The colours of an old war
Osbert Lancaster
Diary of a War Artist Edward Ardizzone (Bodley Head £4.00).
Confronted with the facts of war the artist has, until comparatively recently, adopted one or other of two attitudes — the heroic or the grim. On the one hand the great battle panoramas of Van der Meulen and the caracolling generals of Baron Gros; on the other the unremitting savagery of Callot and Goya. The former smell strongly of the studio, and one often wonders whether in fact these painters had ever heard a shot fired in anger. (But not always justly for that most academic of military artists, Verestschagin, met his end sloshing away at a vast canvas as he sank beneath the waves at the battle of Tsushima). The latter, particularly when seen en masse, tell us rather more about the psychology of the painter than about the scenes recorded. The artist as detached reporter first raat„cl! his appearance in the Crimean War in person of Constantin Guys who sent back ae series of the most vivid camp and bet!, scenes only to have their immediacy prorriPt,"e eliminated by the wood-engravers of On Illustrated London News. In the last war ft,' artist more worthily upheld this tradition tha'' Edward Ardizzone, and we are fortunate 1,11e deed that, thanks to modern reproduction, t",i slightest of his scribbles has here retained a' its spontaneity. As a visual reporter Ardizzone is dist, guished by his humanity; he never forge`; that soldiers are but civilians in uniforr"t; those same people whom, in happier times, hri had so sympathetically portrayed leaning ° the saloon bar. He neither blows them up into dashing heroes storming the Heights of Abraham, in the manner of Copley, nor does he reduce them to stylised automata as did C. R. Nevinson and the Vorticists. Not that he is unaware of tragedy or incapable of expressing It; I recall most vividly from an earlier volume the single figure of a village priest imploring a lift in a deserted street, an image of despair as Powerful as those etched by Goya, and in the Present work there is a tiny drawing of a doctor kneeling by a corpse on a stretcher and !cooking up at two weeping women which by Its economy and avoidance of over-emphasis says all that can, in the circumstances, be said.
But cheerfulness will keep breaking in and the majority of the drawings are peopled by Fhpolpous colonels, Italian tarts, exhausted infantrymen, bewildered peasantry, sinister Sicilians, Red Cross nurses, all sympathetically observed and wittily presented. In addition the reader is presented with a bonus in the shape of a whole series of the most ;Xcluisite little landscape drawings, par, 1!c.ularly of Italy, which make one regret that IS aspect of the author's art is otherwise so seldom revealed.
The text of the diary itself is beautifully complementary, as vivid, factual and funny as ithe drawings, and provides a most valuable, oecause so clearly uncontrived, running corn' Mentary on life behind and in the lines. For example, the atmosphere of war-time Naples, , the only sector of which I had any (very brief) , experience, is exactly and vividly recaptured. Contrary to the accepted view, most artists aLl.ze very capable writers and Ardizzone comes ugh up on the list. The present diary is the °est thing of its kind since Lear's Journal of a knda scape Painter in Southern Calabria and igher praise than that, I cannot, personally, give.
Osbert Lancaster has recently written The Littlehampton Bequest, published by John Afurray.
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