100 years of Canadian artists capturing the realities of war

This excerpt is adapted from War Art in Canada: A Critical History, the latest edition in the Art Canada Institute's Canadian Online Art Book Project.

Throughout history, there have always been creative responses to conflicts between different peoples and rival countries. Canada has an extraordinary history of war art — one that encompasses an enormous range of dynamic and, at times, surprising works.

War art can be made by anyone and in virtually any material. It embraces sculpture, graphics, film, photography, and digital media as well as craft, textiles, and carving. But the best-known Canadian visual records of war come from four official war art programs: the First World War Canadian War Memorials Fund, the Second World War Canadian War Records, the Cold War Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program, and the current Canadian Forces Artists Program. Together, these programs have brought artists and soldiers together, resulting in the creation of astonishing works of art that bear witness to victory, loss, service, and sacrifice.

Established with a goal of recording the nation's achievements, the Canadian War Memorials Fund employed over 100 artists and led to the creation of almost a thousand artworks, including several by painters sent to the battlefront. For What? is one of the most iconic, because in it Frederick Varley brought together the horrific scenes he had witnessed since his appointment as an official war artist earlier in 1918 — rows of crosses, mutilated bodies on swampy battlefields of churned mud, and dead horses' bones as shells whistled by above.

Writing to his wife about his work that year, Varley reflected, "A photograph would be horrible of the same subjects because it would be deadly literal — I have escaped that and attained something worse — hopelessness, and to get it I have had to live it."

When war broke out again in 1939, artists lobbied for another official art program, believing that, in a "total" war, they had an important role to play in communicating information and documenting shared events. The Canadian War Records employed 32 official war artists who were divided among the three services — army, navy, and air force — and served in all the Western theatres of war, including Britain, Italy, Northwest Europe, and the Atlantic Ocean.

The artists' assignments usually saw them embedded with designated army units, ships, and air force squadrons, and they were determined to work in the midst of combat. For example, in preparation for the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, Orville Fisher innovatively strapped tiny waterproof pads of paper to his wrist. After racing up the beach from his landing craft, he made rapid sketches of the battle unfolding around him using perfectly dry materials.

Fisher was one of several artists for whom sketches and memories became the foundation for larger paintings. Jack Nichols saw a man drown while he was on board HMCS Iroquois during the attempted evacuation of Brest, France, by the Germans in August 1944. The image seared itself on his memory, and he completed Drowning Sailor in Ottawa more than a year later, in 1946. In the painting, a terrified German mariner clutches uselessly at the water as he is pulled down into its depths: he represents fear in the face of death. Describing this painting in 1998, Nichols commented, "When you are drowning, you lose your nationality, don't you?"

Not all war art is violent, however. The only female official war artist was Molly Lamb Bobak, and she travelled overseas only after the war ended in May 1945. She created dozens of works representing her peers in the Canada Women's Army Corps, including a mesmerizing portrait of a Black Canadian woman working behind an army canteen counter. Sergeant Eva May Roy of the Canadian Women's Army Corps was one of a small number of Black enlistees in this service. She was in domestic service when she enlisted in the Canadian Army in December 1944; seven months later, she was sent overseas to England and then to Amersfoort in the Netherlands, where she likely met Bobak at the canteen. Very few Canadian soldiers of colour were ever depicted as part of the Canadian War Records program, though there were thousands enlisted — making Bobak's painting an exceptionally important tribute.

After 1945, Canada rebranded itself as a peacekeeping nation, and United Nations–sponsored missions dominated Canada's military and diplomatic activities for the next four decades. Artists continued to record the activities of the Canadian Armed Forces, though these works are very different in subject matter from those of earlier war artists. For instance, Peacekeepers, a painting by Haitian Canadian Marc-Bernard Philippe, depicts blue-helmeted peacekeepers interacting with Haitian children.

In recent years, several artists have created works in response to the war in Afghanistan. What They Gave is a personal response by Gertrude Kearns to the traumatic events she witnessed in 2006 in Kandahar as an embedded artist with the Canadian Army. A suicide bomber blew up the vehicle carrying Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry, with whom she had just had breakfast. Berry was killed at the scene, and three Canadian soldiers were severely injured, one of them losing a leg. Kearns's unprecedented access to the medical facilities to which the wounded were taken inspired this painting, created in Toronto nearly nine months later.

Today, war art investigates how conflict and war shape and reshape the country, looking back through our history and honouring those serving in the present. Visual and performance artist Adrian Stimson, a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Ma`sum Ghar in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2010, an experience that led him to paint portraits of Indigenous soldiers. He later looked back to history — to the battlefields Frederick Varley and his peers had painted — and created a performance reflecting on history and service.

Trench commemorates the approximately 4,000 Indigenous soldiers who served in the First World War. Guided by historic manuals and working from dawn to dusk over five days, Stimson dug a six-foot-deep trench in the U-shape pattern — which is also the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) symbol of war — and shored it up with 250 sandbags. His performance references Niitsitapi cultural practices that put the body under duress to enable healing. Simson hoped his toil would draw attention to the incompleteness of Indigenous First World War history in order to help make it whole and to honour it. In doing so, he has taken up a legacy shared by war artists in Canada for over a hundred years and redefined it for a new generation.