Henry Tonks was a war
artist of the highest degree. He did not do landscapes.
He was a Professor. Maybe a little old fashioned.
Henry Tonks said when he taught art at the Slade “I will resign if this talk of
cubism continues”
He had taught many
artists such as Paul Nash at the Slade School of Art but he did not
teach him enough. Paul
Nash's paintings have become an important visual reference for us
when thinking about the conflict, including this powerful,
apocalyptic vision of nature violated by war. Nash
was commissioned by a government scheme, in 1916, which initially
aimed to illustrate publications with drawings to supplement the
limited photographs available. Nash had served briefly in the Ypres
Salient in 1917 before being invalided out. When he returned to
Belgium as an artist, he was shocked by the devastation wrought by
the battle of Passchendaele. All of the commissioned artists’ work
had to be passed by the official censor. While depictions of dead
British soldiers were unacceptable, this devastated landscape managed
to pass unchallenged due to its symbolic, rather than literal,
content. Nash’s startling, new, modernist vision would bring him
huge acclaim in the art world.
However,
Colonel A N Lee, the censor, could not foresee this. He wrote: “I
cannot help thinking that Nash is having a huge joke with the British
public, and lovers of ‘art’ in particular. Is he?”
While Paul Nash was
basking in glory, stylising suffering as official war artist, Henry
Tonks was recording the reality of war on a very intimate scale.
Tonks too old for front
line action volunteered as an orderly.
Dr Harold Gilles had
helped set up a pioneering new hospital specialising in facial
surgery.
When Gilles, who was the head surgeon realised that Tonks
was working there his instincts to record the remodelling or
rebuilding of a face were assisted when he asked Tonks to help him.
He
needed colour and Tonks with his background as a surgeon and then as
a demonstrator of anatomy understood what Gilles needed.
He was in the right
place at the right time to do his bit for the war.
Reconstructive surgery
at that time was largely at its infancy and mostly made up of just
clinching flesh, and pulling it over to close up a wound and
stitching it into a part of the face that would help it to resemble
what was there before.
Tonks sat with forlorn
soldiers who had given up hope, whose lives were dead inside.
Some would never
recover from the wounds they had endured.
When we say the scars of
war, he recorded them in all their disfigured glory.
They were humans
who had given themselves in the cause of freedom.
With dignity Tonks made
a portrait in soft pastel of Walter Ashworth of the Bradford Pals who
injured on the first day of the first world war.
In the first few
minutes the Pals were cut to ribbons.
He also made a diagram
of where to stitch and then he painted him again after the
reconstruction that gave him what was described as 'a pleasant
smile'.
Art as modernism in a
modern age. He had to use the skills of Leonardo Da Vinci for a new
age, after all he was qualified.
He said about his
portraits “These are the only works of which I am not ashamed.”
He would help in
rescuing these wretched creatures lives, of abandoned luck and malicious evil.
Artistic compassion was
required.
Imagine the sitter
seeing his image and knowing how he looked.
The sharing of this
ordeal will have been hard.
It is so difficult
today to look at these images, even in reproduction through the
internet or on TV.
But look you must,
because in these images we see why war is wrong and those heroic
stories of heroism in the face of fire fall heavy down to earth when
you witness what Henry saw.
Fire in the face.
No matter how hard I
look I turn away from the reality. I try again and still my mind wont
let me focus, it is too real, I turn away again and again I try to
look.
It seems as if you
don't want to, so as not to defy a lifetime of watching war films
made, rightly to testify to those brave sods who went over the top. But this is reality.
But, we the world
turned its back on the truth and it is only now a hundred years later
that we can palate the truth of Henry Tonks images of soldiers brave,
those without palates, for a lot of them had been blown to
smithereens.
Those poor people who would not only be reminded, after the war, of that indiscriminate trajectory missile
that scarred them.
These faces would
remind every one else of the horrors of war and so they would be
saddled with carrying the guilt of others lives cut short.
They say when you are
staring into the abyss you find yourself, but these poor people look
like lost souls, like ghostly images from the deep. I have spared the reader the full horror.
Or are they just the
depths of our of our own spirit?
They make you realise
that those who were lucky, were sometimes dead. They did not have to
live the horrors for the rest of their life. They were free of the
stigma of half a decade of mass murder on an industrial scale in
those Flanders Fields.
You don't see this sort
of stuff in films such as Where Eagles Dare or Force 10 from Navaronne.
We do not see the blood
of war like the trench reality would have been.
You cant smell the
stench of rotting flesh.
Even though we know
Spielberg can do such a brilliant job of convincing us, of showing
bullets flying through the air and hollowing the sounds war makes, he
would never dare show this. The censors would not let him. But look
we must.
When the Americans
chased Saddam Hussains Iraqi army out of Kuwait and bombed the hell
out of them on the road back to Basra they left many of them as
charred skeletons torn of flesh. The images captured by
brave war correspondents, of this stench of death, were banned from
being shown to the American public.
They might ruin the
breakfasts of a nation and spoil their day.
There is no redemption
for the victors of war, for they write history. And as with the
Vietnamese murder zone a picture can tell a story.
PR can save a
President who should be shot or be on trial for war crimes.
For these works by
Henry Tonks show the side of war that I want to forget, but I must
look at.
I must learn to stare
and so I should challenge Presidents and Prime Ministers and Saudi
Princes in pure white stainless linen with blood on their hands.
Tony Blair should be
made to look at these pictures of the aftermath of war.
Those who survive who
will be forever locked into a dream like sequence of recurring
nightmare night after night, cast into perpetual recollection for
perpetuity, waking up every night screaming need compassion.
So not only is the
suffering of war written on the faces of those Tonks Tommy soldier boys
they were branded with them for life, or what was left of that life.
How could these boys be
taken and destroyed in the flowering of their youth.
And while I am writing
this article I see an image by Francis Bacon.
It looks like one of
Tonks Tommies with a twisted face, yet this is of his lover.
It seems that he is
copying Henry Tonks style?.......but as a way to make himself look
clever, to show his prowess as a painter. He has captured Tonks
images.
It may be that he has
just stumbled across a style.
Bacon grew up during
the blitz it is well recorded. He saw bad times.
But did Bacon ever see
these images of real despair by Henry Tonks?
Bacon was brave enough
to use the twisted and tortured souls of his portraiture and turn it
into modernism.
Why can we look at
Bacon's work with ease?
No matter how we tell
ourselves its haunting we flinch to turn away from images of poor
Tommy boys crying inside, bleeding from within.
Is this because Bacon
was capturing emotion and not recording the tragedy of grief?
Who could except the
compassionate respectful and watchful eye of Henry Tonks?
Who was the better
artist?
For to Tonks I tip my
hat, to a man who cared, not for himself, because the pastels and
watercolours he did was not gallery work, that would hang for all to
see on pristine white walls. But show us our guilt of futile pride
and slaughter.
Tonks work has been hidden from public view for almost
a hundred years. From a public who would be upset, who would not turn
up if they were displayed in a gallery. Maybe they should not be
displayed on public view.
They were much more
important than that.
