A Past That Endures

Creativity, art, music, might feel a world away from the very brutal realities of war: mud, death, rubble, bomb craters. 80 years on from VE Day, which saw many countries emerge from World War Two, this week has seen crowds gather once more to commemorate and to celebrate. Those six long years of war are distant now, but paintings, sculptures, songs and music survive, transporting us back to a past that endures.

Image, word and sound are how we react, how we record and remember, how we express and lament, persuade or oppose. The visual can be all the more memorable – which is why so much wartime propaganda used cartoon and caricature. But there was also very different war art. It is largely images of the First World War that have become the most famous, as with poetry. But Paul Nash for one was an official war artist in the two Wars, and his Battle Of Britain (1940) and Totes Meer (Dead Sea (1940-1) explore the wonder and ferocity of battles fought in the skies overhead. One (Battle Of Britain) is a skyscape, but the other (Totes Meer) tells a very different story, with downed German planes reduced to wreckage.

Not only artwork portraying the events of war showed its impact. Even artists who painted different themes bore war’s imprint, which changed the way they saw the world. Edward Burra and Ceri Richards were two British landscape artists whose work has a mood of menace.

And of course, just as music and art reflect wartime, so too they can express many other events, global, national, local or individual. Creativity can become a tangible and powerful response, a way to recreate or to explore horror, injustice, bravery, or simply what it is to be human and to live in the everyday.

Songs of those war years still stand out. Songs about hope, reunion and the dream of a different future, but also about getting by, with no fuss and with a smile. Songs that have come to celebrate that generation. They’re songs about how to live and about what truly matters in the end.

War inspires public art to be commissioned – music, like Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, or visual arts. Maybe in memory, such as the pair of stained glass windows of Dunkirk and D-Day in Portsmouth Cathedral, in memory of an admiral of the fleet. Or as communities rebuild – as in Coventry Cathedral, where Graham Sutherland’s famous tapestry is only one of many artworks commissioned when old and new were combined to recreate the bombed Cathedral. Sutherland was another official war artist, and his work went on to reflect this legacy – see his striking painting Thorn Trees (1945). This transforms a nature theme (thorn trees) with a religious reference (Jesus’s crown of thorns) into a mechanical image of steel blades, mirroring the machinery of war.

If the purpose of war songs was to cheer and unite, and war music usually commemorates, what is the purpose of war art? As years go by is it only a historical record? Or can it extend beyond the specifics of time and place? I think that thinking and talking about a war painting can unlock and unpack thoughts and feelings about war, yes, but also about wider human issues like bereavement, life, death, despoiling of nature or regret. So too can most paintings go far beyond their main theme. That’s why I’ve produced a training course called Conversations About Art: How To Share Famous Paintings For Wellbeing. To find out more, have a look at https://medley.live/conversations