For the Record: Memory and the Second World War Paintings of Carl Schaefer, RCAF (original) (raw)
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2017
The present thesis aims at providing an insight on the extent to which official British war paintings were capable of producing a pictorial record of Britain during World War Two. Through a qualitative research approach and a comprehensive analysis of selected paintings, this dissertation will point out the strengths and weaknesses of using art as a tool of reportage. The focus will be mainly centralized on three painters: Paul Nash, Eric Kennington and Graham Sutherland who signed contracts as official artists for the War Artists Advisory Committee. A comprehensive analysis will allude to both the propagandist as well as the informative task these paintings carried on. The analysis of selected paintings will be the backbone of this dissertation. Iconology will be applied to read artworks and assess their historical value. This study will also involve a comparison between artists in terms of style, backgrounds and experiences. Similarities as well as disparities will be pointed out ...
Remembering the Second World War
Remembering the Second World War, 2017
In this volume editor Patrick Finney has assembled a dozen essays on various aspects of memory and commemoration of the Second World War. The individual essays are consistently of high quality, and they are remarkably free of jargon. 1 The essay that has uses the most jargon, Eva Kingsepp's essay on videogames as remembrance of the Second World War, falls closer to media studies than to history, but its arguments are clear and succinct. Finney goes beyond assembling disparate essays to identify common themes, including a shift to emotional and affective domains of memory, but in particular, he suggests a unifying thread of the decentering of the nation-state. He breaks down the collection into sections looking at memory from the standpoint of national, transnational and local perspectives, along with a fourth section on practices of memory. In fact, though, the essays more than anything else demonstrate the centrality of national experience to practices of memory. The first section ('National Memory Cultures?') naturally focuses on particular national perspectives. Margaret Atack explores the peculiarities of French memory, finding that French silence about Vichy is a myth, and in fact, collaboration and then French treatment of the Jews was a recurring element in postwar France, applied to the particular political circumstances of the day. Bill Niven traces Germany's very specific evolution from a moralistic tone of the first postwar decades to a more mature and nuanced 'post-didactic' memory that has room for German suffering. Edward Vickers discusses the very different uses of war in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan (the Republic of China, ROC) and Hong Kong. The mainland narrative is of national steadfastness in the face of suffering imposed by Japan; Taiwanese memory, by contrast, stresses suffering at the hands of the Nationalist Guomindang (GMD), not the Japanese. Postwar Hong Kong emphasized anti-communism, and so collaboration with the Japanese was seen in a much more positive light than in the PRC. The second section of the volume (on 'transnational transactions') intends to move away from national narratives, but the interesting essays therein instead emphasize the particularity of specific national experiences. Patrick Finney looks at the movement of people throughout the British Empire during the war, and rightly notes how that imperial aspects of the war and the Far East in particular, were marginalized in British memory. That said, his transnational approach ends up underlining how war experience was used to build and consolidate particular national histories, whether a Canadian narrative of sacrifice, South Asian construction of national pasts, or Burmese celebration of an anti-Japanese uprising. Tatiana Zhurzhenko's discussion of the Soviet war memorial in Vienna shows how it was essentially irrelevant to Austrian memory, but has instead become a site for resurgent Russian nationalism among Austria's Russian-speaking diaspora. Caroline Norma's work on South Korean and Japanese feminist responses to comfort women is most successful in being truly transnational, tracing how South Korean and Japanese campaigns against Japanese sex tourism to South Korea grew into cooperation in publicizing the plight of comfort women. The local essays in part three ('local and sectional memory') also reaffirm the centrality of national traditions. Gerald Figal finds a deep grassroots anti-war sentiment dominating the culture of war
Canadian Military History, 2017
Recent acquisitions at the Canadian War Museum are considered in relation to the radical innovations of soldier-artists who endured the somatic conditions of the First World War trenches, privileging materiality and psychic reality over visual perception. Barbara Steinman and Norman Takeuchi bring the past into the present through the indexical presence of black and white photographic fragments and the emotive presentation of lost objects as signifiers of the desires of the absent. Scott Waters and Mary Kavanagh evoke dread and the contingency of death through anamorphic distortion and blinding luminosity. Like the suggestive surfaces of the Museum itself, these works unsettle us to make palpable the psychic toll of war. T Canadian War MuseuM has recently made a number of intriguing acquisitions to the art collection that introduce artistic strategies not typical of the collection overall. These works by Barbara Steinman, Norman Takeuchi, Scott Waters and Mary Kavanagh are diverse i...
Corps identity: the letters, diaries and memoirs of Canada's great war soldiers
2008
The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the role published diaries, letters and memoirs of Canadian soldiers played in shaping, consolidating, and preserving the "myth of the [Great] war experience" in Canada. In Death So Noble, Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, Jonathan Vance argues that, during and shortly after the First World War, Canadian politicians, artists and historians created this myth to soften the horrible realities of the trenches. To justify and explain the deaths of more than 60,000 Canadians, the war was most often portrayed as a positive, if costly, experience that led a colony to full nationhood. At the same time, Canadian soldiers were described as backwoodsmen; natural soldiers who evinced a strong disdain for army discipline. -- Although Vance's interpretation of the Great War legacy in Canada has been well received, the role that Canadian soldiers played in the creation of this legacy has yet to be examined. One approach to this en...
2020
Throughout the First World War 4, 507 photographs were produced by the Canadian War Records Office. These photographs were used as propaganda to promote victory overseas and were popularized in exhibitions, magazines, books, and other wartime ephemera. Produced simultaneously to this official record was private soldiers' photography which is comprised of albums, scrapbooks, personal snapshots, and soldiers' portraits and communicate a narrative that is both similar and disparate from the official record. This thesis examines the ways in which private and official photographs were formed and how they were used to communicate soldiers' wartime experience. It argues that the official photographs are not just a piece of propaganda, but rather that of the photographer's and the private photographs are an extension of soldiers' culture and art, as well as an extension of twentieth-century photographic culture.