Two Artists Trace The Echoes Of War

The image of people huddled together in a dark, circular tunnel could be coming from Kyiv or Mariupol, ripped from any number of newspapers covering the war in Ukraine. The expressiveness of the image, undoubtedly the work of an experienced photographer, conveys the misery, the desperation, the desire for it all to be over, in a single snapshot. But it’s not from Ukraine. It’s from London, in 1942.

The photograph is part of a special exhibition entitled ​“Bill Brandt | Henry Moore,” running at the Yale Center for British Art now through Feb. 26. The show, curated by Martina Droth, picks up the two artists when they crossed paths in London in 1942 and follows them through their long careers after World War II. In doing so, it gets at challenging questions about the role of art in conveying human suffering, and art in the service of political causes, that has obvious reverberations straight into the present day.

Brandt and Moore ​“met during the Second World War, when both produced pictures for the British government of civilians sheltering underground during the nighttime bombings of the Blitz. Widely disseminated through news media and exhibitions, their haunting depictions of this human crisis became defining images of the war,” an accompanying statement explains. The exhibition begins with Brandt’s and Moore’s war work and ​“traces the artists’ intersecting paths and creative exchange across the postwar years.” They both found comfort in megaliths like Stonehenge, which ​“demonstrated the arresting power of sculptural forms.” They also ​“looked to forms in nature as a means of expressing subjective experience and evoking the human body.”

But in 1942, when they met, they had an assignment, from the British Ministry of Information. It fit in both with a documentarian’s mission of showing what was happening during the bombings of London and with a propagandist’s agenda of moving others — especially powers like the United States — to commit more fully to the war effort. But they remained artists, too, which makes sense; Moore was in his 40s by then and Brandt was nearly there. As ​“many Londoners sought shelter in the London Underground[,] Brandt and Moore were fascinated by the intermingling bodies on the platforms and also sought out individuals caught in moments of isolation.” Brandt’s photographs captured something of the reality. Moore was ​“ashamed to intrude on private suffering,” he said, and made his sketches from memory. The artists, the accompanying note reads, ​“present the people as stoic and united, which helped to create the myth of a classless society.”

Except not quite. As the show points out, both also documented the lives of coal miners, which showed who it was that doing some of the dirtiest work to power the war effort. Brandt had photographed coal miners in 1937, showing the way they became covered in the coal they were extracting. He gained enough trust, apparently, to follow them into their homes, where family members helped them painstakingly wash it off. These photographs were published in the 1940s, when Moore was assigned to draw the workers in the mines. The idea for the Ministry of Information was to ​“emphasize the importance of coal to the war effort.” What Moore and Brandt captured was the harrowing nature of the miners’ work, which comes across as about as dangerous and dirty as sheltering from bombs in an underground train platform. For the people of London, those conditions were an acute but temporary hardship. For the miners, it was their livelihood and a long-term fact of their lives. Brandt also captured Orthodox Jews studying in a group, a man sleeping in a coffin in a crypt. In subject and form, both artists had visions that eclipsed their assignments.

The show clarifies that Brandt and Moore had a long acquaintance after World War II, as Brandt took pictures of Moore and his sculptural work for the next three decades. Both artists also pursued their own crafts and careers. The second half of the show, which is dedicated to this, lacks the dramatic urgency of the staging of the artists’ wartime work. This is good news for the artists themselves; it is gratifying to know that both of them could, on some level, put the war behind them. Brandt’s photographs take on a playful surrealism as they use angle and proximity to create pleasant disorientation in the viewer, even as they’re just extreme closeups of people on seasides. Meanwhile, Moore’s sculptural work was utterly abstract, an examination of form and material. 

Those looking for narratives about PTSD, or of two artists tightly bound together by their intense wartime experience, will come away empty-handed. It is to curator Martina Droth’s credit that she didn’t shoehorn the story into these (sadly) familiar patterns. The portraits that emerge of Brandt and Moore are of two men who were artists before the war began, served their country, and then returned to their art. It’s possible to imagine that the postwar images are the kind of work they would have made all along if World War II had never happened. The postwar work reflects the artists’ own interests; the war work was the aberration, an assignment from elsewhere.

The high quality of both artists’ wartime work invites comparisons to the images coming out of Ukraine for anyone who has been following the news there. Many images are startlingly similar in content — of people seeking refuge underground, huddled into piles, then people walking in weary wonder through half-destroyed streets dusty with rubble from bombings — even if the war now isn’t being captured by professional artists, but by soldiers and civilians using their phone cameras. The artists’ points of view and methods have changed. The power remains.

At the same time, Brandt’s and Moore’s work answers a question people sometimes ask about the point of art and artmaking in times of calamity. The question, valid on its surface, rests on an assumption that art is ultimately a form of escapism, or a kind of luxury. And some art is. But in their adaptability to their circumstances, and in taking on their government assignments, Brandt and Moore showed what the point of art could be: to capture and document, and in the same breath, communicate the urgency, the need for help. Commissioned as it was by the Ministry of Information, it was propaganda almost by definition. But on a deeper level, Brandt and Moore managed to convey compassion in the face of suffering. Their art got past the politics of their assignment to deliver a very human message, and they followed where it led long after the war was over.

“Bill Brandt | Henry Moore” runs at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through Feb. 26. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information. Admission is free.