NEW Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries at the Imperial War Museum

Last Friday, I visited the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) for the first time. They are the galleries in the UK’s to explore how artists, photographers and filmmakers bear witness to and tell the story of war and conflict.

The Imperial War Museum is not typically a place I think of when wanting to see art - but recent developments suggest it should definitely be part of the education of any self-respecting artist of fan of art history who wants to understand better how war has been recorded from a visual perspective.

Not least because the Galleries include some iconic artwork as well as important films and photography.

The reason I was at the IWM last Friday was because I'd been invited by the Museum's Digital Producer/Director to some filming she was doing with Gareth Reid in relation to various of the outstanding paintings in the IWM's art collection.

Gareth Reid being filmed while sketching and making notes
about "Gassed" by John Singer Sargent

Some of you may remember Gareth Reid as the winner of the 2017 series of Portrait Artist of the Year and more recently Portrait Artist of the Decade (Review: Portrait Artist of the Decade as featured in Portrait Artist of the Decade Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery - last few days). For me he will always Gareth Reid who I first met at the National Portrait Gallery back in 2008 when he was responsible for what I still think of as one of the best BP Travel Award Exhibitions in the history of the award (see BP Travel Award: Gareth Reid and the Finnish winter bathers).

He and I were both very impressed with the Galleries and their content. Read on to find out more.

The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries

The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries are located at the Imperial War Museum in London. They opened last November on Remembrance Sunday. 

The Galleries are free to enter, making more of IWM’s world-class collection available and accessible to all.

Entrance to the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries

This is the first time in IWM’s history that a permanent gallery space has been created to display the three collections together - visual art, film and photography.

The War Artists of World War II

80 years ago today, on 3rd September 1939, the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, forming the Allies within the context of World War II.

Battle of Britain by Paul Nash
An abstracted aerial view of a wide flat landscape including the mouth of a river.
Above the sky is full of aircraft contrails and smoke plumes, while to the upper right aircraft are flying in formation

Last night, on BBC4 (10pm) there was a rerun of a Culture Show Special made in 2010 about

The Art of WWII. 

Alastair Sooke explores the often overlooked history of the wartime art boom, meetingBlitz survivors, factory workers and Land Girls who became the subject of paintings, talks to contemporary artists about the challenges of creating work in conflict zones and considers how the images produced during the `People's War' laid the groundwork for a modern understanding of what art should be.

It reminded me of some of the exhibitions at the time of the 60th anniversary of the start of World War Two.

Portraits by Dame Laura Knight

I highly recommend a viewing of the programme. It was very good - particularly in relation to:

• the role played by Kenneth Clarke, the Director of the National Gallery played in relation to:
• moving the National Gallery collection to a disused slate mine near Blaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales
• setting up and chairing the War Artists' Advisory Committee, 
• persuading the government to employ official war artists in considerable numbers.
• buying artwork produced by soldiers
• he ended up with 6,000 works of art which were displayed around the UK at the end of the war
• the emphasis on the art being about the war and reaching out to and engaging with people
• insight into the approach and practices of various of the war artists - using those who had witnessed working at the time

The designated "official war artists" included in the programme included Edward Ardizzone, Paul and John Nash, Mervyn Peake, John Piper and Graham Sutherland - and Ardizzone, Paul Nash, Piper and Sutherland feature in the programme

War Artists on full-time salaried contracts

• Edward Ardizzone
• Edward Bawden
• Muirhead Bone
• Stephen Bone
• Henry Carr
• William Coldstream
• Leslie Cole
• Charles Cundall
• William Dring
• Evelyn Dunbar
• Richard Eurich
• Reginald Grenville Eves
• Barnett Freedman
• Anthony Gross
• Bernard Hailstone
• Keith Henderson
• Thomas Hennell
• Eric Kennington
• Henry Lamb
• Thomas Monnington
• James Morris
• Rodrigo Moynihan
• John Nash
• Paul Nash
• Mervyn Peake
• John Piper
• Roland Vivian Pitchforth
• John Platt
• Eric Ravilious
• Albert Richards
• Leonard Rosoman
• Rupert Shephard
• Graham Sutherland
• Alfred Thomson
• Carel Weight
• Charles Wheeler
• John Worsley

Artists employed on short-term contracts such as Laura Knight, L. S. Lowry, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer are also included in the programme

Dame Laura Knight - War Artist
(left to right) The Dock at Nuremberg, charcoal study of the British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe
Ruby Loftus screwing a breech ring and Switch Works© The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA, 2013

It was noted that lots of the artists produced quite traditional (boring) 'war art' while those left to produce whatever they saw fit produced some amazing work - from Henry Moore's Blitz Sketchbooks of people sleeping in the Underground to Paul Nash's Battle of Britain and Totes Meer and Stanley Spencer's paintings of Ship Building on the Clyde

In May 1940 WAAC sent Spencer to the Lithgows Shipyard in Port Glasgow on the River Clyde to depict the civilians at work there. Spencer became fascinated by what he saw and sent WAAC proposals for a scheme involving up to sixty-four canvases displayed on all four sides of a room.[38] WAAC agreed to a more modest series of up to eleven canvases, some of which would be up to six metres long. Wikipedia - Stanley Spencer

Totes Meer (Dead Sea) 1940-1 Paul Nash 1889-1946
Tate Britain
Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946

The painting which I always remember - but did not feature in the programme is Leonard Rosoman's painting of the wall collapsing on two firemen during the Blitz.

House Collapsing on two Firemen, Shoe Lane, London EC4
copyright Leonard Rosoman

Related posts

• Review: Laura Knight Portraits
• 'Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War' at Somerset House

• Leonard Rosoman OBE RA (b.1917)

British Pathé film of Stanley Spencer

Cover of Stanley Spencer 
- the Catalogue raisonné by Keith Bell

This is a British Pathé film of Sir Stanley Spencer going about his business in Cookham in 1950.

The topic is "Royal Academy Take Back Old Rebel" and concerns his return to exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts from which he has resigned as a member in 1935 after two of his paintings were rejected from the Summer Exhibition.

The paintings were:

• Saint Francis and the Birds - which is now owned by Tate Britain
• The Dustman or The Lovers - which is now part of the Laing Art Gallery Collection

I'm not surprised he resigned!

Links:

• About Stanley Spencer - English Painter - my website about Spencer
• 'Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War' at Somerset House - about the recent exhibition of his First World War Paintings at Somerset House
• Cliveden, Cookham and Stanley Spencer - about a visit I paid to Cookham in 2007