Art and War

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 138, 13 February 1942, Page 4

Art and War

T would be ridiculous to pretend that the i exhibition of war pictures opened last week in Wellington (and noticed at greater length on Page 10) has meaning for everybody. There are people to whom pictures (other than photographs) mean nothing; who are blind both to colour and | to form; and who would be better employed reading about war than looking at it through the eyes of the most dramatic draughtsman alive. The truth is in fact more selective than that. It would probably be safe to say that the number of people in any community who can read what an artists draws or paints is one in five or six, and in a young community like our own one in nine or ten. But that still leaves a very large number who. can be earnestly advised to see good pictures as often as they can. And the pictures at present on exhibition in Wellington are as good in their class as New Zealand has ever seen. They are of course creations of the hour, and in fifty or even twenty-five years may have fallen back among the things whose interest is largely historical. But they will interest us as long as the present war interests us, and in the meantime are as vivid a picture of it as talent, and training, and courage, and deep feeling can make them. For they are not the result primarily of orders or commissions. They are not things that men, employed to make pictures as carpenters are employed to build houses, went out and brought back. They are things that men and women, stirred to their depths by the horror and grandeur of total war, felt first and expressed afterwards. . In addition they are things that our own generation, our own fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters have felt, and are still feeling. It is our war, our struggle, our resistance, and-let us not be too squeamish to say it-our courage and self-sacrifice that have been given colour and shape. Many of the exhibits are the work of men (like our ‘own two New Zealanders) who are members of the fighting forces. The others are the work of men and women associated with the fighting forces as helpers, relatives, or friends. Perhaps therefore. we should not call them an "exhibition" at all, but borrow the Prime Minister’s words from the catalogue and call them the expression of our faith and of our strength,