[MSN] Canada's Defence Department has lost many of its war-art paintings, and simply ditched other works that depict the military in a less than heroic light, says a new book. Paul Gessell reports.

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Art missing in action
Canada's Defence Department has lost many of its war-art paintings, and
simply ditched other works that depict the military in a less than heroic
light, says a new book. Paul Gessell reports.
  
Paul Gessell 
The Ottawa Citizen 


Saturday, July 29, 2006


Scores of paintings about Canada's military have gone missing from the
Department of National Defence since the Second World War.

The good news is that some of the artworks were of dubious quality. And then
there were the works just too controversial for the department to keep.

Essentially, when it comes to military art since 1945, the Defence
Department has bombed, according to a new book by Canada's leading authority
on war art. The book, Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada's War
Art (University of Calgary Press) is by Laura Brandon, the curator of war
art at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

Brandon's provocations against the Defence Department begin even before one
opens the book. The cover of the book is a detail from a charcoal-and-chalk
pastel portrait of Col. Serge Labbe, a commander of the now-defunct Canadian
Airborne Regiment in Somalia in 1992-93. This is a portrait the Defence
Department would have liked to disappear, and not because of any esthetic
failings.

Labbe was vilified publicly because of a scandal following the death of a
Somali civilian teenager, Shidane Arone, who was tortured by Airborne
members. News of the scandal did not break until after the portrait had been
created by Canadian artist Allan Harding MacKay in 1993. MacKay had spent
time in Somalia under the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Programme
(CAFCAP) with the Canadian troops, but created the portrait after returning
to Canada.

When the scandal erupted, Defence refused to accept the Labbe portrait into
its collection. Labbe was too controversial. Instead, the portrait was
offered to the War Museum's collection. It was accepted and was part of an
exhibition at the old war museum on Sussex Drive in 1998.

The story of the Labbe portrait is contained in Brandon's book in a chapter
titled Tangled Web: DND, The War Museum and CAFCAP, 1968-95. CAFCAP was
started in 1968 so civilian artists could create paintings and drawings
related to Canada's military exploits. When the program ended in 1995, only
about 300 works survived in the Defence Department's collection. Some others
were acquired by the war museum or remained the property of the artists
themselves to keep or sell as they wished.

"The quality of the work in the CAFCAP collection is uneven," Brandon
writes. "Few of the artists have achieved widespread recognition in Canada.
Only rarely do pieces come close to the quality of the earlier programs.
Selection has consistently responded to DND's image of itself."

In other words, Defence did not want paintings that revealed unflattering
aspects of military life. Hence the rejection of the Labbe portrait.

But, at least, the Labbe portrait was not lost, stolen or trashed. The
Defence Department "lost" 150 works of Second World War art by 1946, a year
after the war ended, Brandon writes. The government then asked the National
Gallery to take over the war art collection, which later moved to the
Canadian War Museum. But the Defence Department continued to commission
artists to paint postwar military activities.

"DND's reputation as a custodian of art suffered further when a commission
by the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1954 to the former official war artist
Robert Hyndman -- to paint No. 1 Air Division in England -- resulted, as a
result of poor loans tracking, in the loss of 30 out of 65 works."

Hyndman was a Second World War official war artist. He continues to teach at
the Ottawa School of Art and lives in Chelsea, just north of Gatineau.

"It was a chronic problem," Brandon said at a recent lunch interview while
discussing the Defence Department's lost art. "These huge collections were
not terribly well documented, especially after the immediate aftermath of
the Second World War. I have a binder in my office of the works that have
disappeared."

"Maybe two have turned up in 14 years I've been at the museum."

The quality of military art after the Second World War went downhill, says
Brandon, because of diminished input from the National Gallery in the choice
of artists.

Many official war artists were big names, or about to be big names, when
selected for the two world wars. The First World War involved such Group of
Seven members as A.Y. Jackson and Fred Varley. The Second World War had Alex
Colville and Abe Bayefsky.

After the Second World War, the talent often bypassed the military or,
depending upon how you view the situation, the military bypassed the talent.
Anyway, cutting-edge artists after 1945 were most interested in abstract art
and other non-traditional expressions rather than the old-fashioned
representational art preferred by Defence. Generals tend to want modern
weapons, not modern art.

War artists from the two world wars had a status not accorded peacetime
military artists. The artists from the two world wars were paid to be war
artists. That is no longer the situation with the current Defence Department
art program that was revived in 2001 after a six-year hiatus. Now, artists
receive no pay and have no guarantees the department or war museum will buy
any of their work.

Traditionally, the War Museum has not been as squeamish as Defence when
acquiring and retaining art that paints a less than pretty picture. Art from
Somalia, Afghanistan and other recent theatres of war involving Canadian
troops have made their way into the museum collection. Example: The portrait
of Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the United Nations
mission that was unable to stop the genocidal civil strife in Rwanda in
1994. This painting by Gertrude Kearns references the mental anguish and
suicidal impulses experienced by Dallaire, now a Liberal senator.

The War Museum has also been exhibiting on a permanent basis, much to the
chagrin of some veterans, portraits by Kearns of Canadian soldiers in the
Somalia debacle. As well, Kearns has done recent work in Afghanistan with
the blessing of Defence, despite the artist's penchant for tackling tough
issues military brass might prefer to forget.

The Defence Department art battles are only a small part of Brandon's book,
which traces the history of war art in Canada since the First World War and
discusses the ways we view it, both as art and as historical documents.
Despite a massive collection of war art that is the envy of countries around
the world, Canada did not build a proper home to exhibit its war art
collection until the current Canada War Museum was opened last year on
LeBreton Flats.

Perhaps the most spectacular war art exhibition in Canada opened in 2000 at
the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

The war museum at that time was still in its old, cramped quarters on Sussex
Drive. The show was called Canvas of War: Masterpieces from the Canadian War
Museum. It included everything from long-forgotten First World War murals,
to the original plaster models for the large sculptures on the Vimy Memorial
in France, to surprisingly modernistic paintings of Second World War scenes.

"Organizers of the tour for Canvas of War assumed that it would be a
difficult show to sell," Brandon writes.

In fact, the exhibition attracted half a million visitors and travelled to
nine Canadian cities. Brandon attributed this success to the fact the
exhibition came just a few years after the country marked the 50th
anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The visitors came to see
their history and themselves in the paintings.

The success of Canvas of War is likely what caused Defence to reinstitute
the military art program in 2001, Brandon speculates. The war museum,
including its art curator, help guide this latest program.

"The program's future remains increasingly secure," Brandon concludes. "Both
the Canadian War Museum and the Department of National Defence believe that
art programs should be part of the recording of military life and
experience. Who disseminates the results is not so cut and dried."

There are no easy answers, it appears, when it comes to war or to war art.

C The Ottawa Citizen 2006