piece in the show, for my money, was Anna Airy’s A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London (1918) (I couldn’t find a photo to do it justice); if ever Inez Holden’s factory-worker fiction gets a modern reprint, this should be on one of the covers.  Airy’s picture depicts the horrible glow of ferociously hot metals and the insufferable heat of a factory – made all the worse by the inclusion of a glimpse of the world outside, where it looks like a glorious summer’s day (both worsening the heat of the factory indoors and worsening the necessity of being cooped up rather than able to enjoy the beautiful day).  I felt stuffy looking at it.  But in spite of contributing perhaps the best work in this show, Airy’s story is apparently one of disappointed hopes, her light dimmed with the advent of Modernism.  She ought to have become a household name, going by the work exhibited here.  Sadly, such frustrations are a constant in the lives of the female producers of both art and literature of this period; elsewhere in this exhibition is Margaret Abbess’ sleek, graphic work from the Second World War, which she considered destroying as recently as 2005, thinking no-one had any value in it.  What else has been lost in this same casual way?  It boggles the mind.

Necessarily I was most taken with the First and Second World War material, but more recent conflicts were also represented.  Of most note, to my mind, is Linda Kitson’s excellent series of conté crayon line drawings, particularly her very striking Blue Beach Two, San Carlos, 5 June 1982 (1982), where faint suggestions of colour have been added in places to the line drawing of a landscape with helicopters.  They seem to capture moments on the move, as well as the vitality and transience of the soldiers’ experience (it is notable, too, that these are depictions of soldiers’ lives on duty rather than the Home Front; a progression of sorts for female art in the context of war).

What more can I say?  It’s free, it’s excellent and it runs for the rest of the year.  While I admit I’m biased in its favour, I do think it’s a vital area that is deserving of the notice of more casual visitors as well as people in  academic ivory towers, and it should get you thinking if nothing else.  Give it a go.