Imperial War Museum · Lambeth
Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art
As bombs fell on 1940s London, artists responded. Over 45 paintings and drawings, with photographs, film and oral histories, capture a city both familiar and strange.
In Matvyn Wright's A Parachute Bomb (1941), the Thames glows pink, a barge sits at anchor and the night sky looks lit by fireworks. The title tells you what is actually coming down. Kenneth Clark, who ran the official war artists' scheme, put it bluntly: "bomb damage is in itself picturesque."
More than 45 paintings and drawings from IWM's own collection, most commissioned by Clark's committee, hang in four sections: Travel, Thames, Street and Shelter. You walk in past a short film that opens on Tower Bridge, then through dimly lit rooms where Londoners' recorded memories play between the pictures, beside letters, toys and bomb-damaged crockery. Peter Popham, reviewing it for The Past, calls what these artists made a record with "no parallel in any of the other combatant countries."
Come for the home front rather than battles: tube shelters, docks, burning churches, a clothing exchange for bombed-out families. It's free, on Level 3 in the Special Exhibition space, and IWM suggests an hour. It closes on 1 November.
لا تفوّت
A Parachute Bomb, Matvyn Wright (1941)
Look for the rosy Thames and the barge at anchor under a sky that reads as fireworks until you check the title.
The Haberdashers' Hall, 8th May 1945, Eliot Hodgkin
The bombed-out remains of a City livery hall, painted in close detail with the flowers and 'bombweed' pushing up through the rubble.
The Houses of Parliament on Fire, May 1941, Leonard Rosoman
Painted by a serving fireman, it shows Parliament burning on the last night of the Blitz.
A Bermondsey Rest Centre, Mabel Hutchinson
A boy and a nurse at the centre of a shelter for bombed-out families, a scene Popham found so vivid "you can almost smell the powdered eggs".
WVS Clothing Exchange, Evelyn Gibbs (1943)
One of the exchange points set up to clothe families who had lost their homes, in the Shelter section's run of paintings by women artists.
مناسب لـ
- ساعة أو أقل
- ثقافة بتكلفة قليلة
- عشّاق التفاصيل
نحو 60 دقيقة
مع الأطفال
IWM says the show suits adults and children. A free 'stamper' trail and activity sheet has kids spotting details in the paintings, photographs and objects.
