The Official Colouurs of War – Recording Malta a in WWll
In the Preface to this book Prof. Conrad Thake writes: “It has been claimed that ‘no single event in the history of mankind was more documented through art while it happened than World War II. Throughout the course of the war commercial art, in addition to radio reports and newsreels, remained a constant informational resource to the public by informing the home front of the evolving events through posters, newspaper cartoons, and comic books. Malta under British colonial rule was no exception and various British artists were specifically engaged and commissioned to produce art works that depicted images of wartime Malta. One should immediately state that these art works were produced in accordance to strict criteria where the regulatory instruments of censorship and state propaganda had a strong bearing on the ultimate work of art.
The book is the culmination of over a decade of research conducted by Caroline Miggiani, first in the form of her undergraduate dissertation entitled ‘Picturing the War – Malta seen though the Eyes of the Official British War Artists 1939-1941’ and then her Master’s degree dissertation entitled ‘Drawing on the War; Leslie Cole, Malta and the Art of Visual Persuasion in 1943.’ Both dissertations, which I had the pleasure to supervise, were submitted as part of the degree requirements within then Department of History of Art, Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta.
Miggiani’s work was groundbreaking in many respects for she was the first researcher to appraise and analyse in detail a corpus of wartime paintings of Malta within the collection of the Imperial War Museum, London. She delved into the production of officially commissioned art which featured Malta during the Second
World War – a depiction of Malta at war as depicted through the ‘eyes’ of British artists. The specially-appointed War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) headed by the eminent British art historian Kenneth Clark, engaged nine British artists and one sculptor to draw and paint wartime scenes in Malta.
Besides these officially-engaged artists there were other British soldier and amateur artists who unofficially and acting upon their own initiative produced artworks of wartime Malta. The most prominent figure in the last category was the architect and architectural historian, Quentin Hughes who produced a series of local landscape scenes in watercolour.
This book does not limit itself to being a mere pictorial gazetteer of Malta’s wartime paintings. It is far more ambitious in scope as it explores the intricate and complex relationship between the production of art and the exigencies of state propaganda; the constraints imposed on the artist and the forms of genteel censorship that were exerted upon Leslie Cole and ultimately moulded the final artwork. As Miggiani argues, official war artists were mainly appointed for propaganda purposes but the recording of the war in visual terms was undertaken to preserve its memory.
The leading and certainly, the most prolific artist of all the ten British artists engaged b the WAAC to work in Malta was Leslie Cole. Cole’s brief was to document the ‘extraordinary dramatic and historic scenes’ manifested on the island as official correspondence had clarified that ‘photographs don’t really do it adequately.
Although Cole was only in Malta for a six-month period, from March to November 1943, he produced several artworks that focused on a range of thematics such as the Grand Harbour as a theatre of war and peace, air