Artists of the Great War

Propaganda

When war broke out just 13 years after Federation, the Australian community was charged with imperial loyalty and new-found independent patriotism. Between 1914 and 1918 propaganda pictures presented two views of the overseas conflict: the heroism of individual efforts on the battlefield and the threat of violence from across the oceans. Both stories were employed to encourage enlistment. Artists of the Great War presents propaganda imagery by Will Dyson, Fred Leist, Lionel and Norman Lindsay and Harry Weston.

Following the defeat of two conscription referendums in October 1916 and December 1917, Norman Lindsay was commissioned to produce a ‘recruitment kit’. Working with the three key principles of persuasion, fear and guilt Lindsay’s poster Today the German Monster threatens the world with bloodshed, slavery and death 1917 depicts a maniacal German ogre threatening the world. The oversized figure’s menacing arms are drenched with blood. Originating in central Europe, the bloodshed spills out in all directions, smothering the globe, reaching close to Australia. Lindsay’s poster is a deliberate, powerful expression of the threat of invasion.

The collection of propaganda posters and prints in Artists of the Great War explores a range of symbols, motifs and texts that artists used to encourage enlistment. From Leist’s outback crusader to Lionel Lindsay’s emblematic crucified Belgium, these artists present Australia’s participation in the war as a moral good and a global necessity.

Official War Art Scheme

Australia’s Official War Art Scheme was established following British and Canadian models, with the intention of preserving a pictorial record of the war, which included art in various media, photography and film. Under this scheme, artists were employed by both the Australian War Memorial and the Army Military History Section.

There were two separate commissioning programs. The first was administered by the Australian High Commission in London, advised by the then official war correspondent and war historian Charles Bean. This involved the appointment of 10 Australian artists living in London at the time—George Bell, Charles Bryant, Will Dyson, A Henry Fullwood, George Lambert, Fred Leist, John Longstaff, H Septimus Power, James Quinn and Arthur Streeton—each of whom received an honorary commission in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Each artist was expected to produce at least 25 drawings during the period of his appointment (usually up to three months), as well as a major painting. The second program involved five artists already serving with the AIF: George Benson, Frank Crozier, Will Longstaff, Louis McCubbin and James F Scott. These artists were selected by Bean to be attached to the Australian War Records Section, and received assistance with art materials and other support. The scheme also later employed sculptors Wallace Anderson, Web Gilbert and Leslie Bowles in the Modelling Subsection of the Australian War Records Section to create topographical models and dioramas.

The works of the official war artists provide a direct response to life on the front line in portraiture and landscape, from moments of powerful action to tense inactivity.

Gallipoli and The Anzac Book

The Anzac Book: Written and illustrated in Gallipoli by the men of Anzac reflects the harsh and bloody reality of the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915.

Published in 1916, The Anzac Book was an anthology of drawings and watercolours, stories and poems produced by Australasian soldiers in response to their experiences at Gallipoli. Initially conceived as an Anzac New Year magazine, the book was the idea of official war correspondent and war historian, Charles Bean, in November 1915. Combatant artists David Barker, Frank Crozier, JWS Henderson, Otho Hewett, Cyril Leyshon-White and Bean himself drew on whatever was accessible to them during combat. The soldiers’ hardships and trauma are presented in a sardonically humorous manner, reflecting what we now consider ‘the Anzac spirit’.

Barker’s drawing of a wounded but defiant infantryman in front of a torn Union Jack was selected as the cover illustration for The Anzac Book, winning the artist a prize of five pounds.

Will Dyson

Illustrator, cartoonist, war artist and printmaker, Will Dyson was one of the robust minds of his time: a political radical, a comic genius and, above all, a sensitive draughtsman.

Born in Alfredton, Victoria, into a family where his father actively participated in the local Labor Party and his two elder brothers worked for a socialist newspaper, Dyson inevitably absorbed their political views. Self-taught as an artist, he began publishing illustrations and caricatures in the late 1890s and 1900s. In 1909, Dyson and his wife, artist Ruby Lindsay, sister of his great friend Norman, moved to London at a time of profound change and struggle in British politics and industry. Dyson seized the opportunity to support trade unions and the working classes, drawing editorial cartoons for the labour newspaper The Daily Herald.

He also addressed the threat and then the reality of the Great War, using graphic satire to attack the Kaiser and German militarism. A staunch nationalist as well as a socialist, Dyson also lobbied to be allowed to draw at the front, and was finally appointed Australia’s first Official War Artist in December 1916. His war drawings are compassionate representations of the lives of ordinary Australian soldiers rather than heroic battle scenes. He not only depicted the war from the battlefront, but also exposed the wounds of war behind the lines. Welcome back to the Somme 1918 shows the return of the AIF in March 1918, when diggers famously reassured the local citizens: ‘Fini retreat ... beaucoup Australiens ici’ (‘The retreat is over … many Australians are here’).

Will Dyson’s Australia at war: Drawings at the front

‘He was emphatically lost, lost like a child, and evoking some of the pity that goes to a child, he looked so very young …’
(Will Dyson, from the notes on Dead beat, the tunnel, Hill 60)

Will Dyson was the first Australian official war artist to visit the front during the Great War. Attached to the Australian Imperial Force, he travelled to France in December 1916 and remained there until May 1917, making records of the Australian involvement in the war. Dyson experienced the battles at close quarters; he was wounded twice. During his time at Ypres and on the Somme, he produced a large number of pencil, charcoal and watercolour sketches. A selection of these drawings, each with a commentary by the artist, was later published in Australia at war: Drawings at the front (1918).

Dyson preferred to describe the day-to-day life of ordinary Australian soldiers. Many of his drawings focus on the troops’ physical and psychological devastation by attention to pose and gesture, like the drooping head, slumped shoulders and fallen body in Dead beat, the tunnel, Hill 60. His aim was not to record heroic acts, but rather the miserable physical and psychological conditions of the Western Front campaigns. By all accounts the winter of 1916–17 was the harshest in the region for decades.

The paintings, drawings and prints in Artists of the Great War provide an introduction to the achievement of Dyson’s war art. His rapid, fluent line skilfully captures the soldiers’ dreadful circumstances and the loneliness and fatigue of life on the front line.

Women Artists

During the Great War, 16 male Australian artists were appointed by government and the military to document the conflict. Being unable to witness battle scenes at the front line, during the war women artists depicted more personal experiences and routine subjects. Many of them worked as nurses or as volunteers in soldiers’ canteens.

Australian artist Iso Rae was living in the French coastal artists’ colony of Etaples when war broke out; she served throughout the war with the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross at the army base established in the town. Between 1915 and 1919, Rae documented conditions in the camp—hospitals, barracks, recreation huts and tents, soldiers drilling, horses, German prisoners of war—in gentle, understated post-Impressionist pastel and gouache drawings.

Another significant female war artist is Hilda Rix Nicholas. Having had her mother and sister die at the outbreak of the war, in 1916 Rix married Australian officer George Matson Nicholas; he was killed at Flers just five weeks later. The grieving widow shares her loss through many paintings and drawings that convey overwhelming personal responses.

The third woman artist in the exhibition is Dora Ohlfsen, an expatriate painter and sculptor who lived in Rome. Ohlfsen also served with the Red Cross, and in 1919 produced the Anzac Medallion, sold ‘in aid of Australians and New Zealanders maimed in the war’.

Against the dominant, masculinist historical discourse, these artists’ visual testimony shows us women’s civilian experiences of war and of wartime loss.

Broken bodies and Military Hospitals

The Great War remains Australia’s worst conflict in terms of casualties—of the 416,809 men who enlisted, over 60,000 were killed and 156,000 were wounded. With unprecedented numbers of young men injured, the role of the Army Medical Corps and the Australian Army Nursing Service was crucial. Of the artists represented in this exhibition, Rupert Bunny, George Coates, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton served during the war as hospital orderlies, Iso Rae volunteered as a nurse with the British Red Cross, and Daryl Lindsay became a medical illustrator at the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup.

Bunny depicts the often tense, quiet atmosphere of a French military hospital in his painting, Waiting to be X-rayed 1915. Streeton’s oil sketch The ward c 1918 shows the 3rd Australian General Hospital, Abbeville, while Coates’ First Australian wounded at Gallipoli arriving at Wandsworth Hospital 1921 is an impressive painterly commission completed after the war. Rae’s 23rd General Hospital 1915 is a quick pastel drawing, with all the immediacy of having been drawn in the field. In comparison to the sombre palette of artists on the Western Front, George Lambert’s Palestinian study, Balcony of troopers’ ward, 14th Australian General Hospital 1919, is vibrant in colour and dappled in sunlight.

Lindsay provided crucial medical illustrations for plastic surgeons repairing umprecedented facial trauma. His watercolours are incredibly intricate and clinical, graphically documenting the injuries that were unfortunately so common among soldiers fighting in the Great War.