Orwell’s War

Abstract

In Bedlam, or, rather, the building that previously housed the London asylum, now the Imperial War Museum, hangs the last official historical painting. (After the Second World War photography took over the visual documentation of history.) Its remarkable subject is the Nazi war crimes trial held at Nuremberg; its remarkable painter, sent by the War Office to provide an official record, a seventy year old woman named Laura Knight, who had first exhibited her work during the reign of Queen Victoria. Born in 1877, she acquired her reputation by creating skilful figure studies, especially of circus, ballet, and theatre performers, and she was elected to the Royal Academy in 1927 (only the second woman in this century). She published her autobiography in 1936; she published a second autobiography in 1965.¹ Knight became well-known during the war for posters from her paintings portraying scenes of people engaged in military activities — an air raid warden, a women’s barrage balloon crew, a bomber flight crew, but her response in 1946 to seeing war-ravaged Germany and hearing testimony at the warcrimes trial produced a result quite different from her previous work.

History … is the Devil’s scripture.

Lord Byron, Cain (1821)

The cinema sheet stares us in the face. The sheet is the actual fabric of Being. Our loves, our hates, our wars and battles, are no more than a phantasmagoria dancing on that fabric, themselves as unsubstantial as a dream. We may rage in our dreaming.

H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1946)