TY - JOUR
AU - Curzon, Lucy, D
AB - Evelyn Dunbar was officially commissioned as a British war artist in April 1940. Under the auspices of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), Dunbar was charged with depicting subjects germane to the Ministry of Information’s (MoI) wartime publicity campaigns.1 She was asked, in this capacity, to document various arenas of women’s work that were vital to sustaining the war effort – especially those relating to voluntary services, agriculture, and nursing.2 Until this point, Dunbar’s career had centred largely upon writing and illustrating popular books, as well as a mural commission, and the exhibition and occasional sale of her landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes. Her status as a professional artist was thus more-or-less established by the time of her appointment. Regardless, the declaration of war on 3 September 1939 marked ‘a major turning point in … [her] career’.3 The looming conflict had precipitated a collapse in the art market, causing galleries to close and commissions to disappear, as well as paints, canvas, and other materials to become increasingly scarce. Indeed, some 73 per cent of British artists – including those involved in commercial art and design – went on to face unemployment in the first six months of the war.4 Hence Dunbar’s acceptance to a position with the WAAC was, arguably, exceptional. Yet unlike many of her war artist colleagues, including Henry Moore and Paul Nash, Dunbar’s work has remained largely unrecognised, as has that of her colleagues Mary Kessell, Ethel Gabain, and Dorothy Coke, among others. This lack of parity has produced a symbolic, even literal devaluation of women’s representations of conflict in modern history, particularly the experience of total war. And while scholars such as Lucy Noakes, Sonya O. Rose, and Penny Summerfield have used oral testimonies, for example, or documents housed in the Mass Observation Archive to bring to light women’s first-hand accounts, relatively little attention has been paid to visual culture, particularly work produced by women artists, like Dunbar, who were employed by the WAAC. Gill Clarke’s Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country (2006), Catherine Speck’s Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars (2014), and Kathleen Palmer’s Women War Artists (2011), for instance, have begun to address this disparity. These works provide necessary information – including details about Dunbar’s early life, training, and interest in horticulture, and her extensive commissions and entrepreneurial spirit, as well as facts about the paintings she produced under the war artist scheme. As such, they are essential resources for recovering a life that has, quite literally, been ‘hidden from history’.5 My approach consciously builds upon these foundations: to contextualise, indeed complicate Dunbar’s work in relation to prevailing ideas about gender in wartime Britain. In particular, I focus on how concepts of femininity and ‘good citizenship’ were often at odds with one another, such that women artists like Dunbar faced conflicting remits when it came to visualising the war in daily life. Many of her paintings are in fact testament to the contradictory role Dunbar played with regard to the WAAC’s overall aims. Recent scholarship, including work by Juliette Pattinson, Arthur McIvor and Linsey Robb (2017), Emma Newlands (2014), and Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers (2017) points to the continued significance of the Second World War’s social impact.6 The starting point of my argument is therefore the following, widely recognised claim – that ‘few historical events have resonated as fully in modern British culture as the Second World War’.7 The condition of total war motivated official demands for a united effort – that is, that all Britons, not merely combatants, share the burden of waging war out of loyalty to nation. The concept of ‘collective sacrifice’ was almost immediately enshrined in notions, for example, of the ‘People’s War’ or the ‘Spirit of Dunkirk’. The mass significance of these narratives, moreover, has not abated over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The steadfastness of Dame Vera Lynn’s reputation as the ‘forces sweetheart’ or World Cup football promotions that invoke Britain’s ‘finest hour’ are witness to this fact.8 Mythologies of wartime identity are indeed regularly invoked. London mayor, Sadiq Khan, appealed to the ‘Blitz Spirit’ in 2016 as part of his winning campaign that proposed to end the capital city’s housing crisis.9 And heartfelt calls, via social media and the popular press, to ‘keep calm and carry on’ abounded after the Westminster, Manchester Arena, and London Bridge/Borough Market terrorist attacks of 2017.10 Given the embeddedness of the Second World War in British culture, it seems imperative to ask the following question: how has the effective absence of Dunbar and other women artists influenced the study of this war, particularly in light of the role that works by Nash and Moore, as well as Stanley Spencer and others have played in documenting the conflict? In turn, how does this historical blindness, once rectified, influence our understanding of not only this war’s identity politics, particularly its ideas of citizenship, but also accounts of postwar culture and society in which the war’s afterlife features so predominantly? Using Dunbar as a case study, my intention is not only to examine the gender politics of this underexplored area, namely women’s representations of modern war, but also to establish, more generally, a rationale as to why these works have remained hidden in the first place. Evelyn Dunbar, the WAAC, and Wartime Citizenship Dunbar was born in Reading, Berkshire on 18 December 1906. The family moved to Kent in 1913, where Dunbar attended Rochester Grammar School for Girls.11 Her mother, Florence Murgatroyd, was an amateur painter and encouraged Dunbar’s creative activities.12 Indeed, Dunbar secured early recognition as a student by winning a prestigious Royal Drawing Society (RDS) gold star in 1924.13 Upon leaving school, she began writing and illustrating short stories for children, which were published in The Everyday Book (Dean and Son, c. 1924) and Nursery Ways (Dean and Son, 1926). She eventually entered a local art college, but – by 1927 – was travelling to London to attend classes at the RDS and Chelsea School of Art.14 Finally, in 1929, Dunbar was admitted to the Royal College of Art (RCA). Her work was almost immediately noticed by William Rothenstein, the RCA’s principal at the time.15 Soon thereafter, Dunbar began establishing her reputation in London, most notably through a 1931 exhibition at the Goupil Gallery. Her paintings, Gardening (c. 1931) and Beside the Medway (n.d.), were shown there alongside work by Mark Gertler, Eric Gill, and Lucien Pissarro, among many others.16 In 1933, with Charles (Cyril) Mahoney – who oversaw the RCA’s mural painting programme – she collaborated on a series of murals at the Brockley County School in Lewisham, south London. Dunbar worked at Brockley from 1933 to 1936, completing a panel entitled The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk, as well as a large frieze and an extensive series of spandrels and ceiling roundels. She again collaborated with Mahoney to produce Gardeners’ Choice (1937) for George Routledge and Sons. This book included a lengthy text (written by Dunbar) and illustrations of Mahoney’s and Dunbar’s favourite perennial plants, particularly those whose beauty afforded the artists ‘a close intimacy through drawing and painting’ such that they had ‘been made aware not only of the garden value of a plant … but of [aesthetic] proportions and forms and contrasts’.17 Dunbar also contributed illustrations to Donald and Catherine Carswell’s anthology, The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (1936), and an extract from Wuthering Heights that was published in the journal Signature. Her last publication before the war involved her design and illustration of Gardener’s Diary 1938, a daily journal, for Country Life magazine. Dunbar exhibited in the Wildenstein Gallery’s Cross Section of English Painting in the spring of 1938 and opened the Blue Gallery at 168 Eastgate in Rochester early the following year.18 The space was a single room, clad with blue panelling, located above The Fancy Shop – a haberdashery run by her sisters, Jessie and Marjorie.19 There she hoped to sell her work, as well that of her friends and colleagues. One of the only recorded exhibitions hosted in the Blue Gallery opened in February 1939. It included a selection of Dunbar’s own paintings and those of her mother and Mahoney, as well as works by Edward Bawden, Allan Gwynne-Jones, and Barnett Freedman, all of whom Dunbar had met at the RCA.20 Maxwell and Anthony Ayrton, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rowntree, and Edward Bainbridge Copnall also exhibited. Yet the Blue Gallery ceased operation less than two months later.21 However well received Dunbar’s efforts at professional organisation were, and likewise, how much such activity bolstered her career (the Tate Gallery, for example, purchased two of her images in 1940), lack of sales meant that the venture was untenable.22 As Gill Clarke suggests, ‘few professions were harder hit’ than that of artist during the last months before the war and, of course, for its duration.23 Dunbar felt the financial strain quite acutely. Her ambition, however, was not thwarted. On 20 December 1939, Dunbar wrote to Percy Jowett, Rothenstein’s successor at the RCA, to ask for information regarding a new venture. Less than a week earlier, a national radio broadcast had announced the formation of a committee whose aim was to promote artistic records of the war. This committee – the WAAC – was under the direction of Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, and included the artists Muirhead Bone, Walter Russell, E.M.O’R. Dickey, and Jowett, alongside representatives from each of the three armed services.24 Dunbar told Jowett that, although she had ‘missed the broadcast, and [had] never been able to find out anything definite’ regarding the application process, she had a strong interest in ‘making war records’.25 In her letter she explains that she is especially interested in documenting ‘women’s agricultural or horticultural work, or any thing [sic] connected with landwork’, which she felt she ‘could do with … [a] very keen understanding’.26 Four months later, in April 1940, she received a letter from Dickey – in his capacity as WAAC secretary – confirming her appointment. That an official committee was charged with the task of overseeing the creation of an artistic legacy – one whose purpose was to preserve a visual record of Britain’s wartime experiences – was not, at the time, without precedent. In 1916, after Sir Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook) initiated Canada’s War Records Office, which included visual art in its collecting ambit, he introduced a similar scheme at the behest of the British government – the British War Memorials Committee. The WAAC, under Clark, succeeded this body. Its first meeting was held in the National Gallery on 23 November 1939. Officially, the group was tasked with drawing ‘up a list of artists qualified to record the war at home and abroad’, as well as advising ‘on the selection of artists from this list and on the arrangements for their employment; and … on such questions as copyright, disposal, and exhibition of works and the publication of reproductions’.27 More immediately, however, the WAAC attempted to keep artists employed. Clark estimated that roughly 8,000–9,000 artists were put out of work in the first three months of the war.28 Second to this goal, and less publicised, was Clark’s aim to, ‘as far as possible … prevent [artists] … from being killed’.29 Dunbar herself was delayed from being called up to active service because of her WAAC commission. Yet the WAAC’s primary objective, of course, was to amass a body of images that could encourage popular support for the war, at home and abroad. As such, it endeavoured to secure works ‘likely to be of historic interest as war records for future generations’ and, further, encouraged ‘public interest in such aspects of the war as the artist, with his personal vision, can illuminate as no merely factual record can’.30 The WAAC’s intention was never, however, to cultivate propaganda – at least not overtly. Indeed, Clark publicly declared that such activity could stifle an artist’s creative development given that ‘propaganda tended to coarsen his style and degrade his vision’.31 Rather, Clark intended the WAAC to maintain morale by upholding an ideal of ‘civilized society’ – one that was founded upon the widespread cultivation of aesthetic taste, indeed pleasure. In so doing, he surmised that he was defending values dear to the heart of Britain itself. In October 1939, Clark argued that the ‘first duty of an artist in wartime is the same as his duty in peace: to produce good works of art’.32 Artists, in other words, were to hearten national confidence by promoting recognisable ideas of beauty, skill, and sophistication – and all that these concepts implied with regard to national identity – in the face of enemy barbarism. Clark cultivated support for such values by creating conditions that freely encouraged contrast with the totalitarian policies of the Nazi Propagandaministerium. For example, he routinely emphasised the WAAC’s commitment to commissioning artists whose approaches represented catholicity in method and taste, from surrealism to the work of Royal Academicians.33 Naturally, this compared unfavourably with Nazi efforts at cultural repression, made evident not least of all through their treatment of so-called ‘degenerate’ art. More importantly, Clark stressed ‘the elevation of aesthetic quality above all other criteria of interest’, and as such attempted to position the WAAC as an apolitical entity, to which the overtly partisan Propagandaministerium was a perfect foil.34 Brian Foss thus argues that the British public saw the WAAC, via the press, as being ‘successful in its development of organisational and procedural policies that projected an image of fairness[,] … democratic intent[,] … and concern for promoting the very qualities that made British art unique and valuable’.35 Yet the reality of Clark’s leadership was somewhat different. Despite wide-ranging tastes, his view of ‘quality’ – for example – did not include abstraction. Indeed, he rejected ‘those pure painters’, including Matthew Smith, Ben Nicholson, and Victor Pasmore because their work was concerned ‘solely [with] … putting down their feelings about shapes and colours, and not in facts, drama, human emotions and life generally’.36 Clark viewed this ‘ultra-modern’ work as escapist and excessively sterile, and thus unsuited to conveying messages of ‘civilization’ or ‘democracy’ – ones that the business of upholding morale demanded. Yet even prior to the war Clark pursued a narrow position. In a Listener article of October 1935, Clark publicly mourns the rise of ‘lifeless’ abstraction and accuses British modernists of paying too much heed to specifically ‘German developments’. ‘We paid, as usual’, he declares, ‘the price for having conquered Germany materially by being in turn conquered by German culture’.37 Clark’s sentiment, however, was not fuelled by simple nativism. Rather it registered his concern about fascism’s increased power in Europe.38 Martin Hammer suggests that Clark equated painterly abstraction and its ‘fatal defect of purity’ with the isolationist tactics of totalitarianism, ones that allowed culture to develop without concern for the nation in whose service it was intended to act.39 The social character of art was therefore lost, and with it – from Clark’s vantage – the very humanity of civilization. It should be reiterated that Clark was not against modernism altogether. Indeed, he ‘appeared to be grappling with pressing issues of the moment: how to be leftist but not crudely populist… and how to be modernist as well as accessible’.40 For him, art of the period not only had to maintain aesthetic commitments, but it also had to be socially useful – which meant having a clear purpose that was broadly evident to a wide public. Thus, Clark abhorred the visual politicking of Nazi or Soviet socialist realism and, at the same time, was highly wary of abstract modes that ostensibly refused communication altogether. In order to properly engage the contemporary context, visual art – in short – had to maintain balance. The WAAC’s decision-making policies were not merely guided by aesthetic considerations, however. This is especially the case with regard to the issue of gender. The WAAC, as a governing body, was entirely composed of men. In turn, of the 335 artists whose works were turned over to the Imperial War Museum in London at the close of hostilities, approximately 38 of them were women.41 Evelyn Dunbar and Stella Schmolle are the only women documented as having worked on salary ‘for successive periods and for a number of years’.42 Ethel Gabain and Laura Knight, in turn, were awarded major commissions, though neither of them was hired in a longer-term paid position. The remainder of the women listed were employed ‘to undertake a few short works, spasmodically over a short period’ (eight women), offered ‘independent submissions’ to the WAAC for consideration (twenty-three women), or were both hired intermittently and submitted works (three women). Comparatively, twenty-six men (including Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, Muirhead Bone, and Paul Nash), under the same circumstances, were offered salaried positions with the WAAC, while twenty-three male artists took up (sometimes successive) substantial commissions.43 Given this context, it should not be surprising that the subjects ‘approved’ for women artists by the WAAC were guided by a policy of ‘separate spheres’ – that is, they were largely limited to depicting women’s work or other suitably ‘feminine’ home front subjects. And when exceptional circumstances arose – for example, Laura Knight’s portrait of twenty-one-year-old Ruby Loftus screwing a breech-ring for a Bofors gun44 – the WAAC took pains to emphasise, for example, the model’s physical attractiveness and femininity, over and above her wartime contributions, in order to alleviate patriarchal fears about ‘unconventional’ female behaviour (Fig. 1).45 Dunbar’s image, Hospital Train (1941), presents – at least ostensibly – a more conventional approach to female representation. In this painting two nurses painstakingly prepare a makeshift mobile ward (Fig. 2). To the WAAC and the British public, representations like these were ‘normal’ and therefore reassuring. As Foss suggests, they showed ‘no obviously injured bodies’ and thus preserved the idea of nursing as ‘unexceptional’ and therefore ‘womanly’ – that is, an activity that took place in ‘comforting settings where there [was] plenty of efficiency and readiness’ as opposed to one that, in reality, bore regular witness to catastrophic injury and, ultimately, death.46 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1943, oil on canvas, 86.3×101.9 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1943, oil on canvas, 86.3×101.9 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Hospital Train, 1942, oil on canvas, 55.8×76.2 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Hospital Train, 1942, oil on canvas, 55.8×76.2 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. On the contrary, male artists employed by the WAAC were routinely placed in and, furthermore, asked to record extraordinary situations. Vivian Pitchforth, for example, documented Operation Dracula and the liberation of Rangoon in 1944. Edward Bawden was sent to North Africa and the Middle East to sketch troop movements throughout the war. Thomas Monnington successfully petitioned the WAAC in order to record his wartime flight experiences inside Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft. In turn, Albert Richards, then only a student at the Wallasey School of Art, documented D-Day preparations and eventually accompanied the 6th Airborne Division to Normandy.47 Male artists regularly had honorary military commissions and, for the most part, had little difficulty securing access to ‘major’ (that is, ‘masculine’) subjects including the fronts themselves, as well as domestic and overseas military bases, heavily damaged areas at home and abroad, and so on. The limitations imposed by the WAAC appear to run contrary to British women’s general experience of wartime life. In an unprecedented action, hundreds of thousands of women joined or were conscripted into active duty with the armed services by 1941 – including the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), and the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS).48 Many more went to work in munitions factories and chemical plants, and as mechanics, signallers, wireless operators, and bus and ambulance drivers – that is, at employments previously restricted to men. A 1942 MoI information pamphlet on women workers proudly declares: ‘Women have not only entered factories by the million, but they are taking a direct and increasing share in actual defensive military operations’.49 In many instances, the novelty of such work proved both exciting and affirming. As one woman working in radar equipment manufacture revealed, ‘They’ve put me on easy jobs sometimes, but I like something to struggle with. I like going on and on until I’ve got it right, so when I’m finished I can think to myself—“There, I did that! Aren’t I a clever girl?”’50 But as Penny Summerfield has argued, changes in women’s employment were actually more limited in scope than they initially appear. In the end, the British government controlled women’s access to wartime employment in order to maintain, overall, traditional gender relations at work and home. Thus, while more and different types of women (including married and elderly, upper-middle class, etc.) entered the workforce, they were largely being employed in areas befitting expectations of femininity (even in the auxiliary services), including clerical or secretarial work, cooking, cleaning, and nursing to name a few. Additionally, the shift of largely working-class women from ‘traditional areas of … employment such as the textile industries and domestic service’ to ‘process industries like electrical engineering and food manufacture’ was actually an interwar trend that continued after 1939.51 And while some public assistance was provided to alleviate the burden of women’s duties in the private sphere, including tax-funded day nurseries, the state was very cautious about the trend such activity might set by removing this hurdle altogether. In 1942, for example, Mass Observation reported that women in London seeking care for their children faced long waiting lists, nursery locations far from home or work, opening hours that did not match the hours of factory shifts, and prejudice from medical doctors who feared the spread of ‘epidemics in day nurseries’.52 Most mothers therefore ‘made do’ by finding ‘their own solutions to the problem of combining wartime work with domestic tasks’.53 Though war might have changed particular situations, as Summerfield concludes, it did little to contest the overall gender hierarchies of the interwar era. The issue of how ideas of gender influenced concepts of wartime citizenship is most pertinent to my study of Dunbar’s work. As an appointee of the MoI, her paintings were intended to promote – despite Clark’s efforts to deny this intention – the type of ‘good’ citizen behaviour that would sustain Britain’s commitment to total war. Total war is a definitively modern phenomenon in the sense both of its impossibility prior to industrialisation’s material discoveries, and also the unprecedented degree of social infrastructure that it requires. As Léon Daudet argues, it is ‘the expansion of fighting … into politics, economics, trade, industry, intellectual life, law, and the world of finance’, among other spaces.54 In the case of the Second World War, this necessitated not only combatants willing to fight, alongside the means for their oversight in terms of leadership and a steady stream of arms, but also a highly systematised home front that included medical professionals, farmers, and auxiliary service members, to name but a few, right down to each household willing to ration food, swallow fear, and plant a victory garden. Most often, this goal was met by officially encouraged ideas of ‘collective sacrifice’ or ‘common good’ – that is, convincing citizens to support Britain as a whole, rather than pursue their individual goals or desires. In turn, when both men and women were conscripted (National Service Acts in 1939 and 1941), and German bombs hit Buckingham Palace and the East End of London, the British public was provided with ostensible evidence of this shared burden. The context of total war, then, made it appear that the disparities of interwar society had vanished. Yet claims supporting an actual or measurable correlation between the ‘extent of wartime participation by society’ and the ‘subsequent levelling of social inequalities’ are very difficult to sustain.55 Indeed Arthur Marwick argues that, while total war requires total social involvement, including that of underrepresented or underprivileged groups, it is better to assume that ‘such participation will [only] provide the possibility of social gains, or at a minimum, of developing new consciousness and self-esteem’ rather than a guarantee of actual change.56 This is particularly the case with regard to the flattening of gender hierarchies. Sonya O. Rose claims that collective sacrifice was ultimately described as a form of moral behaviour, which (not surprisingly) was defined according to the rigid parameters of masculinity and femininity. For instance, while a male soldier’s sexual promiscuity was permissible as an aspect of maintaining combatant morale (to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, men were even given condoms upon deployment), any ‘improper’ activity on the part of women in the auxiliary or civilian services was perceived as ‘unrestrained’, ‘self-serving’, and possibly ‘sexually subversive’. Even the sight of a woman in military dress – ostensibly overthrowing male authority – was a regular cause of public consternation. Audrey Manning, a member of the Women’s Land Army (WLA), confronted this stigma while stationed in Kent. ‘We used to go to dances in Meopham Village Hall’, she recalls, and ‘[t]here was an officious woman on the door who would not allow land girls in if they were wearing uniform’.57 Ironically then, as Rose notes, ‘some of the specific duties of wartime citizenship exposed women to the charge of being immoral and/or irresponsible – in other words of not being good citizens’.58 As a facet of total war women were held to standards of citizen behaviour that placed them at a significant disadvantage compared to their male counterparts. They were expected to maintain values associated with traditional femininity and, simultaneously, take on roles that either directly asked or indirectly encouraged them to break with these same conventions. This incongruity, I contend, was a reflection of national identity. Wartime ideals of nation positioned the nominal British citizen as male. He was marked as a valiant defender of home and country – he was willing die for both – and his citizenship and its privileges were seamlessly aligned with that identity. By the same measure, women were morally and sometimes legally obligated to take up often-unconventional work outside the home as war service.59 Yet they were also mandated, by a similar logic of good citizenship, to reject the public sphere in order to uphold, via archetypal definitions of femininity, their nurturant roles as mothers, wives, daughters, and so forth. In other words, they were asked to assume the function of moral compass – as beacons of ‘light’ and ‘goodness’ – for a nation at war. Such contradictory roles were routinely brought into relief after September 1939. For example, though bound to contribute to the war effort, many women workers were prevented (by trades unions) from earning the same wages as their male counterparts and, moreover, they routinely faced harassment from male workers who resented them for being ‘hired to do work that formerly had been their [i.e. the men’s] sole preserve’.60 If they showed too much dedication to their new positions, women were assumed to be neglecting their chief duties as wives and mothers and thus their ‘civic virtue’ came under attack.61 Popular magazines further reinforced this gender order by encouraging women to pay careful attention to fashion and self-care, such that they would not deny their ‘true’ femininity and therein remain attractive to husbands and potential suitors (though not too glamorous, such that they flouted ideas of wartime austerity and selflessness). Indeed, the MoI proudly declared that female barrage balloon crews, ‘whether under a cap or steel helmet … [arrange their hair] to show the permanent waves to the very best advantage’.62 Factory workers, in turn, had ‘well-cared for hands and hair and [wore] … whenever possible, pretty shoes. They [did not give up] … their necklaces nor their bracelets nor their lipsticks’.63 The extent to which ‘“good citizenship” and masculinity were virtually the mirror images of one another’ has, in turn, led to the Second World War’s historicisation as a definitively male experience.64 Honoured for their willingness make the ultimate sacrifice, male combatants are prioritised, for example, in official remembrances of war. Discussing Britain’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations of VE Day in 1995, Lucy Noakes argues that these events ‘drew attention to the high symbolic status given in warfare to soldiers’.65 In this context, military men were officially ‘assigned a privileged place within the national commemoration and celebration of the end of the Second World War’.66 Yet tens of thousands of women participated in vital work and civil defence initiatives. Thousands more were killed during the Blitz, thus ‘reflecting the ways in which … aerial warfare broke down the gendered distinction between combatant, who could die for his nation, and civilian, who remained “behind the lines”’.67 Regardless, it is still the male soldier who is favoured in canonical wartime narratives. As Noakes and Susan Grayzel ultimately conclude, ‘while citizenship duties expanded to include women in the defence of home and nation, this citizenship was deeply inscribed with traditional notions of gender’.68 Conflicting definitions of citizenship, however, remain largely hidden because of how war is contextualised in histories of the period. As Noakes argues, ‘the overwhelming image of the war that emerges from the many and varied sites of cultural transmission in which it appears is one of unity’.69 This is to say, powerful mythologies of the ‘People’s War’ and the ‘Blitz Spirit’ – ones that have shaped the twentieth-century history of Britain – stress commonality as opposed to division. The invisibility of working-class communities that bore the weight of death and destruction during the Blitz; Jews who faced increased anti-Semitism, particularly around charges of draft-dodging and black marketeering; colonial subjects from India whose participation, for example, at Dunkirk has been largely erased; and women hampered by the double-standards of wartime citizenship are testament to the fact that ‘conflicting interests of class, race, politics and gender [were] … collapsed together to create a picture of a unified nation, united in battle against Nazi Germany’.70 Furthermore, even when divisions are evident in these histories, they are usually ‘denuded of all antagonism; they appear instead as accepted and unproblematic, “natural” ways of delineating society’ such that the male combatant experience, and its offshoots, is understood as normative.71 Given this context, the fact that male artists and, by and large, representations of male experience were prioritised by the war artist programme and thus take pride of place in its history is hardly unexpected. Yet how does a close reading of Evelyn Dunbar’s work provide new information about the war, particularly the erasures and contradictions that marked it? Her paintings, I believe, make visible conflicting expectations of women’s wartime citizenship. Dunbar was asked, officially, to promote citizen morale and its attendant archetypes of national identity. But the exemplary figure, in this context, was male. As such, Dunbar was asked to see and, further, to represent the war from an impossible subject position. To fulfil her duties, in other words, she had to subordinate (if not vacate altogether) her own subjectivity in favour of Britain’s wartime patriarchy, specifically its demand to define women’s roles in light of male citizenship and privilege. It is this particular aspect of her work upon which my argument will focus. How could Dunbar see and ultimately characterise this war from a vantage that was, in fact, not her own? I argue that, while the images she created outwardly maintain the myth of unified (male) national identity, they also – more subtly – highlight incongruity, even strangeness. In particular, Dunbar’s negotiation of painterly space presents an opportunity to explore how women artists responded to the opposing mandates placed upon them and, moreover, their craft as a condition of total war. War Artist Between 1940 and 1945, Evelyn Dunbar duly captured scenes of convalescent nurses sewing camouflage nets, civil defence workers being trained to wear anti-gas clothing, and land army recruits bedding down for the night, among many other wartime subjects. She was regularly commissioned by the WAAC, from the spring of 1940, to cover specific subjects on short-term work assignments. At the beginning of 1943, however, she was offered a coveted six-month salary position to focus specifically on agricultural topics and women’s voluntary activities. This commission was renewed in September of that year and again the following spring.72 By the end of the war, the WAAC had purchased roughly forty paintings from Dunbar, many of which are now in the collections of the Imperial War Museum (London), Manchester Art Gallery, National Museum of Wales, the Royal Air Force Museum, the British Government Art Collection, and Tate Britain, among others. St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters (1942) is a particularly compelling example of Dunbar’s work at this time (Fig. 3). In September 1940, St Thomas’s Hospital in Lambeth, London was severely damaged by German bombing and was subsequently evacuated to St Nicholas’s Hospital in Pyrford, Surrey. As Dunbar informed E.M.O’R. Dickey in March 1942, ‘I propose, if you agree, to go to … [where] St. Thomas’s Hospital is evacuated, and where there seems to be every branch of nursing represented. I have a great idea for a large picture, & know a nurse there who would give me some assistance.’73 Dunbar arrived there in 1942 and stayed for several weeks, hoping to ‘do a record of the different nurses in their various uniforms’, including those from the Red Cross, Nursing Auxiliary, and the Civil Nursing Reserve, as well as staff nurses from St Thomas’s and St Nicholas’s Hospitals.74 What she eventually produced, however, was something extraordinarily different. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, 1942, oil on canvas, 91.4 cm×152.4 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, 1942, oil on canvas, 91.4 cm×152.4 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Outwardly dividing her canvas into a grid of distinct rectangular areas, Dunbar visually narrates the everyday experience of nursing. In the upper left corner of the canvas, a nurse is sterilising medical equipment. Others, who are filling water bottles, making beds, transporting patients, and tending to burn victims, follow, in succession, from left to right. In the central rectangle, representing the administrative core of the ward, a nurse works at a desk while the matron conducts an interview. In the remaining scenes, nurses and other staff can be seen giving medicine to patients, cleaning the wards, plastering limbs, gathering linens, and performing charge duties. In barely visible script, Dunbar herself has identified the scenes according to the organisations from which the nurses come (e.g. Red Cross) or the type of nurse (e.g. charge nurse) pictured. At first glance, then, St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters seems to provide ‘appropriate’ information about women’s roles in times of war. As Sonya O. Rose argues, ‘Nurses symbolically epitomised the qualities that all women should emulate in performing their patriotic duty – they were quintessentially both caring and [appropriately] heroic’.75 As a profession, nursing allowed women, ostensibly at least, to migrate the qualities or behaviours expected of them in the domestic sphere to the professional world – namely, selflessness in tending to others. Despite obvious contradictions, even nurses working at the front fell into this paradigm. Though they were ‘near the arena of danger’, they were ‘not in the thick of things, [thus] locating them in a familiar (family) way in relation to the dead and dying: women succor [sic], soothe, heal, tend, offer solace’.76 In short, nurses could perform essential work that affirmed their ‘good’ citizenship by maintaining traditional gender hierarchies. Embracing these duties demonstrated, in the end, not only a woman’s ability to care for her immediate family in the home, but also the national family in the hospital or casualty clearing station. Yet Dunbar’s own description of the painting does not focus on ideas of ‘civic duty’, ‘citizenship’, ‘femininity’, or any other aspects of the MoI’s information campaigns. Dunbar instead discusses how the image is a product of her way of seeing – as an artist. She states: ‘[The painting] arose from the vivid impressions I received on first going into & going about in a big hospital … till it became the hurrying composition which you finally had from me’.77 Dunbar’s use of the term ‘hurrying’ reflects not her haste to finish the painting, but rather the quickness of hospital life. This sense of fleetingness is reiterated in the final phrases of her commentary. She states: ‘The whole is a scene of everyday hospital tasks, a flat chequered background, with its wreath of crisply white aproned figures moving deftly & swiftly over it, browns, greens, blue [,] scarlet and white with a few sharp blacks and spottings of delicate pink – so it seemed to me’.78 The pace of nursing, from Dunbar’s vantage, was best conceptualised as blocks of colour – that is, particular hues impressed upon a flattened surface. Dunbar’s effort to articulate a very specific meaning for the painting is, I contend, highly significant. By describing the peculiarities of how she saw the hospital and subsequently chose to represent it, Dunbar challenges an array of gender stereotypes that the MoI used to police wartime femininity and female citizenship. Discussing how colour directs her interpretation of the image grounds the painting’s meaning in aesthetics, a field in which Dunbar could claim expertise. Therefore, rather than typifying what she saw at the hospital in the terms of ‘womanly caregiving’ or collective sacrifice (the terms on which the painting was later received), she instead anchors the work in personal experience – that is, a vision of the hospital space as defined by herself, a painter. Dunbar’s efforts at definition, in other words, symbolically refuse the state’s efforts to impose (highly gendered) notions of national welfare or common good, and instead position her as an active arbiter of meaning. Whether or not her intentions were consciously revisionist, she nonetheless makes inroads to reclaiming St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters from the state’s distinctly gendered information campaigns. But Dunbar’s description of the painting also points to what I argue is the fundamental conflict she faced when working for the war artist scheme. St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, in the end, reveals the disjointedness between what the WAAC expected Dunbar to represent and the difficulty she faced in actually fulfilling this responsibility. In order for her realise her contract with the WAAC, her paintings – regardless of how she conceived them – needed to embody establishment values of wartime citizenship. As such, Dunbar was obliged to see her subjects and, necessarily, herself through the same stereotyped lens of femininity as did the patriarchal establishment. This act required her to look, quite literally, at the world from a place of significant deficit. As Pam Cook has argued with regard to women in film, but which is equally apposite in the case of Dunbar’s paintings, ‘the place of woman [in these pictures] is defined as the locus of “lack”, an empty space which must be filled in the working through of man’s desire to find his own place in society’.79 Put another way, in order to maintain sentiments of national unity, which underlay total war’s requirement of collective sacrifice, Dunbar was asked, implicitly, to uphold a rigid gender order in which women’s role was to affirm male (and national) subjectivity. Women artists were consequently required to negate their own active self-making and instead mirror, through deference, male expectations of power (and women’s powerlessness). Cook argues, therefore, that myths of femininity (the caretaker, the mother, etc.) ‘relate primarily to [fulfilling] the desires [and thus subjectivities] of men’.80 And in visual narrative, ‘the role of women … can be seen to perform a similar function: to bring into play the desire of the male protagonists’.81 Dunbar was ultimately asked to see the war from a position that required her to forego self-definition and, instead, cast herself and her subjects as the passive objects of a patriarchal gaze – to be signified as ‘selfless’ or ‘empty’ in order to uphold, indeed create the concept of an ideal male soldier and citizen. Upon closer investigation of St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, however, it appears that Dunbar – beyond the meaning she herself assigned to the work – took pains to further resist prescribed wartime representations of women. This is evident in how Dunbar represents space. Very few of what initially appear to be static or contained ‘areas’ of activity actually are. In the upper left corner, the image of the nurse sterilising medical equipment overlaps the scene below, thereby occluding the image of another nurse pushing a trolley of medical supplies. Equally disruptive are scenes at the far right of the image. A nurse measuring vials of medicine overlaps Dunbar’s depiction of the plastering room in the lower right corner and, at the same time, oddly encroaches upon a scene of two nurses bathing a patient. It appears that the nurse preparing medications occupies the foreground, as the second nurse, in the background, brings a washbowl and the third un-tucks the wounded man’s bed. Yet the different coloured surfaces on which they stand, in fact, indicate that the first nurse is actually in a different space than the one occupied by the second and third figures. A similar incongruity is obvious in the image’s central scene. Per Dunbar’s account, the Red Cross nurse seen here is peering into the office to request an ink blotter.82 The folds of her skirt, overlapping the folds of the apron worn by the nurse being interviewed, suggest that these women are located in the same room. Yet the very evident line sectioning off the left third of this central rectangle – made most clear, again, by the different colour of the floor – suggests otherwise. Despite their spatial overlap, in other words, these are two entirely different scenes. With regard to organisation, however, perhaps most ambiguous – and, indeed, unruly – is Dunbar’s depiction of a charge nurse in the lower left corner. She has, ostensibly, climbed a set of stairs accompanied by the housekeeping staff behind her. Yet this nurse, while she is walking up the stairs, also appears to be simultaneously walking down them, evidenced by the back-side of the same image on the step below the figure’s upward moving front side. Perhaps the scene merely depicts two people passing one another at shift change? In her description of the painting, though, Dunbar refers to a single charge nurse.83 Furthermore, the upward and downward figures do not occupy the same space (or even spaces), thus meeting on the stairs would be impossible. The upward moving image dominates one scene with an arcade in the background and overlaps another in which a nurse tends to a burn victim. The downward moving image, however, is largely set against yet a third, indistinct setting. The number of instances where nurses simultaneously occupy different contexts demonstrates that Dunbar has presented time and space as fundamentally out of joint. Movement through space, in these contexts, is not governed or regulated by time; rather, time seems to be looping back upon itself, speeding up or slowing down. Particularly in the case of the charge nurse, time no longer defines the activity of these spaces in any conventional way. This disjuncture, at first, might be attributed to Dunbar’s association with interwar efforts to consolidate the innovations of cubism, while at the same time observing the post-1918 ‘call to order’ and, ultimately, the idiosyncrasies of personal style. Dunbar was intrigued by new approaches to traditional subject matter, as were many of her interwar contemporaries, namely Edward Bawden, John Nash, Eric Ravilious, and Stanley Spencer. Dunbar, in fact, exhibited with Spencer in 1931, and was quite familiar with his work in Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere. She followed his career and regularly attended exhibitions of his painting in London, including one at Arthur Tooth’s in 1936.84 Spencer’s enigmatic treatment of space – for example, awkwardly raking the background, as he does in the Sandham murals, Ablutions and Tea in the Hospital Ward (1927–32), or positioning the viewer at an extreme angle, seen in Reveille (1927–32) – seems to find a complement in Dunbar’s scenes of St Thomas’s Hospital. This is particularly evident in the angle of the image of nurses plastering at the bottom right of the canvas or the extreme depth of the ward at the centre of the top row. Yet I argue that Spencer does not disavow naturalism with the same degree of purpose as does Dunbar. Spencer manipulated painterly space in this way to facilitate his vision of neo-primitivism – spatial idiosyncrasies, in other words, facilitated his merging of the literal world with supernatural elements. But Dunbar’s spatial politics are more heavy-handed. As in Spencer’s murals, the individual spaces of St Thomas’s Hospital are raked and canted, producing a sometimes awkward viewing relationship. Yet beyond this, the relationships between Dunbar’s spaces are doubly confounding, with one space apparently leading to another only to be cut off or occluded. The degree of intention with which Dunbar manipulates space, then, is not merely – like Spencer’s – a question of style or a contributing theme. Rather, it is one of the painting’s primary modes of meaning-making. This obviousness, I propose, is evidence of Dunbar’s willingness to intercede upon assumed or conventional ways of seeing (i.e. those encouraged by the MoI) and instead present opportunities for viewers to create dissonant texts. But to be clear, this is not a case of Dunbar creating feminist heroines. Rather, as Cook argues, the value of the image ‘lies … in the ways in which it displaces identification with the characters and focuses our attention on the problematic position they occupy in the world’.85 This discord, in turn, encourages viewers to see ‘the contradiction between women’s desire for self-expression and culture, and the cultural processes which articulate a place for woman as spectacle’.86 In the case of St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, the constant interruption in what appears to be a linear narrative, at least initially, opens gaps into which viewers are implicitly asked to foster new meaning. Owing to this rupture of time and space, in other words, these nurses prevent viewers’ easy or passive identification with the content of the image. In so doing, those looking on are asked to contemplate what this disruption means, particularly with regard to the women depicted. Dunbar, in other words, uses the space of the hospital as a vehicle of distanciation. A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling (1945) presents a different, but equally powerful vision of women’s roles in the war effort (Fig. 4). As Andrew Lambirth argues, in much of her wartime oeuvre ‘[Dunbar’s] special achievement lies in the unsentimental depiction of ordinary women adapting to unfamiliar work’.87 This is certainly true of A 1944 Pastoral and Dunbar’s other images of the WLA. The so called ‘land girls’ that Dunbar depicted were responsible for ensuring that British farms stayed productive for the duration of the conflict. With the military call up of the first age group in October 1939, as many as 10,000 men vacated the agricultural workforce, with tens of thousands more to follow.88 So, the services provided by the WLA were vital to the war effort. To adequately prepare, most land army recruits (often inexperienced women from London and large industrial cities in the north of England) were sent on four- to six-week training programmes at agricultural institutes in order to learn how to drive and repair tractors; harvest fruit, vegetables, and grains; milk cows; and apply basic pest control, to name just a few of their expected duties.89 Because it was easiest for Dunbar to capture the spirit of the WLA during these training sessions, most of the subjects in her paintings are new recruits. She travelled to Sparsholt Farm Institute in Hampshire and East Malling Fruit Research Station in Kent to capture images of women as they prepared for work assignments all over the country. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling, 1944, oil on canvas, 91.3×121.8 cm. Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling, 1944, oil on canvas, 91.3×121.8 cm. Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK/Bridgeman Images. It is clear from the visual evidence in A 1944 Pastoral that these land girls are working in an orchard. The surrounding frieze, however, gives the viewer more detailed information about the activities represented. As Penny Dunford argues, Dunbar ‘adopted … [an] imaginative approach in which women’s hands holding secateurs and saws display [in the frieze] the various skills required by the task [of pruning]’.90 Because landscape is typically not suited to convey such detail, Dunbar uses the frieze to show the gestures and tools required to efficiently care for the trees. Yet Dunbar does not merely deny genre protocols in A 1944 Pastoral. Its formal elements likewise complicate expectation. For example, Dunbar’s emphasis on colour and line in the central panel accentuates rather than negates the painting’s underlying architecture. She very clearly highlights three distinct compositional areas. The first is the diagonal green swath of grass that runs from the foreground to the left-centre back of the image. The second and third are formed by the diagonal rows of brown trees on either side of the green band. Remarkably, Dunbar makes little or no effort to alleviate the comparatively hard edge of her chromatic planes or linear construction. The point-of-view from which the image is conceived further undermines the assumption that Dunbar’s manipulation of space is merely an issue of style. The painting’s vanishing point is located on the horizon line at the left-centre back of the image, as if the viewer is standing atop the ladder of the land girl in the immediate right foreground. Yet the strong diagonal emphasised by another ladder (carried by the woman in the red kerchief) disrupts this view. Extending in the opposite direction – to the right-centre back – these lines suggests a second vanishing point. Yet the diagonal row of trees running from the left foreground to the right centre-back abruptly cuts off the force of this vantage, thus creating a palpable tension that contradicts efforts to gloss its significance. In combination, these elements in A 1944 Pastoral – the use of a frieze in a landscape, emphasis on formal architecture, and so on – indicate that Dunbar’s primary objective was not simply to document the scene laid out before her. She also questions acts of viewing and, moreover, systems of representation themselves. This approach is also evident in Milking Practice with Artificial Udders (1940) (Fig. 5). Recording a mundane but necessary aspect of wartime work, this image of three land girls learning to milk cows at Sparsholt Farm Institute while using canvas and rubber ‘udders’ is evidence of Dunbar’s efforts to complicate straightforward representation. As in A 1944 Pastoral, she also uses here a robust linear architecture – one that serves to highlight not only the importance of her subject matter but also the creative act itself. In other words, while Dunbar presents the viewer with factual information, she does so with obvious intent to provoke an aesthetic response. I believe that Dunbar’s construction of the space in which the land girls work – the dairy wash-room – signals this intention. Here she uses the elements of painting to restrict her audience’s ability to naturally or obviously orient its gaze in relation to the activity at hand. For example, the narrow slats of the duckboard (used to prevent slipping in water pooled on the floor) in the lower left of the foreground, which is nearly at right angles with the edge of the canvas, poses a stark contrast to the size and orientation of the platform on which the land girls are seated. Its broad boards run diagonally from the right foreground into the background of the image. Given the latter, viewers assume an eye level position in relation to the image – one looking towards a vanishing point just above the third woman’s shoulders. Yet due to the former – namely, the angle of the boards in relation to the edge of the canvas and their comparatively smaller size – the viewer is instead encouraged to look left and assume a higher angle (as if looking over the platform, hence the smaller size of the boards), glancing towards a vanishing point located where the back wall of the dairy wash-room meets the floor. This dissonance is repeated in Dunbar’s depiction of the land girls themselves. While the woman in the foreground and her colleague in the middle ground are relatively proportionate, the third woman – in the background – is almost the same size as the figure next to her. This gives the impression that the upright plane created by the back wall of the room is advancing forwards, thus uncomfortably compressing the space of the background. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, 1940, oil on canvas, 61.7×76.6 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, 1940, oil on canvas, 61.7×76.6 cm. © Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Although the compositional features of Milking Practice with Artificial Udders may be seen merely as an instance of, for example, cubism’s influence, it is my argument that – given Dunbar’s approach in St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters and A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling – they are instead evidence of a personal aesthetic gambit. This is to say, by upsetting the viewer’s natural inclination to suspend disbelief and passively engage the space or figures of an image (as the MoI would hope), Dunbar challenges her viewers to look not strictly for clear visual evidence of an event, object, or feeling. Rather, the spatial awkwardness of the painting – while not as contrived as Dunbar’s efforts in St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters – encourages her audience to bear witness to her creative act and therein question her (and their own) interpretation of the scene as ‘obvious’ or ‘sincere’ in its conveyance of information. Indeed, much like the dissonance created by her nurses occupying different spaces at the same time, these tactics emphasise the need to ‘make strange’ femininity as opposed to mythologising it – they present an opportunity, in other words, to actively extend meaning beyond the image itself. Conclusion Even though ‘women [artists] fell victim to an ideological trap in which their relation to the war effort was defined less in terms of full citizenship than of what were sweepingly assumed to be their restricted interests and capabilities’, as Brian Foss suggests, this did not mean that their experiences of war were any less significant or authentic.91 If anything, I contend, they are perhaps better representative of war’s complexity. Dunbar’s work is a case in point. On the one hand, it demonstrates the many public roles women undertook as a condition of total war. On the other, it shows the complicated position that women war artists (and, indeed, women generally) occupied in terms of attempting to fulfil their roles as ‘good’ British citizens. Unlike male combatants, whose citizenship was seamlessly aligned with the values of wartime masculinity, women were expected to fulfil contradictory aims. They were obliged serve the country through the often-unconventional types of work demanded by total war, including munitions manufacture, farming, or service in the ATS, WRNS, and WAAF. Yet also as a facet of ‘good citizenship’, women were compelled to maintain pre-war notions of femininity that kept home and family at the forefront of their duties. This incongruity is clearly manifest in Dunbar’s work. Instances of skewed perspective, overlap, and occlusion, to name a few, punctuate the compositions. Quite literally, her paintings mimic women’s inability to see an unobstructed path through the maelstrom of war’s social burdens and expectations. And while perhaps contemporary viewers were not conscious of this connection, Dunbar’s techniques are at least obvious enough to encourage active viewing, contemplation, and questioning. Her unconventional combination of genres or overlying narrative frames, I argue, cannot be dismissed as merely decorative. As such, viewers are left with the potential to negotiate or question the meaning of the work, rather than accepting assumed (i.e. patriarchal) ideas of femininity promoted by the MoI. Yet the fact that her work points to the uneven gender politics of collective sacrifice has rendered Dunbar’s paintings largely invisible to postwar history. Unlike, for example, Paul Nash’s famous Defence of Albion (1942), which – through its depiction of a British aircraft sinking a German submarine off the coast of England – effortlessly draws upon (understood male) notions of patriotism, valour, and bravery, Dunbar’s work precipitates gaps in meaning-making, ones that I have argued ultimately serve to question established tropes of war. This is to say, Dunbar’s paintings challenge myths of wartime experience – namely, the prioritisation of male service – and thus they cannot be easily assimilated into mythologies of citizenship and national identity. In fact, when read in the context I have outlined above, Dunbar’s work reveals that the ideal of collective sacrifice can indeed be significantly disrupted or displaced. Dunbar’s paintings, in fact, refuse to gloss such discrepancies. Unlike mythologies of Britain’s ‘finest hour’ or the ‘Blitz Sprit’ then, these images are non-compliant with regard to wartime notions of nation. Thus they remain at the margins of history. Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Research Grants Committee (RGC) and the College Academy of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (CARSCA) at the University of Alabama. Additionally, I would like to thank Alexandra Walton and the staff at IWM London for their generous assistance, as well as the estate of Evelyn Dunbar, Manchester Art Gallery, and the anonymous readers who commented on this work for the Oxford Art Journal. Footnotes 1 The WAAC assigned artists to branches of the armed services, as well as to the Ministry of Information. See Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity (London/New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 2007), p. 25. 2 Foss, War Paint, p. 30. 3 Gill Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country (2006; reprint, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2007), p. 82. 4 Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 82. 5 See Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press 1975). 6 Juliette Pattinson, Arthur McIvor, and Linsey Robb, Men in Reserve: British Civilian Masculinities in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Emma Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers: War, the Body, and British Army Recruits, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers, Gender and the Second World War: The Lessons of War (London: Palgrave, 2017). 7 Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson, ‘“Keep calm and carry on”: The culture memory of the Second World War in Britain’ in eds. Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson, British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2. 8 Noakes and Pattinson, ‘Keep calm and carry on’, pp. 1–2. 9 Pippa Crerar, ‘Sadiq Khan: London needs the Blitz spirit to solve its housing crisis’, standard.co.uk, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/mayor/sadiq-khan-london-needs-the-blitz-spirit-to-solve-its-housing-crisis-a3234836.html accessed 15 August 2017. 10 Londoners get #KeepCalmAndCarryOn trending in show of defiant ‘Blitz spirit’, metro.co.uk, http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/05/londoners-get-keepcalmandcarryon-trending-in-show-of-defiant-blitz-spirit-6685350/ accessed 20 August 2017. 11 Gill Clarke, The Women’s Land Army: A Portrait (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2008), p. 165. 12 Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 9. 13 Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 11. 14 Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 14. 15 Christopher Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting (Olargues, France: Romarin, 2016), p. 80. 16 Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 85; and Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 20. 17 Evelyn Dunbar and Cyril Mahoney, Gardeners’ Choice (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1937), pp. 1–2. 18 Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 229. 19 Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 241. 20 Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 241. 21 Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 243. 22 Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 19. 23 Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, p. 82. 24 Foss, War Paint, p. 9. 25 Evelyn Dunbar to Percy Jowett, 20 December 1939, ART/WA/03/074, Second World War Artist Archive, Imperial War Museum London (IWM). 26 Dunbar to Jowett, ART/WA/03/074, IWM. 27 ‘Press Release’, 29 November 1939, ART/WA/01/001, Second World War Artist Archive, IWM. 28 Foss, War Paint, p. 9. 29 Kenneth Clark, The Other Half: A Self Portrait (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 22. 30 Untitled memo, ART/WA/01/001, Second World War Artist Archive, IWM. 31 Kenneth Clark, ‘The Artist in Wartime’, The Listener, 22/563 (October 1939), p. 810. 32 Clark, ‘The Artist in Wartime’, p. 810. 33 Clark, ‘The Artist in Wartime', p. 810. 34 Brian Foss, ‘Message and Medium: Government Patronage, National Identity and National Culture in Britain, 1939–45’, Oxford Art Journal, 14/2 (January 1991), p. 59. 35 Foss, ‘Message and Medium’, p. 60. 36 Clark, ‘War Artists at the National Gallery’, Studio, 123 (January 1942), p. 2. 37 He is referring to German Expressionism. Kenneth Clark, ‘The Future of Painting’, The Listener, 14/351, October 1935, p. 543. 38 Martin Hammer, ‘Kenneth Clark and the Death of Painting’, Tate Papers, 20 (Autumn 2013), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/20/kenneth-clark-and-the-death-of-painting accessed 30 May 2016. 39 Clark, ‘The Future of Painting’, p. 544. 40 Martin Hammer, ‘Kenneth Clark’, np. 41 Brian Foss’s later research, which ostensibly looks at all works commissioned (not merely those turned over to the IWM) lists approximately fifty-two women out of over 400 artists who took part in the WAAC scheme. See Foss, War Paint, pp. 196–204. 42 Brian Foss suggests that Schmolle was not a full-time salaried artist, while the IWM’s catalogue states that she was. Unfortunately, Schmolle’s files in the IWM’s Second World War Artist Archive are currently unavailable, so her role cannot be easily determined. See Foss, War Paint, p. 203; and Imperial War Museum, Concise Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture of the Second World War 1939–1946 (1956; reprint, London: Imperial War Museum, 1964), p. 245 43 Imperial War Museum, Concise Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture of the Second World War, pp. 242–6. 44 Making a Bofors breech-ring was considered, at the time, the most highly skilled job in the ordnance factory where Loftus worked. Loftus was twenty-one years of age and had no previous munitions experience when Knight made the painting. Kathleen Palmer, Women War Artists (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 49. 45 Foss, War Paint, pp. 110–11. 46 Foss, War Paint, pp. 84–5. 47 Foss emphasises, in particular, Monnington's and Richards's efforts to capture scenes of combat first-hand. See Foss, War Paint, pp. 125–7. 48 Corinna Peniston-Bird, ‘Of hockey sticks and Sten guns: British auxiliaries and their weapons in the Second World War’, Women’s History Magazine, 76 (Autumn 2014), p. 13. 49 Arthur Wauters, Eve in Overalls: Women at Work in the Second World War (1942; reprint, London: Imperial War Museum, 2017), p. 5 50 Mass Observation, War Factory: A Report (1943; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 56. 51 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 3. 52 ‘M-O Report No. 1151: The demand for Day Nurseries, March 1942’ in Wartime Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology, ed. Dorothy Sheridan (London: Heinemann, 1990), pp. 158–9. 53 Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, p. 3. 54 Léon Daudet cited in Nil Santianez, ‘Showing What Cannot Be Said: Total War and the International Project of Modernist War Writing’, The Massachusetts Review, 57/2 (Summer 2016), p. 301. 55 Ian F.W. Beckett, ‘Total War’ in Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice, eds. Colin MacInnes and G.D. Sheffield (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1988), p. 2. 56 Arthur Marwick, ‘Introduction’ in Total War and Social Change, ed. Arthur Marwick (London: MacMillan, 1988), p. xvi. Italics in original. 57 Audrey Manning cited in Joan Mant, All Muck, Now Medals: Landgirls by Landgirls (1994; reprint, Chalford, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2009), p. 112. 58 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 109. 59 This would only apply, however, to women who were not already working. By and large, therefore, this is a discussion about middle-class ideals of femininity. Nonetheless, these values, due to the panic over gender roles that arose during the war, were imposed upon working-class women – many of whom had never not worked for a living. 60 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 110. 61 Rose recounts the story of a matron at a day nursery in Tottenham who ‘reported to a Ministry of Information officer that the mothers left their children at the nursery from 7:00 in the morning until 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon’ and thus were clearly ignoring their responsibilities as mothers. Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 120. 62 Wauters, Eve in Overalls, p. 14 63 Wauters, Eve in Overalls, p. 35. 64 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 152. 65 Lucy Noakes, War and The British: Gender, Memory, and National Identity (London: I.B.Tauris, 1998), p. 2. 66 Noakes, War and The British, p. 3. 67 Lucy Noakes and Susan R. Grayzel, “Defending the Home(land): Gendering Civil Defence from the First World War to the ‘War on Terror’”, in Gender and conflict since 1914: historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, ed. Ana Carden-Coyne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 33. 68 Noakes and Grayzel, ‘Defending the Home(land)’, p. 34. 69 Noakes, War and the British, p. 3. 70 Noakes, War and the British, p. 6. 71 Noakes, War and the British, p. 6. 72 See Evelyn Dunbar, ART/WA/03/072, Second World War Artist Archive, IWM. 73 Evelyn Dunbar to E.M.O’R. Dickey, 17 March 1942, ART/WA/03/072, Second World War Artist Archive, IWM. 74 Evelyn Dunbar to Emslie Gregory, 4 January 1944, ART/WA/03/072, Second World War Artist Archive, IWM. 75 Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 124. 76 Jean Bethke Elshtain cited in Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 124. 77 Dunbar to Gregory, ART/WA/03/072, IWM. 78 Dunbar to Gregory, ART/WA/03/072, IWM. 79 Pam Cook, ‘Approaching the work of Dorothy Arzner’ in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 47. 80 Cook, ‘Approaching the work of Dorothy Arzner’, p. 47. 81 Cook, ‘Approaching the work of Dorothy Arzner’, p. 47. 82 Dunbar to Gregory, ART/WA/03/072, IWM. 83 Dunbar to Gregory, ART/WA/03/072, IWM. 84 Andrew Lambirth, ‘Evelyn Dunbar: Such a Gifted Artist’ in Evelyn Dunbar: The Lost Works, eds. Sascha Llewellyn and Paul Liss (Chichester, West Sussex: Pallant House Gallery, 2015), p. 27. 85 Cook, ‘Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner’, p. 47. Italics in original. 86 Cook, ‘Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner’, p. 49. 87 Lambirth, ‘Evelyn Dunbar: Such a Gifted Artist’, p. 22. 88 Neil R. Storey and Molly Housego, The Women’s Land Army (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2012), p. 24. 89 Storey and Housego, The Women’s Land Army, p. 29. 90 Penny Dunford, ‘Evelyn Dunbar, 1906–60’, Women Artists Slide Library Journal, 27, 1989, p. 21. 91 Foss, War Paint, p. 30. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Visualising the Home Front: Evelyn Dunbar and Wartime Citizenship
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcy018
DA - 2018-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/visualising-the-home-front-evelyn-dunbar-and-wartime-citizenship-UejKHx8RO8
SP - 341
VL - 41
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -