What use is a sketch, a sculpture or a sonnet when war is rumbling around you? Why preserve its chaos and cruelties in paint, or make an heirloom of a piece of stained glass you saw glinting in the rubble?
At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, a new display of paintings, prints, photographs, objects and poetry made in response to conflict, subjects the value of war art to gentle scrutiny. War Craft ranges over diverse territories and eras, and includes works by noted artists such as JMW Turner, Paul Nash, Robert Capa and John Singer Sargent, although it focuses especially on “trench art” — those objects created or refigured by soldiers in the lulls between engagements or during convalescence and confinement, using whatever material was easily at hand: dice shakers carved from animal bone, for example, or vases from spent shell cases. The show is rich in battle debris (propellers, radio dials and the like), which could be turned into a kind of trophy or talisman. Tangible proof of prowess — or just having survived.
But the idea that a single object might stand for an entire conflict — even all wars throughout time — has been used to breathtaking effect by artists more widely. Jeremy Deller’s “Baghdad, 5 March 2007”, for instance — a rusting, crumpled car wrecked in a street bombing in Iraq, acquired by the artist and placed in the atrium of London’s Imperial War Museum in 2010, is as muscular a symbol of the wreckage caused by war as any, and Shomei Tomatsu’s photograph of a tiny wristwatch stopped at 11:02 on August 9 1945 conveys more about the devastating effect of the Nagasaki atomic bomb than a thousand pictures of the mushroom cloud.
It’s often said that the first world war was the one to tip depictions of conflict away from triumphalism and jingoism (as seen in the 19th century, when thrilling, heavily romanticised versions of war played an important role in empire-building) towards subversion, and it’s true that the intensity of the experience for those who fought in it — including the artist-soldier Paul Nash, represented in the exhibition by a glowering print of soldiers trudging along a narrow ridge in the driving rain near Lake Zillebeke, Belgium — made war art much darker and more condemnatory.
In the letter he sent his wife after the bloodbath at Passchendaele, Nash wrote: “I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever.” The message, he hoped, would be a “bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls”.
The rise of photography had a significant role. Cameras were taken to the Crimean, US civil and Boer wars, providing a picture of a soldier’s day-to-day reality to civilians back home, and replacing the anonymous mass of traditional battle painting with the faces of individuals. By the mid-19th century the common soldier had become a popular subject of military art — in the paintings of Elizabeth Thompson, for instance, which revisited the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. “The Roll Call” (1874), of frozen, wounded and exhausted Grenadier Guards during the Crimean war, was shown at the Royal Academy and turned Thompson into a national celebrity.
But as early as the 17th century, the notion that there might be something more to say about war than chronicles of battle and scenes of heroism had flittered into being. In his 1638 canvas “The Consequences of War” — painted 20 miserable years into the Thirty Years’ war — Rubens put Mars, god of war, “trampling over literature and the arts” and in cahoots with the “monsters” representing “Pestilence and Famine: inseparable companions of War”, he explained to the painter Joost Sustermans.
And Rubens’ contemporary Jacques Callot put the plight of innocent civilians front and centre. His series of 18 etchings, “The Miseries and Misfortunes of War” (1633), follows a group of marauding soldiers on the rampage and ends with their arrest and execution. These extraordinarily animated vignettes influenced perhaps the most famous war art of all: Francisco Goya’s “The Disasters of War” (1810-1820): 82 nightmarish prints made in response to the Napoleonic occupation of Spain during the Peninsular war, some derived from personal observation of battlefields — plate 44 for instance, is entitled “I saw it” — and all boiling over with outrage.
Yet some of the most affecting war art faces its subject at a remove. I’m thinking of Jonty Semper’s “Kenotaphion” (2001) for which he stitched together every surviving recording of two-minute silences at the Cenotaph in Whitehall to create a symphony of shuffling feet, birdsong, coughing and pattering rain. And on the subject of sound, Susan Philipsz’s “War Damaged Musical Instruments” has an extraordinary power: “The Last Post” is played by British and German brass and wind instruments that have been damaged in conflict during the past 200 years, the tune so distorted by violence it is almost unrecognisable.
For her 2015 installation “War Room”, meanwhile, Cornelia Parker used waste sheets from the factories that make Remembrance poppies — millions each year — to create a vast red tent echoing the golden pavilion that Henry VIII had made for negotiations at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. The pattern on the paper comes from thousands of perforations: punched-out poppies whose absence summons lives lost, soldiers who never came home. Desolate, stifling, intimate, mystical — you can make the space what you will. When it was displayed at Manchester’s Whitworth gallery, army veteran choirs turned up to sing inside it.
There is a place for beauty in this bear pit — in the delicate, rapturous watercolours that were made on the wing during aerial operations by brothers Richard and Sydney Carline for the first official war artists scheme. In Chloe Dewe Mathews’ Shot at Dawn (2014), photographs of the sites at which British, French and Belgian troops were executed for cowardice or desertion between 1914 and 1918, where the milk-dense mists and clumps of windblown trees feel painfully picturesque. And in similar vein, Adam Cvijanovic’s soaring mural paintings of key sites in American military history — Iwo Jima, for example, and Omaha Beach — whose airy, unpeopled landscapes shiver unnervingly between grief and wonder.
There is beauty too — or a form of it — in acts of care. Those shards of glass rescued from the rubble, on view in the show, were from St Martin’s Cathedral at Ypres, the Belgian town almost completely destroyed by artillery fire in the first world war. The desecration of the cathedral and the town’s vast 13th-century Cloth Hall came to stand in the minds of many for the terrible price war inflicts on civilisation. The soldier who stooped to pick up the glass pieces must have sensed that in the moment, because he pocketed the pieces, kept them safe until he returned home and leaded them back together. At some point, he or his family also put them in a frame, as you might a priceless painting.
February 24 to August 23, fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
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