Canada has had a program of documenting its war efforts ever since 1916 when Lord Beaverbrook created the Canadian War Memorials Fund. Photographers and filmmakers were tasked with documenting Canadian efforts on the frontlines, in the rear echelons, and on the homefront. Importantly, Canadian artists were also brought on to create their artistic impressions of the war effort. Through both world wars, some of Canada’s most distinguished artists served in the armed forces as “Official War Artists,” or more informally as civilian war artists. In the First World War Canadian artists such as Fred Varley and AY Jackson held military commissions, while civilians such as Arthur Lismer and Henrietta Mabel May documented the war effort at home. This practice continued in the Second World War, where a young Alex Colville was plucked from his role as an infantry officer to become an Official War Artist. The majority of works created under this program during both world wars is now held as the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art at the Canadian War Museum.
In May 1944 Colville was assigned to London, England, as an official war artist. Colville was first stationed with the Royal Army Service Corps in Yorkshire where he made sketches of the men and equipment being marshalled to send to France in support of the D-Day invasion. He sailed to the Mediterranean aboard the HMCS Prince David, a landing ship carrying troops for the allied landing in Southern France, and in October 1944 he joined the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, the famed Canadian “Water Rats” of the battle of the Scheldt Estuary. As part of his service, he was present at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, witnessing firsthand the extremes of inhumanity to which Nazi ideology had led Germany. Bearing Witness to War includes works by Colville from each of these theatres, including his most famous works form the war, Infantry Near Nijmegen, Holland and Bodies in a Grave, Belsen.
Nova Scotia painter Nancy Stevens was a student of Colville’s and fellow war artist Lawren P. Harris at Mount Allison University. She was able to attend university on a scholarship from the Canadian government as a “child of the war dead.” When she was five, her father went overseas to fight the Second World War. Like almost 45,000 of his countrymen, he never came home. Decades later, to mark its 70th anniversary, Stevens created ten paintings based on the Canadian campaign in Italy’s Liri Valley.
Artist, curator and educator Allan Harding Mackay was a civilian war artist for the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program in Somalia in 1993 and in Afghanistan in 2002. In 2002 he was confined to the airport at Kandahar, it being too dangerous for a civilian outside of the main base. His chosen medium of hand-altered photography served well for the limited ability he had to document the activities of Canadian service personnel. The camera allowed for near-instant impressions, while the return to the images with paint, wax and other media, allowed him the time to process the images he had taken, and to create works that resonate with his impressions and his feelings about the conflicts he was recording.
Bearing Witness to War looks at war from three distinct views: from that of a serving soldier, in Alex Colville, documenting what was happening as it was happening; Nancy Stevens’ mature reflections of a child who lost a parent to war, the events of more than six decades past brought to life through her research and imagination; and the impressions of civilian Allan Harding Mackay amidst a modern war machine, alive to the danger yet insulated from the frontlines.
