Artists in Uniform

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 247, 17 March 1944, Page 5

Artists in Uniform

HE exhibition of drawings and paintings by New Zealand servicemen and servicewomen opened last week in Wellington raises a question which few of us. find it easy to answer. Why have war-artists at all? Why draw and paint war-scenes when the camera can do in a splitsecond what the brush may not do in days? That, at any rate, is how the issue probably appears to the majority, and if it were as simple and as sharp as that, the answer would be as simple, too. There would be no need for war artists, and no case for them. It would be sufficient that each army or regiment, each battleship or battlesquadron, each flight or squadron of fighting planes carried a camera and a competent man to work it. But most of us see dimly that this would not be sufficient. We see that the case for artists in war is the same case precisely as that for artists in peace: the deep desire of men to see, to feel, to hear, and to understand. It is no reflection on photographers to say that the camera cannot meet this desire; cannot express the human heart and mind. It can do amazing things, more and more amazing every day, but it cannot speak, sing, laugh, or cry. The brush in the hands of a great artist can. We may not know the answer when Tolstoy or some other philosopher asks formally what art is, but we know that it is more than reproduction or representation; that it is not mechanics; that we cannot imprison it in a soundbox or capture it in any kind of sensitive substance but a human being’s brain. So when something as disturbing as war overtakes us it is not sufficient that the record should be external and mechanical. It is necessary that a record should be preserved which will teil the story in language that our children’s children will understand as well as we do; perhaps better than we do; and although it is a lucky country that in the end does get its story told in that language, since great artists are almost as rare as blue moons, it is a very foolish and _ benighted country that does not aim at such a record.