“Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings”

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, on the grounds of Washington University, has an excellent exhibit of “The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill” which will close on Feb. 14. In November, I had a post about the exhibit, noting that it was sponsored by the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Mo., site of Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946.

The companion book for the exhibition, Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and Paintings by David Coombs with Minnie Churchill, is something of an anomaly. At the exhibition, you can buy it for $71.95. On Amazon, it is available through third-party sellers, with prices starting at 353 for a used copy and $611 for a new copy. The book originally published in 2011 and, I believe, “adopted” for the exhibition.

It’s a coffee table kind of book – large, rather lavish, filled with color reproductions of virtually all of Churchill’s known paintings and a few photographs of some that are currently lost.

Churchill began to paint in 1915, when he was 40 years old. He had a penchant for landscapes of almost all kinds – beaches, valleys, meadows, the Kentish countryside around his home, Chartwell, and mountains, but he was by no means limited to landscapes. He also painted still lifes, buildings, homes, rooms, and people. He managed to work himself into his paintings (such as the one at the top – the figure at the furthest right). He even wrote a book about painting – Painting as Pastime.

To see Churchill’s paintings together gives a sense of what the man accomplished as a “pastime.” He wasn’t “just a painter;” he was a good painter, an artist, certainly influenced by Impressionism but with his own unique style.

The exhibit at the Kemper is a wonderful show; as good as the book it, it’s no substitute for seeing the real paintings up close and with explanations of many of them as to their context, little known facts, and the historical circumstances surrounding them.

Painting: Beach at Walmer, oil on canvas by Sir Winston Churchill (1938); private collection.

The Art of World War I

We were at an art exhibition entitled “Out of Chaos,” sponsored by the Jewish Museum of Art in London at the Courtauld Gallery. It wasn’t a huge show, some six smallish rooms, but if it lacked in quantity it more than made up for it in depth and quality. The idea behind the exhibition was to show 100 years of Jewish art in London.

A number of works in the exhibit caught my eye; one was a self-portrait by Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). I was familiar with his work as a poet; he’s one of the so-called “World War I poets” who produced some wonderful poetry during the war. I wasn’t as familiar with his art. Eventually, I was able to get my hands on Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and His Circle, an exhibition book for a show of the same name held in London and Leeds in 2008. And I learned that Rosenberg was not only one of the World War I poets, but also a member of a group of artists known as the “Whitechapel Boys.” (Another was artist David Bomberg, who was represented in the “Our of Chaos” exhibition with several paintings.)

At that point, several exhibitions began to converge – the First World War Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London; this “Out of Chaos” exhibit at the Courtauld, and then one we saw just recently, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis: “Images of War, War of Images.”

It’s no surprise that there are a number of exhibitions, artistic and historical, about World War I; we are about right in the middle of the war’s centenary. What’s fascinating is that there were essentially three kinds of art that developed through and because of the war: “official art,” like that commissioned by the British military of artists like Paul Nash; paintings and drawings that artists who served in the war did, often to help them make sense of what happened; and the art used for what we can only call wartime propaganda.

Like the poets telling their stories in theor poetry, the World War I artists told their stories. Both poets and artists tried to make sense of a war that began with cavalry riding horses and quickly became a murderous assault by weapons technology in the stalemated trenches.

An excellent introduction to the “official art” and the “artists’ art” is Art from the First World War by Richard Slocombe and published by the Imperial War Museum in London. A small paperback (costing $20 in the U.S. but less than that if you happen to visit the museum in London), it includes some of the major works which resulted from the war, including some of the desolate battlefield scnes by Paul Nash, horrific landscapes by john Nash, and works by C.R.W. Nevinson, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, and several other artists.

Whitechapel at War, noted above, focuses on a relatively small group of artists. It includes three essays on Isaac Rosenberg, the Whitechapel group collectively, one on how their works began to become known through print, and a final chapter a “Whitechapel Girl,” Clare Binberg, who was associated with the group but did not share their military experience.

A third good resource is Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I, edited by Gordon Hughes and Philipp Blom, which is the exhibition book for “Images of War, War of Images” show at the Kemper Museum. While the first two books focus on British artists, this one is more expansive, encompassing artists and art from all of the primary nations at war during the conflict – British, French, German, Russian, Italian, American and others. Like the exhibition itself, it goes beyond paintings and includes recruiting and war bind posters, magazine illustrations, photographs, and even how soldiers decorated their helmets. The essays (and illustrations) are packed with information on how the war was visually “told,” both during and after the conflict.

The “Images of War, War of Images” exhibition is in its final days at the Kemper – it closes Jan. 4. If you’re in or visiting the St. Louis area, it is well worth your time. 

Related:

“Some Corner of a Foreign Field” by James Bentley

Paul Cornish’s “The First World War Galleries”

Good Poems Can Come in Small Packages

Jane Potter’s “Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life”

The World War I Poets in the War

The Most Famous Poem of World War I

The Poetry of World War I

Brian Gardner’s “Up to the Line of Death: The War Poets 1914-1918”

The Poems the Soldiers Read in World War I

Top painting: “Gassed” by John Singer Sargent, oil on canvas (1919); Imperial War Museum, London.

Images of War, War of Images

Yesterday, I described our visit to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, to see the exhibition of “The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill.” Directly across the hall from the Churchill paintings is another exhibit, this one on World War I: “Images of War, War of Images.”

Two wonderful exhibits at one time in the same museum – and they’re both free.

Last year in London, we visited the World War I Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, a brilliant display of the history of the war. (I reviewed the book describing the galleries this past July.) The museum also had an exhibit of the art of World War I, which we missed for lack of time, but you can get a taste of the exhibit by reading Art from the First World War by Richard Slocombe.

What the exhibition in London included but did not go into great depth on was the role of images, art and propaganda in World War I.  That is the focus of the show at the Kemper Museum.

Art wasn’t the only creative activity that went to war. Magazines, newspapers, recruiting posters, war bond drive information and much else played significant roles. When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed George Creel to lead the Committee on Public Information, often referred to as the Creel Committee, to keep up morale at home and helping people understand the task ahead. Today we would call it a committee for propaganda.

The United States was a Johnny-come-lately to the war propaganda effort; Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Italy had already been long involved in efforts to depict their opponents as fools at best and monsters at worst. The Germans didn’t help themselves with the unprovoked invasion of neutral Belgium and the death and destruction that followed, including the famed medieval library at Louvain.

Yet it wasn’t all propaganda. People went into the war with an understanding of their world, that life was getting better and better, the idea of progress as a major principle in economic, social and cultural life, and that cavalry still had an important role to play in warfare. They confronted the technology-based slaughter of both the western and the eastern fronts, and warfare involving civilians in a massively new way. Louvain was destroyed, but even London experienced bombing by German dirigibles. People, and especially soldiers, came out of the war profoundly changed. And that included the artists who went to war.

This is what the Kemper exhibition is about, and it is filled with paintings, posters, drawings, diaries, magazines and newspapers, short films made after the war, and even artifacts like soldiers’ self-decorated helmets. An accompanying book, Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I, edited by Gordon Hughes and Philipp Blom, provides insight into what the exhibition includes. The book is published by Getty Publications, and The Getty Museum has provided a considerable number of the works included in the exhibition.

The Kemper has done itself proud with these two exhibitions. The only issue we had was parking – it’s easier on weekends on the famously overcrowded Washington University campus but we did manage to find a metered spot adjacent to the museum.

But if you have the opportunity, see them both (and they’re free).

Illustration: “I Have You, My Captain. You Won’t Fall,” color lithograph by Paul Iribe, 1917; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill

In 2006, a new art museum building was opened in St. Louis – the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, on the grounds of Washington University in St. Louis. As it turns out, it’s not really a new museum; it originally opened in 1881 as the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. And it’s one of the oldest teaching museums in the United States.

Last week, we visited to see its latest exhibition, “The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill,” co-sponsored by the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri (home of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech and with a first-class museum on Churchill in World War II). Timothy Riley, paintings curator for the National Churchill Museum, curated this exhibition at the Kemper.

In some ways, this felt like old home week.

Kemper Art Museum

One of the people instrumental in bringing the exhibition together was Richard Mahoney, the CEO for whom I wrote speeches for seven years. He was more than a fan of Churchill; he was a collector of Churchill memorabilia and had read virtually everything about the British statesman. One thing you may not know about speechwriters is that, if they’re worth their pay, they will read what their speakers read. Wall Street Journal, check. Business Week, check. The History of the English Speaking Peoples (four volumes)? The History of World War II (six volumes)? And does anyone know how many speeches Churchill gave?

It was a lot of work. Things went fine until the CEO started reading Charles Dickens, starting with The Pickwick Papers. I ended up buying the 21-volume set of Charles Dickens' works published by Oxford University Press. And read Peter Ackroyd’s 1000+page biography of Dickens. On the cool side, I was about the only person I know who ever got paid for reading the works and biography of Dickens in the office. (The vice chairman at the time, for whom I also wrote speeches, was a major fan of Mark Twain. Yes, I’ve had an unusual career, even for a communications person.)

At one time, four paintings by Churchill hung in our company’s conference center. At least three of those are in this exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum (I’m uncertain about the fourth). Many of these paintings have a history, and the exhibition tells those histories. One, of Marrakech, was painted while Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met at Casablanca; it was the only painting he did during World War II and he gave it to Roosevelt. Another, of the surf at Miami Beach, was painted in the six weeks in 1946 Churchill stayed there while preparing the Iron Curtain speech. Still another was submitted under another name to an amateur competition and won first proze, although one judge dissented and said no amateur could have painted it.

It’s a wonderful exhibition, with works loaned by the Getty Museum, the Hallmark Art Collection in Kansas City, the Chartwell Art Collection, and numerous private collections. Churchill painting about 550 paintings, and about 50 are included at the Kemper show. It runs through Feb. 14. For sale in the Kemper shop is Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings by David Coombs with Minnie Churchill; the price is $55 (although, oddly enough, Amazon sells it for considerably more.)

Right across the hallway from the Churchill exhibition was one on World War I; more on that tomorrow.

Illustration: Boats at Cannes Harbor, oil on canvas by Sir Winston Churchill (1937); National Churchill Museum, Fulton, Mo.