“What to paint was a problem for the war artist . . . The old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone forever; the impressionist technique I had adopted in painting was now ineffective, for visual impressions were not enough.”
-A.Y. Jackson, Official war artist, First World War, and future member of the Group of Seven.

A.Y. Jackson’s words are a fitting metaphor for the problems raised by an art exhibit like Canvas of War, currently on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It is clear that artists, working under conditions that they had never before experienced (just as their combatant comrades were living in conditions that they had never before imagined), struggled to find visual expressions for what they witnessed. The curators of the exhibit, both those that chose these seventy-two works and those here in Vancouver that created the exhibit as it currently exists, faced similar difficulties. Largely, if these seventy-two are an indication, the artists found answers to their questions, or at least a method of expressing the questions themselves to their audience. The exhibitors, tasked with representing these works in an intelligible manner in light of the current social and political context, were less successful. The exhibit is an exercise in hedging one’s political bets, as the curators clearly constructed an exhibit that would pull at Canadian heartstrings but actually offer no real condemnation of the wars it depicts, and thus of the wars of today.

As the exhibit has been put together and toured, Canada has been involved increasingly in world conflict, including as an aggressor nation in places like Afghanistan and most recently Haiti. The public response to the war in Iraq, a war that Canada supported with its work in Afghanistan, demonstrates that the Canadian public is perhaps now more politicized about international conflict than at any time since Vietnam. Thus, this exhibit enters a dangerous environment, one in which navigating popular opinion of war is especially difficult. Added to this is the pressure exerted by the touring exhibit’s raison d’être, that is the establishment of a new national War Museum at taxpayers’ expense. The curators are therefore left with a politicized, primarily anti-war environment in which to agitate for more money to support a new War museum. The compromise that this forces on the curators is clear throughout the exhibit.

The most obvious aspect of the compromise is in the selection of topics. With one exception, only works from World Wars I and II are exhibited. Partially, this is due to aesthetic concerns. Also, however, these are the ‘safe’ wars. While at the time these two wars were debated extensively, and protested vigorously (especially in BC and Quebec), they have since passed into a national memory in which a consensus has been reached about their heroic significance. World War II, only now fading from living memory in Canada, has been characterized as ‘the Good War’ in which there was clearly a ‘righteous’ (the Allies) and ‘evil’ (Germany and Japan) side. Atrocities like the Holocaust have blotted Allied war crimes like the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo out of the collective record, and the war remains a deep pool of symbolism for current imperialists trying to justify their invasions of other countries. World War I, ‘the War to end all Wars,’ has also been coloured by this brush. While in its immediate aftermath it was often regarded as the example of imperial excess that it was, eighty years later it has moved into the role of heroic prelude, sort of the “Episode One” to World War II’s “A New Hope.” The result of all of this narrative-construction is a sort of canonization of these wars as reasonable, acceptable, and right. In popular discussion, the possibility that these wars were as problematic as current excursions in the Middle East or elsewhere is just not entertained. Instead the victims of the wars are victims of a tragedy, not a crime, and the massive destruction of Europe (as well as Asia and North Africa, although both campaigns are totally absent from this exhibit) is the unfortunate side effect of a titanic battle for righteousness and freedom.

Clearly, this exhibit operates in such a way as to ensure that it echoes this sense of tragedy, without emphasizing it to the point of disrupting the ‘justice’ of these wars. The First World War portion of the exhibit is characterized by paintings of the monotony of the war, training fields in Canada and hospitals in the field but not in combat. The work is characterized by a routine melancholy that disqualifies any possibility of celebration of the conflict; still, none of the work condemns it either. There are a few exceptions in the World War I gallery that break this trend, and fulfill the expected, indeed needed, role of documents of the violence of the war. Even these works are arranged in a way that disrupts their power, however, and marginalizes their role in the exhibit. Although Eric Kennington’s stunning piece The Conquerers is mixed into the exhibit, the rest of the truly anti-war pieces are contained in the last room of the WWI portion. This room opens with Armistice Day, Munitions Centre, by Frederick Etchells, a painting displaying the jubilant crowd of munitions workers in Canada celebrating the armistice.

The rest of the room is filled with the work of Fred Varley (Some Day the People Will Return, For What? And German Prisoners) and Maurice Cullen (Dead Horse and Rider in a Trench and The Cambrai Road). Both of the painters are clearly devastated by the violence they have witnessed, and their agitated work highlights the death of soldiers and civilians, but also the destruction of the villages and the land of France. These works appear as afterthoughts, though, chronologically and figuratively outside of the war. It is as if the destruction was a tragic side effect of the conflict, as opposed to the central theme and defining Truth of the war. By separating them in this way, the exhibit ensures its audience will experience a sense of the destruction caused by conflict, but marginalizes this feeling as best it can from the war itself.

A similar effect occurs in the Second World War portion of the exhibit. Conflict is certainly not glorified, but it is anaesthetized: planes are shot down, boats sink but few men can be seen dying. A few exceptions once again stand out, but the majority of them appear in the final room yet again. One stunning exception is Jack Nichols’ Drowning Sailor, in which a figure, clearly already dead even as he struggles for life, literally claws at the water in an attempt to prevent his submersion. The painting is captioned with a quote from Nichols, explaining that all nationality disappears as a combatant drowns. The tragedy of the incident is emphasized – the soldiers are not to blame for the death of the sailor, nor are generals or politicians, as all nationality disappears, and all are equal when faced with the primal force of the sea, and by extension death in general. This is undoubtedly the greater metaphysical truth, but it elides the reasons that any sailor found themselves drowning in the Atlantic or the Pacific in the early 1940s. In the final gallery, images assure the audience of this same dynamic. The exhibit closes with Alex Colville’s haunting image Bodies in a Grave, Belsen of Holocaust victims from the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. The tragedy is nearly tangible, the painting is so powerful. But once again, context is lacking, and the exhibit offers no help. There is no explanation for this barbarity, no explanation of how Canada came to be involved in the conflict, nor of how Bergen-Belsen had come into existence. Perhaps this is too much to ask of an exhibit such as this.

In the contemporary setting, though, as Canadian soldiers once again face fire, this context is crucial. Otherwise, the powerful artwork which seems to encourage all of us to prevent the repetition of such violence is left stranded, never able to address the reasons for these crimes in the first place. Sadly, as A.Y. Jackson predicted, “visual impressions” are not enough.

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