Hall of Remembrance

Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, British Minister for Information (1918)

Muirhead Bone during the Battle of the Somme (1916)

The Hall of Remembrance (Memorial Hall) was a British military art project that in 1918 the War Memorials Committee of the Ministry of Information to commemorate the First World War had been suggested. Selected paintings and sculptures by well-known artists were to be exhibited in a building still to be built . Despite numerous completed works of art, the project was never realized.

history

During the First World War, the British government developed various programs to support and promote the depiction of war events for propaganda purposes . The first project was initiated in 1916 by the War Propaganda Bureau . Artists such as Muirhead Bone , William Orpen , Paul Nash and Christopher Nevinson were commissioned as war painters to produce eyewitness pictures from the Western Front to illustrate publications . In 1917 the War Propaganda Bureau was merged with the newly established Department of Information. In the same year, the Imperial War Museum was founded, which was used to collect various devices and artifacts for documenting the war. In addition to acquiring works that were created within the scope of the Department of Information, the museum also commissioned its own artists.

In 1918 the Department of Information became the Ministry of Information. Minister of Information became Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook , a Canadian - British publisher and Conservative politician . He had developed the exhibition of a large-format series of heroic paintings for Canada as the National War Memorial and planned a corresponding British collection as a counterpart. The British War Memorials Committee was established to coordinate the arts programs. In this committee the idea of a memorial hall (Hall of Remembrance) was born , which should serve for documentation and as a memorial for the First World War. In addition to the soldiers at the front, the topic should also be air and naval forces and the civilian population ( home front ) used to support the fighting troops . Paintings were commissioned from both established and avant-garde artists of the time, including John Singer Sargent , Henry Tonks , Percy Wyndham Lewis , Christopher Nevinson , Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer .

In the center of the memorial hall, based on the triptych The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, there should be a series of four large-format paintings. The committee pursued certain political ideals with the project, at least initially. Just as the work of the Foreign Office (Foreign Office) was realigned after the war, the policy of the League of Nations to mediate, the Super-images should facilitate cooperation between the UK and its various allies illustrate in warfare.

William Orpen was offered the commission for a picture with Great Britain and its Italian ally. The content of the picture should be a war council of the allies. Orpen refused, however, because he did not want to leave the western front for a trip to Italy. Augustus John took over the portrayal of the Anglo-French cooperation in the World War, but failed because of a suitable motif for the painting. John Singer Sargent had the task of mapping the Anglo-American cooperation. To do this, he traveled to the Western Front in July 1918. He too could not find a suitable scene and instead presented the victims of a gas attack with the painting Gassed . The fourth large format picture of the Allied forces was never commissioned.

The paintings were to be housed in a building that was yet to be constructed. Muirhead Bone, war painter and key art advisor to the British War Memorials Committee, recommended that the memorial hall be built in a garden on Richmond Hill . The building was supposed to be a pavilion with a main gallery leading to a decorated oratory, in which the coming brotherhood of man could be commemorated. In such a total work of art, the large paintings with the Allied collaboration could have been aptly integrated as a theme. The executive architect was Charles Holden , who had completed a draft for the building, which, however, has not been preserved.

However, the artists made very individual contributions, so that the paintings could hardly be merged into the intended overall concept. The demand for first-hand war experiences, presented by martial artists in their personal style, could only be matched with a design principle with difficulty. Perhaps the progressive symbolism of the paintings was still too emotionally charged for a successful translation into a form that was intended to last forever. In 1919 the project fell under the purview of the Imperial War Museum and was soon abandoned. This decision was influenced by the unsecured financing of the project. The works of art that had already been completed were integrated into the art collection of the Imperial War Museum.

Completed paintings for the Hall of Remebrance (selection)

Walter Bayes : Landing Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship (1918)
George Clausen : In the Gun Factory at Woolwich Arsenal (1918)
Colin Gill : Heavy Artillery (1919)
Henry Lamb : Irish Troops in the Judaen Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment (1919)
Paul Nash : The Menin Road (1919)
Christopher Nevinson : The Harvest of Battle (1919)
John Singer Sargent : Gassed (1919)
Charles Sims : The Old German Front Line, Arras, 1916 (1919)
Stanley Spencer : Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919)
Henry Tonks : An Advanced Dressing Station in France (1918)
John Laviers Wheatley : Divers at Work Repairing a Torpedoed Ship (1918)
Harold Sandys Williamson : A German Attack on a Wet Morning, April 1918 (1918)