Art Gallery of NSW: World War I centenary marked by exhibition

Fascinating and moving insights into the experience of war are brought to light by an Art Gallery of NSW exhibition.

Supplied Editorial

Among the many exhibitions organised to commemorate the centenary of World War I, undoubtedly the most discreet is Hidden War. It is also a kind of ­hybrid, originally conceived as an online exhibition before it was decided that a corresponding physical display should also be mounted, deep in the recesses of the Art Gallery of NSW’s research ­library and archives.

The exhibition concerns three individuals who are relatively minor figures in Australian art, and yet whose stories offer fascinating and moving insights into the experience of the war. Most of the background story is told online — through an effective combination of words, ­images and short video clips that allow us to hear the words of the individuals, read from diaries or letters of the time.

The first of these artists is Cecil Bostock (1884-1939), who was born in England and ­emigrated to NSW as a child. He was an established photographer by the time he enlisted in 1917 at the age of 29. After five months of training, he boarded a troop ship with more than 1000 fresh soldiers and they sailed to Europe via Panama. It is strange to reflect on the leisurely pace of a voyage to brutal conflict and what would be, for many, sudden and violent death.

Once in England there were more delays, and opportunities to admire the enormous power of British industry, then still at its zenith; it must have been impossible at the time to imagine the decadence that would follow 50 years later, after World War II.

There was no doubt about the justice of the cause either: we were “fighting for right, and the conquest of the Prussian Military Domination. To restore to those unfortunate peoples their liberty, and to crush the ravaging octopus of the unscrupulous Hun organism.”

Once he got the front, Bostock was struck, like so many Australians, by the class-ridden structure of the British Army, which seemed both inefficient and unfair. Far worse, though, was the horror of battle, when he finally encountered it. After the war, in London, he exhibited a photograph, apparently his only picture of the war, that powerfully evokes the dark terror of trench warfare: Day breaks — cold — shrieking — bloody, in which field guns at dawn are briefly silhouetted against the smoke of their own discharge.

Bostock was fortunate to survive the war and was demobilised in 1919. But it would be wrong to suggest that he came through unscathed: the war left him with indelible memories of horror, from coming upon a tank that had exploded incinerating all its occupants (tanks were still a novelty at the time) to walking through trenches over the decomposing bodies of the dead and listening to the agonised cries of the wounded and dying. Worst of all, as Bostock discovered, was the way these terrible experiences would have their full impact on the mind over time; under fire, and in the pressure of stress and danger, the senses were numbed and one could ignore the most dreadful sights and sounds; but later they would sink in, leaving an enduring after-effect of trauma.

The second artist covered in the exhibition is Weaver Hawkins (1893-1977), who was also born in England but came to Australia only long after the war, in 1935. He was educated at Dulwich College — whose Dulwich Picture Gallery was the first public art gallery in Britain — and attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts before enlisting in the army in 1916.

Almost immediately after being sent to the front line at the Somme in July 1916, the young man was horribly injured by a shrapnel explosion that tore open his right arm, and was struck by several bullets through his left arm and shoulder and elsewhere. He survived by lying immobile in the intense summer heat all day, surrounded by the screaming and groaning of dying men: “the sounds of their distress had synthesised into one unearthly wail”.

When darkness fell, Hawkins managed to drag himself back to British lines, crawling through the night. His wounds were so bad that the doctors would usually have amputated both arms, but in the event they managed to save them, although he had no use of his right hand and had to learn to draw and paint again with his left.

Not surprisingly, Hawkins subsequently became a pacifist and one of his best-known ­pictures, Atomic Power (1947), a surreal vision of a dystopian postwar world in which technology has visibly escaped human control, is part of Follow the Flag at the National Gallery of Victoria, reviewed here a few weeks ago. And yet Morris West, the Australian novelist who knew Hawkins in later years, described him as — unlike Bostock by all accounts — “a man at peace with himself” who “painted with a serene concentration and total spiritual involvement”.

The third individual is the least well-known, but not the least intriguing: Dora Ohlfsen (1867-1948) is one of the subjects of a new book co-written by AGNSW archivist Steven Miller, the curator of the present exhibition, with Eileen Chanin: Awakening: Four Lives in Art (Wakefield Press, 2015). She was born in Ballarat and at the age of 23 travelled to Berlin to pursue the study of the piano.

She ­developed neuritis and had to abandon the instrument, turning instead to sculpture, travelling to Russia and Italy, and eventually settled in Rome with her lifelong companion, a Russian countess.

In Rome, she continued to study sculpture and was associated with French artists at the Villa Medici, including her teacher Pierre-­Victor Dautel. Like him, she worked in the genre of the portrait medal, whose tradition went back to the great medallists of the Renaissance and was ultimately inspired by the portraits on ancient coins.

By the time of the war, Ohlfsen was long settled in Rome, but helped in the war effort — Italy was on our side in that conflict — through volunteer work in a military hospital run by the British Red Cross near her studio. As an artist, her greatest contribution was a sensitive medallion commemorating the Anzacs, in which a female personification of Australia tenderly holds the head of a dead soldier, as in a Pieta.

After the war she witnessed the fascist march on Rome in 1922 and subsequently became close to some of the leaders of the movement. In hindsight, of course, it is easy to criticise the involvement with fascism, but for all of Benito Mussolini’s buffoonery he was not Adolf ­Hitler; and it was only later in the 1930s that the full extent of the evil inherent in fascism and Nazism became generally apparent. Unlike ­Hitler, moreover, Mussolini was a supporter of modernism in art and architecture, and resisted pressure from some Nazi sympathisers to persecute so-called degenerate art.

In any case, Ohlfsen executed a portrait medal of the fantastically picturesque and eccentric Gab­riele d’Annunzio, as well as a large medallion-shaped relief of Mussolini, now seemingly lost. Her most ambitious work as a sculptor was a full-scale figure with arms upstretched as a war memorial at Formia, after the inauguration of which Mussolini declared that she was now an Italian artist.

Sadly, like some other expatriates, she ended up being no longer really Australian and yet not quite Italian either. When she and the countess apparently gassed themselves in their Rome apartment in 1948, her studio was dismantled and its contents lost or dispersed. Meanwhile, some of her medals sent to Australia seem to have been seized by Customs as foreign imports and probably scrapped, unless forgotten somewhere in a dusty bond store. She and her companion were buried in Rome’s beautiful Protestant Cemetery among so many other fascinating individuals, from Keats and Shelley to Antonio Gramsci and Martin Boyd.

Intriguing as the online exhibition is, one has to go the gallery and down to the research ­library to discover the small displays that help to bring these stories to life with the evidence of the artists’ work. Nothing can replace the poignancy of objects and pictures, with their real scale, their material form and tangibility.

In Dora’s case, for example, we can admire the Anzac medal in its proper size and the subtle effects of light on its low relief surface. There is a photograph of her as an elegant woman of about 40 years of age from 1908, and one can imagine how, with her cultivated manner and command of several languages, she could move with ease not only through Roman society, but among the French and Russians expatriate communities in Rome.

Almost two decades later, there is another photograph of her holding the plaster cast of the portrait of il Duce, while her own profile has taken on an uncanny resemblance to that of Dante Alighieri.

With Bostock, it is perhaps a surprise to find that a photographer could be such a competent draughtsman. There are very fine little sketches of life in the trenches, all done in pencil in a small pocketbook. Scale here is obviously important, since the artist’s equipment must be portable and must not add significantly to the weight of the military kit he has to carry.

Bostock’s drawings also remind us of something few people understand (and which is completely ignored by school curriculums) — namely that most of us are just as capable of learning to sketch in an efficient and workmanlike manner as of learning to write a literate and presentable essay.

We have been trained to think that the camera will do the work for us, but the discipline of looking and constructing a composition yields a far more intimate engagement with anything that a traveller will take the time to draw.

The most touching of the displays at the ­gallery is without doubt of Hawkins’ work. There are the letters home from before he saw action, filled with fluent anecdotal sketches of military life, then a rather darker series, once he was at the Somme, of the progress of a subaltern in the army — from cocky youth to death in the sixth drawing.

There is a watercolour portrait of the artist by a friend, which he has inscribed after the war, as we can see from the shaky handwriting that contrasts with the ease of his earlier script. And particularly touching is the letter he must have written with great difficulty to his father, using his left hand, only a couple of weeks after being wounded.

But the most memorable images of all are a set of little watercolours — we see too his miniature watercolour set and palette — of the countryside of Picardy in the summer of 1916. Only kilometres from the hell of the trenches, and only days from his own terrifying and agonising ordeal, these are scenes of idyllic countryside, quiet and serene under a summer sun.

Hidden War

Art Gallery of NSW. Tuesday to Saturday, until August 1.