BOOKS OF THE DAY
A War-Artist on War-Photographs
History Under Fire. By James Pope-Hennessy. Photos. by Cecil Beaton. (Botsford. 8s. 6d.)
THE bombing of buildings in this country since last September ought to have provided painters and photographers with the opportunity of their lives. But though we have talked of the possibilities for years, now that we are faced with the results we are a bit out of step. We had realised that it would all be quite near home, but the implications had not sunk in. In the last war, the war-artists had the advantage of us. They went abroad to scenes of death and devastation, and, when they brought back their records, these had the virtues of explorers' tales that everybody wanted to listen to, as well as being works of art with unusual subjects. There is no exploring worth the fare in this country this time. The rubble is scattered on all our doorsteps. The war-artist as a romantic figure brimming with anecdotes does not belong to 1941. (Mr. Edward Bawden, when he returns from the Middle East, may prove to be an exception. I look forward, at any rate, to seeing Bawden draw- ings of camels in situ.) Twenty-five years ago artists and photographers were pioneers in another sense too ; pioneers in form. Post-Impressionism had not long been launched. The walls of the Grafton Galleries had only lately burgeoned with raw forms and exciting colours, and there in Flanders, mile after mile the new forms presented themselves pre-digested. To the budding Post-Impressionist it was noting but beginners' luck to be offered such a mass of paintable material. Alas, for the war-artist and the war- photographer today, surrealism and the documentary film have been there before him, and—worse still—the audience has been there too. Surrealism overdid it. Its prophetic years of activity have taken the wind out of our .sail§ as peddlers of emotional and formal war novelties. Used enough to surrealism's two kidneys on a golf-green, people are hardly likely to get excited by a painting of twisted girders and broken cornices, unless there is a good deal beyond the subject to excite them. A man looking at such a picture may easily tell you that when the cornice broke it missed him by inches, and that he could have done the picture a great deal better himself.
The result is that in this war the pictorial novice is out of his depth at once. He is a bore because he tries to tell us stale news. The only news we don't know already is news that is honest and vivid, told with enough honesty to make it universal and enough personality to give it colour. That means re-engag- ing the old hands, the hands that are used to sorting and choosing and rearranging subjects, to adopting the oblique approach when necessary, to avoiding the imposing for its own sake, to concentrating on the significant for its own sake. It means simply that the good peace-time artist is the good war- time artist too. Unsignificant form ; our bombed cities blossom with it. The old hand ignores it, and looks again. The com- pilers of Britain under Fire, though unnamed, are evidently
novices. They think that any old news in pictures about bombing is good enough, whether it is of half a council-house or of a number of limbless ex-Service men looking at a crater. Some of the comments are heavily humorous. ("A 'bus station. At least one 'bus was not running next day.") This will only do until it is superseded by the proper Wonder Book of Bomb Damage. Grim Glory at just over half the price has just over half the number of photographs but they are clear instead of being dim, and arranged instead Cif being scattered. Limp-covered, good value, it is pleasant to look at and to hold, and should be widely used for home and foreign propaganda. The captions are short and crisp, and the book illustrates many strange, small beauties that are likely to go unrecorded elsewhere : the twisted baroque candelabra on a window sill, the isolated façade of a Noncon- formist chapel, the damaged dome of University College reflected in a puddle. Mr. Cecil Beaton is an old hand. The war, he decides, has played enough tricks without the artist and photographer adding to them, and he has taken some excellent straight photographs of buildings and parts of buildings, selecting carefully, rearrang- ing subjects laudably to make them tell better, interspersing engravings of churches in their early nineteenth-century glory to demonstrate something of what we have really lost. He would probably agree that the most striking, the most memorable, and the most realistic picture in the book is not by him, and is not a photograph, but the engraving from Wilkinson's Londina Illustrraa of the Fire of London. Oddly, it is more like a contemporary war-picture of the best kind (such as the recent work of Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland) than any of the photographs in these three books. For the camera fails to meet war's demands ; it will not heighten and specialise its emotions. Mr. Pope-Hennessy's commentary is informative and discriminating, but not too readable. It patronises the nin teenth century. The production is excellent ; the margins wide the type elegant—happy things for one to be able to say of a new Batsford book. And they must be the only publishers whose paper (in a book of this size and price) has gone up almost a hundred per cent, in quality since the outbreak of war.
JOHN PIPER
Previous page
