Pallant House: Conscience and Conflict

Merlyn Evans, Distressed Area (1938)

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was an internal conflict; but it was also a crucible in which the world forces of left and right met each other, and thus a battleground for competing international ideologies. In England, we are familiar chiefly with the literary responses - Auden, Laurie Lee, George Orwell. Last year's exhibition Conscience and Conflict showed us the waves sent out through the art world by what now feels like a dry run of WWII.


The closeness of art, society and politics is made clear in a photograph in the vestibule, 'Artists painting a hoarding in Bouverie Street, London, 17 Feb 1939' (John F Stephenson). They are painting the slogan,  'Send Food to Spain'. Bouverie Street was one of the 22 hoardings made available by London County Council. Soon it was defaced by Sir Oswald Moseley's blackshirts.


During the Spanish Civil War, artists found themselves committed to a public cause, and thus to a publicly available artistic language. Art was also stepping in where politicians feared to tread: in 1936, Britain and 24 other countries signed a non-intervention agreement, terrified of the conflict escalating. France and Britain maintained an arms embargo, and the Republicans could only buy weapons from Soviet Russia, while the Fascists were supplied by Fascist Italy and Germany. Many organisations were founded to send aid to Spain, and we get a poignant sense of grass-roots activity in Clive Branson's documentary paintings: Noreen and Rosa (1940), studying a volume from the Left Book Club; Daily Worker (1939) showing a newspaper seller in Battersea and Selling the Daily Worker outside Projectile Engineering Works (1937), the point of the last being the attempt to create a feeling of solidarity among the factory workers for their Spanish comrades. Henry Rayner's drypoint etchings, There is no Peace, There is no Shelter make a more direct appeal to human compassion.


The war coincided with the Surrealist movement, which had an important exhibition in June 1936, on the eve of the conflict. One might have thought that the art of the unconscious would have little to say to, or about, the political. On the contrary, there was an intense and precise engagement. Papier-mâché masks at an anti-Chamberlain protest mark surrealism's presence on the streets. A surrealist pamphlet provides an acute analysis of the situation: 'We know that capital will not respond to socialist democracy with only constitutional means; we know that violence is not only the weapon of the proletariat; Britain's policy is implicitly pro-fascist, it freely allows Portugal to arm fascists'. Perhaps the most iconic picture today to come from this engagement is Miró's 'Aidez Espagne'. This was originally intended as the image for a one-franc postage stamp, but the French government didn't issue it. Surrealism captured, too, the monstrous and desolate, in Edward Burra's Medusa, or the faceless nuns of John Middleton's works, drawing on Jung's female archetype and at the same time pointing the finger at the Catholic Church's complicity in fascist atrocities. This theme is addressed in other works, such as André Masson's La Messe a Pampelune (1937) and John Banting's Absolution: Spanish Civil War (1937). Beyond the surrealist ambit, John Armstrong's tempera paintings of bombed-out buildings in scorched plains are more powerful for being drenched in Mediterranean colours: the light associated in art with gorgeousness and the relish for life here illuminates only a splintered emptiness.


Not all artists were sympathetic to the Republicans: the modernist Francis Rose (1909-79) was strongly pro-Nationalist. His satirical The Reds are Really Not Bad Sorts, or the Tastes of War (1936) bristles with contempt for what he must have seen as a communist menace. For Rose, at least, the right side won, and the exhibition ends with a reminder of the misery of war: Clive Branson's Hut Against Trees, Prison Camp in Spain (1938) has tremendous further impact when we learn from the label that he himself was imprisoned in Spain. Many ghosts hover over the gallery, among them John Cornford, dead at 21, and Julian Bell, volunteer ambulance driver, brother of Quentin, daughter of Vanessa, who suffered a breakdown on hearing the news of his death. Or Felicia Browne (1904-36), artist and communist, the first British volunteer to die in action, whose sketchbooks were brought back from the Front and stand as testament to the high emotions and high ideals recorded in this wonderful and revealing exhibition.