real, raw and righteous truth.... and UN and politicians must stop selling all their victories at the backroom tables..... as we saw so often, too often in Afghanistan and especially Vietnam... those of us old enough to remember...
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Art of #WWI in 52 paintings http://madefrom.com/history/world-war-one/painting/ …. Also pretty good primer on art styles of 20th century
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BLOGGED:
CANADIAN ICON ALEX COLVILLE - CANADA: True Patriot ...
nova0000scotia.blogspot.com/.../canadian-icon-alex-colville-brilliant.ht...
Aug 19, 2014 - CANADIAN ICON ALEX COLVILLE- brilliant, gifted global artist- we need 2 remember our Great Canadians- If u love Canada and u love art- ...Hauntingly Beautiful Art
It is amazing to see how much art was produced during the world wars, given that countries were so short on money. While people lined up at soup kitchens, the government still found the funds to hire official war artists. These artists capture the trenches of World War I and the air battles of World War II. They render the horror and the valour of war on canvas in a hauntingly beautiful way. Here is some of their work.
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the [European] Continent."
On March 5, 1946, a train with two World War II statesmen left Washington D.C. and steamed across the United States to the gateway to the west, Missouri. In the town of Fulton, population 7,000, at Westminster University, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with President Harry Truman by his side, delivered a prophetic speech to an audience of 40,000 students. Titled "The Sinews of Peace" the oratory soon became known as "The Iron Curtain Speech", referring to the figurative curtain that had fallen, separating democratic western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe.
Sir Winston Churchill reminded the American audience what had happened when the world powers appeased Hitler, granting him Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia; finally Poland was the straw that broke the camel's back. Churchill feared that if the world powers appeased Stalin, he would never be satisfied either.
The British statesman pointed out that the famous capitals of Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia were under the ever increasing control of Moscow. For instance, he mentioned that:
The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place.
In fact, the Soviet Union would expell two out of the three million Germans in Germany's eastern provinces in the years 1945 to 1948, in the name of ethnic cleansing.
Reminding the audience that the United States was at a "pinnacle of power", Churchill called for even closer relations between Britain and America, in an effort to counter the rising menace of Communism. Surprisingly, though, the speech was not well received by political figures like former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, former Vice President Henry Wallace and then current British Prime Minister Clement Atlee. The New York Herald Tribune disagreed with the tone and content of the speech.
However, within weeks of Churchill's delivery of his speech, public opinion shifted: more and more people realized that the Soviet Union posed a threat that could not be ignored. Although World War II had ended, the Cold War had begun, marked by Sir Winston Churchill's famous oratory. The Iron Curtain had descended, not to be raised for almost 45 years.
War Cartoonists & Illustrators: Various
-----------------
These exhibitions not only demonstrated that Canada had been the first country to establish a war art programme, but had produced a visual record of the war that was second to none. F.H. Varley's For What? was visual proof that the war artists had seen the dark underside of war. And A.Y. Jackson's Screened Road "A" showed that the war-torn, pock-marked landscape had become a valid subject for the war artist. But the value of the Canadian War Memorials Fund lay not only in the collection of works assembled. Participation in the Fund's exhibitions immediately following the war gave artists an opportunity to have their work evaluated by leading critics and gallery officials of the day. The whole experience of painting the landscape in France and Flanders, of viewing the war scenes produced by British modernists, and of having some involvement with major art critics, patrons, and gallery officials, was a crucial factor in elevating the art of the Ontario Group of Seven and its followers to national status. The Fund not only gave Canadians a memorial of their participation in the war; it gave Canadian art and artists an important place within the cultural framework of inter-war Canada.
When the Second World War broke out in the autumn of 1939, it was largely owing to the precedent of the Canadian War Memorials Fund that Canadian artists once more found themselves being pressed into service. Yet Canada did not have an official war art program until 1943. Created largely through the efforts of Vincent Massey and the director of the National Gallery of Canada, H.O. McCurry, the Canadian War Art Program came under the jurisdiction of the Department of National Defence. This time only Canadian artists serving in the armed forces were employed. On a smaller scale than the Canadian War Memorials Fund - only 32 artists were given war artist commissions - the record nevertheless included Canadian activities in N Africa, off the Alaskan coast at Kiska, in the N Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as in Canada, Britain and Europe. Unlike WWI, paintings were exhibited during the war - sometimes directly behind fighting operations - in an attempt to inform civilian and military personnel alike of Canada's contribution to the war.
Taken as a whole, the collection, totalling more than 1000 works, was less concerned with depicting the land than the men and machines. Lawren P. Harris's Tank Advance, 1944 is a wonderful evocation of the mood, the tone and the domination of the landscape by the machine. Charles F. Comfort's Dead German on the Hitler Line depicts the horrific results of war. Alex Colville's Tragic Landscape juxtaposes the terror of war with the peacefulness and tranquility of domesticated nature. The contrast of these opposing realities pervades the canvas with a feeling of angst and a sense of uncertainty that would be the hallmark of Colville's later work.
Canada commissioned no war artists to record military activities in the Korean War. This did not, however, prevent individual soldiers such as Ted Zuber from making a record of their front-line experience when they returned to Canada. Nor did the Canadian government commission artists to record peacemaking operations in the Congo. In 1967, however, the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program was established by the Department of National Defence. This organization sent civilian artists to, among other places, Vietnam, Europe and the Middle East to ensure that the representation of Canada's armed forces begun during WWI was continued. Some 2 dozen artists have contributed to date. But Robert Hyndham, Mary Leach, Ted Zuber, and Graham Wragg have not produced work the calibre of Jackson, Varley, Comfort, Harris, or Colville. Nor has the art community in Canada taken any interest in a form of art that has become unfashionable and eclipsed by the photograph and the film.
CWM
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/war-artists/
1. La Mitrailleuse (Christopher Nevinson, 1915)
Image courtesy http://tate.org.uk.
2. Belligerents (1914-1918)
Image courtesy http://pcccua.edu.
3. Over the Top (John Nash, 1918)
Image courtesy http://en.wikipedia.org.
4. The Ypres Salient at Night (Paul Nash, 1918)
Image courtesy http://upload.wikimedia.org.
5. Gassed (John Singer Sargent, 1918)
Image courtesy http://farm4.static.flickr.com.
6. A Battery Shelled (Percy Lewis, 1919)
Image courtesy http://silverandexactfiles.wordpress.com.
7. We Are Making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)
Image courtesy www.bbc.co.uk.
8. On Wings and a Prayer (William Phillips, 1940)
Image courtesy http://air.webring.com.
9. Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944)
Image courtesy http://subrealism.blogspot.ca.
10. The 2000 Yard Stare (Tom Lea, 1942)
Image courtesy http://bittennails.com.
11. Operation Tidal Wave (Nicolas Trudgeon, 1943)
Image courtesy http://picklyman.wordpress.com.
12. Unknown Title (Thomas Hart Benton, 1941-1943)
Image courtesy http://worldonline.media.clients.com.
---------------------
 |
Canadian War Art |
| | The following articles on Canadian war art and artists have been written
by Laura Brandon, Chief Curator at the Canadian War Museum. They were
originally published in Canadian Military History and Arts Atlantic. Artworks mentioned are included where possible.
|
|
     |
-------------------------------------
CANADA Art and Culture
Official Art
Alsace!
"L" Battery, R.H.A. Retreat from Mons
Trenches Near Angres
The Front Line - At Night
Camp at Sunrise
Canada's Grand Armada, 1914
The Second Battle of Ypres, 22 April to 25 May 1915
First Glimpse of Ypres
The Cloth Hall, Ypres
Opening of the Somme Bombardment
The Battle of the Somme
British Tank in Action
Canadian Artillery in Action
An Artist's Home on the Somme
Battle of Courcelette
Capture of the Sugar Factory
The Crest of Vimy Ridge
A Cemetery on Vimy Ridge
The Pimple, Evening
The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday 1917
Mud Road to Passchendaele
Canadian Gunners in the Mud, Passchendaele
Death Tolls Again Over Flanders
A Machine Gun Officer, Siberia
Unloading Ordnance Stores, Eggershelt
Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron
Canadian Cavalry Ready in a Wood
Cemetery of the 11th Infantry Brigade
Marcelcave
Caught in the Searchlights
Arras
Cavalry and Tanks at Arras, 1918
The Return to Mons
The Watch on the Rhine, (The Last Phase)
Canadians Arriving on the Rhine
Throwing Grenades
Mustard Gas
Gas Chamber at Seaford
Tanks
Felling a Tree in the Vosges
Moving the Truck Another Yard
Canadians Repairing a Track Under Shell-Fire
A Chinese Worker
Looking Back at the Pilot
Instruction in Propeller Swinging
Crashed Curtis JN-4 Aircraft
Sketch of Pilot and Observer
Downed Aircraft
Air-Fight
War in the Air
Action Over Italy, 1918
A Forward Gun on a Patrol Boat
Canada's Answer
Casualties of Unrestricted U-Boat Campaign
Sketch for Minesweepers and Seaplanes
HMCS Grilse on Convoy Duty
Minesweepers at Sea
Canadian Sentry
Field Punishment No. 1
Coiffure in the Trenches
Inside the Main Dressing Station
The Stretcher-bearer Party
No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital at Doullens
An Estaminet, in Cambligneuil
Canadian Headquarters Staff
Munitions - Heavy Shells
Shell Piles
Women Operators
Munitions Worker
Lieutenant General Sir Sam Hughes, K.C.B., M.P.
Sir Arthur Currie
Olympic with Returned Soldiers
Armistice Day, Toronto
A Copse, Evening
Armistice Day, Munitions Centre
Canadians in Paris
Armistice, November 1918
German Prisoners
House of Ypres
The Conquerors
For What?
Vetcraft Poppy
A War Record
Vimy Ridge
Land Girls Hoeing
Trench Raid
Sir Douglas Haig
- http://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/objects-and-photos/art-and-culture/official-art/
-------------------------------
The Iron Curtain Speech
 |
| Photo courtesy www.kingsacademy.com. |
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the [European] Continent."
On March 5, 1946, a train with two World War II statesmen left Washington D.C. and steamed across the United States to the gateway to the west, Missouri. In the town of Fulton, population 7,000, at Westminster University, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with President Harry Truman by his side, delivered a prophetic speech to an audience of 40,000 students. Titled "The Sinews of Peace" the oratory soon became known as "The Iron Curtain Speech", referring to the figurative curtain that had fallen, separating democratic western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe.
Sir Winston Churchill reminded the American audience what had happened when the world powers appeased Hitler, granting him Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia; finally Poland was the straw that broke the camel's back. Churchill feared that if the world powers appeased Stalin, he would never be satisfied either.
The British statesman pointed out that the famous capitals of Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia were under the ever increasing control of Moscow. For instance, he mentioned that:
The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place.
In fact, the Soviet Union would expell two out of the three million Germans in Germany's eastern provinces in the years 1945 to 1948, in the name of ethnic cleansing.
Reminding the audience that the United States was at a "pinnacle of power", Churchill called for even closer relations between Britain and America, in an effort to counter the rising menace of Communism. Surprisingly, though, the speech was not well received by political figures like former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, former Vice President Henry Wallace and then current British Prime Minister Clement Atlee. The New York Herald Tribune disagreed with the tone and content of the speech.
However, within weeks of Churchill's delivery of his speech, public opinion shifted: more and more people realized that the Soviet Union posed a threat that could not be ignored. Although World War II had ended, the Cold War had begun, marked by Sir Winston Churchill's famous oratory. The Iron Curtain had descended, not to be raised for almost 45 years.
Map of Iron Curtain circa 1946 courtesy http://4.bp.blogspot.com.
----
--------------------
------------------------------------------------------
First World War Art
- Jean Veber
- Livingstone Hopkins
- Jean Jacques Waltz
- Adolf Karpellus
- Norman Lindsay
- Maurice Neumont
- Jules Abel Faivre
- George-Bertin Scott
- Victor Deni
- Henri Paul Gassier
- Dominique Fouqueray
- Lucien-Hector Jonas
- Maximilian Lenz
- Luciano Mauzan
- Mihaly Biro
- Pal Sujan
- Dmitri Orlov
- Louis Raemaekers
-----------------
War Artists
Canada's first official war art program, known as the Canadian War
Memorials Fund, was established by Lords Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) and
Rothermere under the aegis of the Canadian War Records Office of the
Canadian Army during WWI.
War Artists
Canada's first official war art program, known as the Canadian War Memorials Fund, was established by Lords Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) and Rothermere under the aegis of the Canadian War Records Office of the Canadian Army during WWI. From its inception in 1916 to its conclusion in 1919, the Fund hired more than 60 artists of British, Australian, Yugoslavian, Belgian and Canadian nationality to produce canvases, works on paper and sculptures depicting Canada's participation in the Great War. None of the resulting 800 works recording the farm and factory workers on the home front and the war-torn landscape of France and Flanders were exhibited during hostilities. At the war's end, however, a large portion was shown in London, New York, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.These exhibitions not only demonstrated that Canada had been the first country to establish a war art programme, but had produced a visual record of the war that was second to none. F.H. Varley's For What? was visual proof that the war artists had seen the dark underside of war. And A.Y. Jackson's Screened Road "A" showed that the war-torn, pock-marked landscape had become a valid subject for the war artist. But the value of the Canadian War Memorials Fund lay not only in the collection of works assembled. Participation in the Fund's exhibitions immediately following the war gave artists an opportunity to have their work evaluated by leading critics and gallery officials of the day. The whole experience of painting the landscape in France and Flanders, of viewing the war scenes produced by British modernists, and of having some involvement with major art critics, patrons, and gallery officials, was a crucial factor in elevating the art of the Ontario Group of Seven and its followers to national status. The Fund not only gave Canadians a memorial of their participation in the war; it gave Canadian art and artists an important place within the cultural framework of inter-war Canada.
When the Second World War broke out in the autumn of 1939, it was largely owing to the precedent of the Canadian War Memorials Fund that Canadian artists once more found themselves being pressed into service. Yet Canada did not have an official war art program until 1943. Created largely through the efforts of Vincent Massey and the director of the National Gallery of Canada, H.O. McCurry, the Canadian War Art Program came under the jurisdiction of the Department of National Defence. This time only Canadian artists serving in the armed forces were employed. On a smaller scale than the Canadian War Memorials Fund - only 32 artists were given war artist commissions - the record nevertheless included Canadian activities in N Africa, off the Alaskan coast at Kiska, in the N Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as in Canada, Britain and Europe. Unlike WWI, paintings were exhibited during the war - sometimes directly behind fighting operations - in an attempt to inform civilian and military personnel alike of Canada's contribution to the war.
Taken as a whole, the collection, totalling more than 1000 works, was less concerned with depicting the land than the men and machines. Lawren P. Harris's Tank Advance, 1944 is a wonderful evocation of the mood, the tone and the domination of the landscape by the machine. Charles F. Comfort's Dead German on the Hitler Line depicts the horrific results of war. Alex Colville's Tragic Landscape juxtaposes the terror of war with the peacefulness and tranquility of domesticated nature. The contrast of these opposing realities pervades the canvas with a feeling of angst and a sense of uncertainty that would be the hallmark of Colville's later work.
Canada commissioned no war artists to record military activities in the Korean War. This did not, however, prevent individual soldiers such as Ted Zuber from making a record of their front-line experience when they returned to Canada. Nor did the Canadian government commission artists to record peacemaking operations in the Congo. In 1967, however, the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program was established by the Department of National Defence. This organization sent civilian artists to, among other places, Vietnam, Europe and the Middle East to ensure that the representation of Canada's armed forces begun during WWI was continued. Some 2 dozen artists have contributed to date. But Robert Hyndham, Mary Leach, Ted Zuber, and Graham Wragg have not produced work the calibre of Jackson, Varley, Comfort, Harris, or Colville. Nor has the art community in Canada taken any interest in a form of art that has become unfashionable and eclipsed by the photograph and the film.
Links to other sites
- A Brush With WarIllustrated guide to the exhibition, "A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan," which explores two military art programs: the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program (1968-1995) and the Canadian Forces Artists Program (2001- present). From the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
- Canada’s War ArtAn introduction to the war art collection at the Canadian War Museum.
Fredrick Varley, Some Day the People Will Return, 1918.
Image: ©Canadian War Museum/Beaverbrook Collection of War Art/19710261-0769.CWM
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