Open Secret at the Imperial War Museum, London.
Something old,
something new – redefining the boundaries of the Art Collection
20 May 2004 to 31 Oct 2004
© Victor Sloan
Most of the paintings, drawings, prints and
photographs in this exhibition have been acquired by the Department
of Art since the millennium. Some items were acquired in the
previous two decades, such as the large poster prints by Michael
Peel, which came into the collection over a number of years from the
mid-1980s. Almost all of it is being exhibited at the Imperial War
Museum for the first time.
The group of works from the First and Second World
Wars, such as the drypoint of Piccadilly Circus in 1918 by Sir
Muirhead Bone, and the two drawings by John Aldridge, were all
produced independently of official wartime commissions. `Unofficial
war art’, which has been a feature of the Department’s acquisition
policy for many years, reveals a personal and spontaneous response
to wartime phenomena that co-existed with more formal commissioned
art. In the Second World War, Kenneth Clark’s War Artists Advisory
Committee regularly purchased individual works from artists and
public exhibitions such as those organised by the Allied Artists
Association.
Painting, drawing and other `hand-made’ media
continue to be a subtle and effective means of conveying states of
mind. The images of stealth bombers and missiles by Peter Kalkhof,
Jack Milroy and Colin Self can be seen as a symbolic means of coming
to terms with objects that provoke feelings of anxiety and fear.
Darren Almond, Alison Turnbull, Glenys Johnson and Paul Ryan examine
architectural structures – a floor plan of an underground bomb
factory designed by Albert Speer, houses built for military target
practice, the concentration camp at Auschwitz – in images that
distil the history of destruction.
Contemporary photography forms an increasingly important part of the
art collection, and the work by Angus Boulton and Ed Whittaker shows
how effectively it documents forgetting and neglect. It is also an
endlessly flexible medium, as demonstrated by Victor Sloan,
Paul Seawright and Frauke Eigen; their work is an eye-witness
response in the classic sense – reflective and personal rather than
journalistic.
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