Caroline Miggiani: The Official Coloursof War, Recording WWII in Malta.
Kite Group, 2018

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 keeping the home front abreast 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 artworks that depicted images of wartime Malta. One should immediately state that these artworks were produced in accordance with strict criteria where the regulatory instruments of censorship and State propaganda had a strong bearing on the ultimate work of art.

This book is the culmination of over a decade of research conducted by Caroline Miggiani, first in the form of her undergraduate dissertation, titled Picturing the War – Malta seen through 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.

Miggiani’s work is ground-breaking in many respects, for she is the first researcher to appraise and analyse in detail a corpus of wartime paintings of Malta at the collection of the Imperial War Museum, London.

She delved into the production of officially-commissioned art that featured Malta during World War II – a depiction of Malta at war as visualised 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 gesture in the last category was the architect and architectural historian Quentin Hughes, who produced a series of local landscape scenes in watercolour.

The culmination of over a decade of research

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 of all the 10 British artists engaged by the WAAC to work in Malta was Cole. His 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’.

Maltese Women with Newly Born Baby in their Underground Home in the Ditch, Kospikwa [sic], 1943.Maltese Women with Newly Born Baby in their Underground Home in the Ditch, Kospikwa [sic], 1943.

Although Cole was only in Malta for a six-month period, from March to November 1943, he produced several artworks that focussed on a range of thematics, such as the Grand Harbour as a theatre of war and peace, air-raids, underground shelters, bomb damage, homeland defence as well as portraiture.

Miggiani makes a compelling argument that Cole, acting upon the instructions and advice of the then Governor Lord Gort and his deputy, David Callender-Campbell, refrained from painting scenes which realistically de­picted the full extent of the sufferings of the local inhabitants and the widespread destruction of the urban fabric, particularly in Valletta and the Three Cities.

Instead, Cole’s reports were specifically directed towards recording the valiant contribution of the Maltese civilians to the war effort and how they were, against all odds, stoically coping with the enemy’s aerial bombardments.

The author delves deeply and assiduously in various official sources, from the National Ar­chives at Kew, to the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, and contemporary newspapers.

Besides these primary sources, Miggiani also had access to private sources, of which the most revealing is the personal correspondence that Cole had with his wife Brenda while he was stationed in Malta.

These private letters, in conjunction with official correspondence, throw wide open the workings of the British State institutions and the constraints within which the State-commissioned war artist had to operate.

A fine example of this dual interpretation between a sanitised form of art and the real conditions prevailing on the ground is that relating to Cole’s painting Malta, Shelters Praying during an Air Raid, whereas in his letter to his wife, he laments that “for two days now, I’ve been deep in shelters among the poor devils and brave souls who live underground. They have no homes except this. ...It’s cold and wet down there and ideal for disease and vermin. ...Scabies ran through the shelters like an epidemic – who can wonder.” In his artwork all traces of such dire deprivation that he narrated are whitewashed into an innocent rendition of faith and positive perseverance.

Miggiani’s work provides us with an invaluable contribution on wartime art in Malta. It raises various intriguing questions as to how institutional censorship and the dictates of war-propaganda moulded the artist’s approach. It also raises issues that transcend the specific time frame of World War II to contemporary issues of how art, politics and the media can all conspire to condition the way we perceive ‘reality’.

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