- Barrage Balloons and Breech Rings: Artists on the Home Front
- Henry Moore: Drawing in the Dark
1. During the second World War, Sir Kenneth Clark, the then Director of the National Gallery, established the War Artists Advisory Commission with the aim of employing artists to record Britain’s part in the war for posterity. The scheme ran for six years and supported around 400 artists. Some saw action in Europe, Africa and the Far East, but most recorded the effects of war on the home front in industry, including John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Laura Knight.
2. In contrast to Henry Moore's popular drawings depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz, his drawings as a war artist of Britain's underground army, the miners of Wheldale colliery, are less well-known. From Moore's return to his childhood home and the challenges associated with 'drawing in the dark', to the influence of the project on the sculptor’s later work, this talk, based on Chris Owen’s book, Drawing in the Dark: Henry Moore’s Coalmining Commission, will provide new insights into Moore’s life and artistic process. It will also reveal the back-breaking labour endured by nearly 3/4 million miners, as they made their vital contribution to Britain’s war effort.
Chris Owen is an art historian specialising in British art since 1750. He is a freelance lecturer and Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University. After studying History of Art at Cambridge University, Chris embarked on a career lecturing in art schools. He was appointed Assistant Principal at Leeds College of Art and Assistant Dean at the University of Derby before becoming Head of Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University from 2011 until retirement in 2019. His book: Drawing in the Dark: Henry Moore’s Coalmining Commission was published by Lund Humphries in 2022. He is currently working on a new book about the sculptor, John Flaxman.
Painting: Take Off (1943) by Laura Knight