During the first world war, 124,702 British soldiers were victims of gas attacks. They suffered blisters, burns or temporary blindness and 2,308 of them died. In July 1918, the Ministry of Information sent American society portraitist John Singer Sargent to the front. There he witnessed the aftermath of mustard gas attacks and was inspired to make a six-metre wide tableau called Gassed depicting a procession of wounded men stumbling, blindfolded, towards a dressing station, while in the foreground more men lie dead and dying, their bodies entangled.
Recently cleaned to reveal a rosy evening light (and even Tommies playing an incongruous football match in the painting’s background), Gassed is the centrepiece of the Imperial War Museum’s new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries in London. This permanent exhibition features about 500 works tracing the history of war art from July 1916 when Muirhead Bone became the first official artist making etchings in the Somme’s killing fields, to the 21st century and works such as Paul Seawright’s 2002 photograph Mounds, which unwittingly echoes Bone’s work by depicting an Afghan landscape bombed senseless, unpeopled and riddled with mines.
Many of the most piercing images don’t depict battlefields. David Cotterell’s 2009 Gateway II shows casualties being operated on aboard a plane as they make their journey from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. The photographs show, as Cotterell put it, that “for all of the talk of technology and diplomacy and of things advancing, we’re still essentially putting young people in front of sharp objects and trying to train them to hurt each other to solve problems”.
Other photographs here depict ordinary terraced streets in Northern Ireland, devoid of people yet surreally scarred with watch towers and other British Army fortifications. Most likely these buildings went scarcely regarded by the locals every day during the Troubles. Military occupation, Jonathan Olley’s images tell us, has obscenely become the new normal.
You could and probably should spend days here in the galleries’ two screening rooms. There is feature-length footage of the battle of Arras, footage from D-Day beaches, even a second world war information film about how to make a compost heap. It’s striking that newsreels of corpses unearthed at Belsen concentration camp are hidden behind a little wall so parents can decide whether their children should be exposed to their horror. When, I wonder, is too early to teach kids about genocide? And is art made at or inspired by the Holocaust - Doris Zinkeisen’s 1945 painting of naked corpses at Belsen, or Edith Birkin’s disturbingly colourful 1990 painting Roll Call: Belsen - any less likely to give children nightmares? I don’t pretend to know the answers.
There is nothing, at least not yet, from the 2023 killing grounds of Israeli kibbutzim or the current hellscape of Gaza. There is, though, a 17-minute film by British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi called Electrical Gaza that depicts the city in all its unexpected poetry and expected squalor during a pause in 2014 before Israeli soldiers moved in. Nashashibi’s film might well soon serve as aide-memoire to the city.
When Virginia Woolf saw Gassed at the Royal Academy in 1919, she ran away. Art does that to art lovers, used as we are to having our eyes delighted. “One fled downstairs, out of doors, round the motor cars, beneath the disdain of the horse and its rider, and so out into the comparative sobriety of Piccadilly,” she wrote in her essay The Fleeting Portrait. In part, this was because of the shock of the subject matter: “Gassed at last pricked some nerve of protest, or perhaps of humanity.”
But Woolf also distrusted the picture because of a particular detail. One of the blinded men is raising his leg to the level of his elbow in order to mount an imagined step an inch or two above the ground. “This little piece of over emphasis of the surgeon’s knife which is said to hurt more than the whole operation,” she wrote. Woolf’s suggestion - that Sargent had confected this purportedly telling detail - goes to the heart of a theme explored repeatedly in these galleries, namely how artists distort reality in order to capture the truth of what they have seen. One of the first exhibits is by Frank Hurley, the official photographer of the Australian Imperial Force. He lugged heavy equipment to and from the front, struggling to keep his plates dry and light-tight. Eighty years before Photoshop and digital photography, and long before our era of fake news, Instagram filters, and retouching apps, Hurley made composite images from different negatives the better “to illustrate to the public the things our fellows do and how war is”.
He could not do otherwise: “To include the event on a single negative, I have tried and tried, but the results are hopeless,” he said. In his photograph, The Morning After the First Battle of Passchendaele, Hurley shows Australian wounded outside a blockhouse, but the sunbeams bursting through clouds he added from another photograph. It’s as if Hurley was trying not just to manufacture a more poignant truth than reality allows, but to make beauty out of mud and misery.
Nearby a screen is showing They Shall Not Grow Old, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s 2018 film in which he colourised 100-year-old black-and-white war footage using Photoshop and other software. “They experienced the war in full living colour,” said Jackson, “so why shouldn’t we now, with the technology we have, turn it from a black-and-white war back into a colour war again?”
Truth, we’re always told, is the first casualty of war; Jackson effectively suggests it can be brought back to life in unprecedented colour. But is the truth something that can be manufactured? Is the heightened realism of Jackson’s colourised film as unreliable as Stalin’s airbrushed photographs or cropped press snaps that censor off-message details exhibited elsewhere in these galleries?
Ironically, the dubious detail that so troubled Virginia Woolf in Sargent’s painting was based on fact. A field ambulance driver wrote to the Athenaeum, which had published Woolf’s essay: “I saw Mr Sargent collecting his details. I have seen the picture in question, also, and it is the man at the end of the file that Mr Sargent has portrayed in this action. It is ‘over-emphasis’, but on the part of the man – not that of the artist … it is a depiction of the truth.”
But Woolf was not alone in being sceptical abut Gassed. Other members of the Bloomsbury group, pioneers of modernism after the war, suspected Gassed was a romantic lie. The novelist EM Forster captured that supposed falsehood: “You were of godlike beauty – for the upper classes only allow the lower classes to appear in art on condition that they wash themselves and have classical features. These conditions you fulfilled. A line of golden-haired Apollos moved along a duckboard from left to right with bandages over their eyes.”
Perhaps even the romantic allure Forster attacked, though, is actually part of Gassed’s power: we are looking at emblems of a golden generation of beautiful young men slain or maimed, each sacrificed for nothing worthwhile.
When Gassed was first shown in London, it was not displayed as intended. It had been commissioned to hang in a planned Hall of Remembrance commemorating Anglo-American cooperation. That was never built, for lack of funds. Indeed, Forster saw Gassed amid society portraits at the Royal Academy. Only now, at the IWM, is Gassed fittingly hung alongside Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September, 1916, painted by another artist asked to contribute to the Hall of Remembrance, Stanley Spencer.
Of course, war art often isn’t displayed as the artist would like. In another room there is a mysterious large oak cabinet. Amid all the other clamorous depictions of war, this freestanding furniture seems incomprehensible. What does it mean? Fast-forward to 2003 when Turner Prize-winning Steve McQueen spent a week as official Ministry of Defence artist in Basra. It was there that he conceived Queen and Country which he imagined could have become the most disseminated, certainly the most licked, piece of war art ever. His idea was simple: commemorate each of the 179 British Forces personnel killed in the Iraq conflict with their own postage stamp, juxtaposing an image of the dead soldier chosen by their family, with the silhouetted head of the Queen.
But it never happened. Instead, the stamps are housed in sheets in drawers in this cabinet. Art has been filed away for the foreseeable. “I can’t think why the project would be controversial,” McQueen has said. “We sent people to war and they died in that war. I’m just visualising their memory. I can’t see any reason not to, unless you’re ashamed of them.” Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the dead with the Queen’s head that made some queasy. Perhaps the commercial brand of the privatised Royal Mail risked being tarnished by association with martial sacrifice. Safer to monetise collectible postage stamps for Paddington and Harry Potter fans. But still … how could we be ashamed of these soldiers, even those of us who thought invading Afghanistan and Iraq was Tony Blair’s folly?
Blair’s folly, incidentally, is captured elsewhere. Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps’s 2007 photomontage shows Blair holding his phone for a selfie against a background of burning oilfields. It’s Frank Hurley for our times - a composite image designed to capture what the artist takes to be a deeper truth.In 2023, as war marches on unstoppably from one folly to another, the space offered to us by the Imperial War Museum to pause and reflect seems not just topical but essential.
• The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries open at Imperial War Museum, London, on 10 November
