It is a fortunate historical fact that artists, finding themselves caught up in the carnage of war, will often experience an insistent need to interpret what they see in their chosen medium. Without their single-minded instincts we would not have Goya’s etchings recording the Peninsular War, Picasso’s Guernica, Anselm Kiefer’s haunting reactions to the Nazis, nor many other wartime works of art.
This week two unrelated exhibitions open in London showing the responses to war of two very different artists. One is Henry Moore, whose figurative drawings made in London during the Blitz are at the core of a show at the Imperial War Museum marking the 20th anniversary of his death. The other is Richard Walker, a figurative painter whose studio is in Tavistock Square and who watched the immediate aftermath of the Number 30 bus bomb last year from his window. His paintings are on show at Curwen & New Academy Gallery. The two men have described their artistic instincts in remarkably similar terms. It is pure coincidence, however, that they share a birthday.
The work chosen for Moore’s show includes a large number of the shelter drawings and sketches made after visits to London Underground stations where people crowded to take refuge at night from the bombing. His first was to Belsize Park, where people huddled in intimate little groups under blankets on the platform.
He was surprised at the imagery of these people, the similarity of their sculptural sleeping forms to his own earlier bronze figures. “I was fascinated by the sight of the people camping out deep under the ground. I had never seen so many rows of reclining figures and even the holes out of which the trains were coming seemed to me to be like the holes in my sculpture . . . They were cut off from what was happening up above, but they were aware of it. There was tension in the air. They were a bit like the chorus in a Greek drama, telling us about the violence we don’t actually witness.”
Moore’s sketches were later developed into his shelter drawings as a result of a commission from Kenneth Clark, the chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee. The bodies are clustered in family groups, their mass and form beautifully described with sculptural qualities. Children sleep covered with blankets, women lie back reading newspapers. But in spite of the apparently relaxed poses, eye sockets are deep with anxiety, sleeping faces creased with fear.
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“The night time in London is like another world,” wrote Moore. “The unreality is that of exaggeration like in a nightmare.”
Walker too noticed the unreality of his world in the days and weeks after last year’s bombing. “I think I was the only artist who was at the location and who witnessed the event. It was like being a war artist. Suddenly I was in the middle of it all, and it couldn’t be ignored. I felt a duty to record what was going on. I could see it all. I was privy to all sorts of things that the public and the press didn’t see because I could see it from my window. And when the police began their forensic work, they covered every square foot they’d checked with blue tarpaulins. There were no cars, no pedestrians, even the birds seemed to be gone. It was like another world.”
Walker responded with 15 paintings, including The Secret Life of Blue, a vividly worked portrayal of the eerily empty street with its blue curtains and the little flags dotted about where the forensic teams had found human remains. “These paintings were possibly the hardest work I’ve ever done.”
Both artists approached their subjects with discretion, feeling unable to intrude on the victims’ privacy. Moore wrote later that “instead of drawing, I would wander casually past a group of people half a dozen times or so, pretending to be unaware of them. Sometimes I climbed a staircase so that I could write down a note on the back of an envelope without being seen. A note like ‘two people sleeping under one blanket’ would be enough of a reminder to enable me to make a sketch next day.”
Walker discreetly took photographs and then six months later began to work on the paintings. “I had a delayed reaction. Down in the lobby of my block of flats there were bodies laid out, people lying about, the walking wounded who had been brought there covered in blood. We were all stepping over bodies. I went into denial for quite a long time, but I did take photographs without people seeing me do it. I didn’t want to exploit the situation, but equally I knew I must do something about it . . . Much later I based my paintings on views from my window. It sort of framed the event, which in artistic terms seemed to make sense.”
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On one level, both artists felt a duty to document what they saw. But their work is much more far-reaching than that. Moore had been profoundly affected by his time in the trenches during the First World War and he had a sense of the likely consequences of the Second World War. Walker had done some work in response to the bombing of the twin towers in New York and felt a need to interpret the London bombing. Both bodies of work mirror the tensions of the times. But both also act as a statement of faith in what values would survive the destruction.
Henry Moore: War and Utility is at the Imperial War Museum, SE1 (020-7416 5320), from tomorrow; Richard Walker: Peace and Noise is at Curwen & New Academy Gallery, London W1 (020-7323 4700), from Sept 27