There's a picture I can't forget since my visit to the Imperial War Museum’s new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries. It’s a photograph, taken immediately after the end of the Second World War. In it, a harried-looking woman hurries, arms around her two fair-headed sons, her hand curled around the younger boy’s eyes to keep him from seeing what lies next to them as they pass – a line of decomposing bodies; murdered Soviet citizens in Warstein, Germany.
The photograph, by a member of the United States Army Signal Corps is a piece of reportage, a record of the Allies’s practice of forcing German civilians to personally witness the horrifying consequences of their actions and inactions. And they made the children do it too.
The picture shocked me, and it raised questions – should children be shielded from these horrors? Should they, legally unable to make informed decisions, be immune from blame and therefore punishment? Or, indoctrinated from their earliest days into hate, should they be shocked out of their conditioning, and made to see their parents clearly, as weak or pathetic or downright evil people?
It’s hard, in the face of the atrocity of the Holocaust, also harrowingly represented across both newsreel and artworks in these galleries, not to conclude that the latter is necessary, brutal though it is. But my complex response to this small picture is a keen example of the power of imagery to question, expose and influence thinking about conflict.
That’s the focus of these five new galleries, a permanent home for this extensive part of the IWM’s collection, which before was treated rather as an afterthought.
They will house around 500 works, showcasing some of the IWM's vast film and photography collections, which include over 23,000 hours of footage and more than 12 million photographs, alongside works by artists including Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Anna Airy, Olive Mudie-Cooke, Eric Ravilious, Norah Neilson-Gray and Stanley Spencer, alongside the photography of Cecil Beaton, Olive Edis and Bill Brandt. Thematically organised with sections on propaganda, witness and evidence, mind and body, anticipation and anxiety and more, it interrogates the image as a reminder, a warning, an illumination, a protest against or a weapon of war.
In the first room a wall of different kinds of works, from Evelyn Dunbar’s 1943 painting Land Army Girls Going to Bed to Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old from 2018, shows the breadth of material to come, and a timeline outlines the development of art and image as a response to and a tool of conflict from Walter Sickert's contemplative, patriotic painting Tipperary in 1914 to John Timberlake and Suzanne Plunket’s images of the 9/11 attacks.
In the following rooms, we get glimpses of the many facets of image-making – photomontage such as kennardphillipps' Photo Op, 2007, a picture of Tony Blair taking an early selfie with a backdrop of a burning oil field is contrasted with composites and staged images from the Great War, raising questions about intention and authenticity.
The co-opting of the female body as a symbol of nationhood crops up over and over in the propaganda section, while the light of humanity amid the darkness of war is a repeated theme throughout. John Singer Sargent's epic canvas Gassed! has been conserved, so that the gorgeous pinky-yellow evening light that diffuses through the scene is more pronounced, and the tenderness between the blinded men, depicted along with their suffering, is somehow more tangible.
And image as memorial is never far away – Steve McQueen's unfinished project Queen and Country, comprising 155 sheets of stamps, each of which commemorates a soldier killed in the Iraq War between 2003 and 2008 (unfinished because McQueen expected them to be issued by the Royal Mail, which never happened) has also been conserved. Its quietness underlines its fierce, cumulative sorrow.
This is a set of galleries to revisit, there’s far too much here to take in at once. But every visit will raise new questions, initiate new discussions and reinforce anew the conviction that the cost of conflict is always, always, in the end, too great.
