Battle lines | 17 September 2011

The introductory room to Women War Artists at the Imperial War Museum confronts the visitor with a large canvas of a women’s canteen in 1918 by the little-known Flora Lion. It’s an honest painting, workmanlike but dull. Hanging to its left is Laura Knight’s famous ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring’ (1943), and in between is a monitor playing a wonderful film clip of Dame Laura and Ruby going to see the painting at the Royal Academy. Ruby, overcome by emotion, kisses Dame Laura; Dame Laura bobs about, smoking furiously. Of course, Laura Knight on film and in paint grabs the attention; Flora Lion is inevitably sidelined. And that sets the tenor of the show, which is rather a shame, as there is work of real interest among the more obscure names.

There are also low art, illustrational things, such as a couple of slightly caricatural drawings, of a woman window-dresser and a bus conductress, by Victoria Monkhouse. The second room is dominated by Laura Knight’s large painting of the Nuremberg trial, with the court scene interestingly elided with the devastated city, offering two kinds of reality for the spectator to juggle with and consider.

Down the left wall are four large conté drawings of the Falklands War by Linda Kitson, while Mary Kessell (close friend of Sir Kenneth Clark) contributes surprisingly powerful studies in sanguine of the ruins of Hamburg. There’s a wall of rather good drawings by Olive Mudie-Cooke, a new discovery for me, including a particularly impressive one of a burnt-out tank rearing up over the trenches. In the next room there are two unusual and intriguing watercolours of a Forces kitchen and canteen in 1942/3 by Erlund Hudson (another discovery), who died in March aged 99.