Exile and Return – A group exhibition commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bailiwick of Guernsey from Nazi occupation. Part 3. Landscape painting, war and displacement.
While making the landscape paintings for the Exile and Return exhibition, once again I returned to the question of why landscape painting is the genre of painting that I have always been drawn to make. It started as a child moving from felt-tipped animals and plants, to the island coastline and meadows. The illustrative work of art foundation course progressed into thinking about landscape in a more conceptual way at art college when landscape and painting itself was deeply unfashionable. More recently, since taking up painting again during the initial Covid lockdown, landscape seemed the most natural place to resume that seductive relationship with the materiality of paint. Drawing outside was also an escape from the confines of my home, when isolating alone often felt stifling and claustrophobic.
Representing the natural world, both grounds me and takes me to other imagined worlds. The sense of place that a location holds seems tied so essentially to our identity and history. It rekindles the sense of awe in the beauty and mystery of nature that children possess - the enchantment of a shiny stag beetle’s iridescence, or the tendrils of a sea anemone opening and closing as the tide washes across. For some reason, this fascination often seems to dissipate when the thrill of the social world, music and fashion sparks into being.
My personal internalised landscape was formulated long before spoken language: dark verdant valleys overhung with tunnelling trees lining the steep hill to the beach below my home; giant rhubarb plants like pink stemmed fairy trees trailing the dank banks of the stream; and whispering cliffsides sheer above the bay, holding the secrets of the millennia close. I vividly remember the scent of bruised stinking onion leaves, eucalyptus pods and the sharp ozone tang of drying vraic on the pebbly shelves above the shoreline; colours and smell almost interchangeable in my four-year-old mind.
Making work that depicts a place or space is meaningful because the connective tissue binding it together draws together narratives, folklore, rituals and ways of life that are centred deep in the individual and collective memory and the psyche. Locally, the smugglers’ pathways zigzagging between fields, used by privateers; Tchîco, the dog of the dead, haunting the Boundary-stone of the Saumarez at St Martin; and the backbreaking labour of the men and women who toiled in greenhouses, raised crab pots and herded their cows slowly along the narrow lanes are all intrinsically bound to my own internalised landscape.
Landscape painting is a depository for emotions and states of being - love and desire, loss and remembrance, belonging and otherness. The process of making landscape work allows us to examine our societies in various ways across multiple disciplines such as the natural sciences, economics and politics, and through the discourse of painting, visual art and the humanities. It also allows us to consider humankind’s impact on the land and the wider ecology - so vital at this time of climate emergency.
Using landscape as a way to consider the impact of warfare and displacement is a part of this discourse. While war and unrest is never absent in the world, it seems particularly unstable at the moment, with the atrocities occurring in Gaza, Ukraine and the ethnic tensions, chronic insecurity, and worsening humanitarian crises in many other countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen. Film footage of dead children, the weaponisation of humanitarian aid and the sight of far right extremism on the streets of many countries in western Europe and worldwide add to a sense of despair and fury.
European countries such as Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland and France have introduced hard-line agendas on immigration. The withdrawal of rights and freedoms mount as the political mainstream accept such ideas into their fold in order to win votes. This has involved the media playing a key role by platforming, hyping and legitimising far-right ideas and decrying the issue of immigration as a major public concern, even when in terms of their day-to-day lives, it rarely has significant personal bearing on citizens’ individual lives. Keir Starmer’s recent ‘island of strangers’ speech was a disgraceful move to the right in its rejection of multi-culturalism and its rhetoric of taking back control of our borders.
The worldwide cohort of the super-rich have been fuelling support of far-right groups on either side of the Atlantic, causing economic mayhem, while creating misery for women and minority groups, especially those who are already marginalised and disenfranchised through structural inequalities such as poverty and racism. The opportunism of the global free market and unfettered capitalism that Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, exploded the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. She examined how unfettered capitalism advanced by Milton Friedman and endorsed by Thatcher and Reagan, was "disaster capitalism" which allowed political actors to use the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to promote privatisation and removal of state regulation, welfare and justice. This economic “shock therapy” favoured corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens while they are too overwhelmed to respond or resist. This provided a platform to create a myriad of new opportunities for profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state. Recently, Klein has written recently powerfully about the rise of End of Times Fascism .
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These issues were washing around in my unfocused brain like a foetid pond water while I sat drawing the looming fortifications in the fading spring daylight. War, conflict and the resulting trauma on the natural world seems inextricably bound to the plundering and exploitation of natural resources that global capitalism fuels. It seems that art is often a way to make sense of the loss and destruction of war, but it also has a place in trying to represent or develop conversations and discourse around how to counter the fundamentally destructive, prejudiced and short-sighted and greed-fuelled impulses that are destroying the planet.
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Artists who have explored themes of conflict, war and displacement are too many to mention here, and so I will focus on a few of those that tie in to WWII. While studying fine art and art history, I was always drawn to the strange, eerie landscapes of Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash; the soft melancholy line and markmaking of Edward Ardizzone; and Doris Zinkeisen’s powerful “The Burning Down of Huts in Camp 1, Belsen Concentration Camp”, along with her evocative recording of post war relief, rehabilitation and repatriation of prisoners of war and civilian internees.
Another artist whose work has always captivated me is the dark melancholic materiality of Anselm Kiefer’s layered paintings, giant lead books and monumental installations that are a testament to the fragility of human existence. Kiefer, whose father was a captain of the Wehrmacht, has always made work through the lens of the history that formed him. Like many of his generation, it must have been harrowing and agonising trying to come to terms with the facts that were revealed during the war trials of the 1960s. His work is loaded with symbolism and bleakness.
Many others across the world are involved today in other projects, but I wanted to focus here on the work of Judith Tucker, whose painting and writing about art has influenced me in recent years. I came across her work through the Contemporary British Painting (CBP) organisation, of which she was the Chair, a few years before her tragic untimely death in 2023. As well as being a brilliant landscape painter, Judith was an academic and curator, and much of her writing about landscape painting and the links to social history, politics and identity really resonated with me. Her writing about painting is important reading for any landscape painter who views art as a means of understanding the human condition and our place and connections in the world. Some of her later work can be seen here on the CBP site or on her own website.
When starting the Exile and Return group project, I re-read several of her academic papers, some of which consider the holocaust and her own family’s history in relation to her painting and writing. Her grandmother, mother and aunt fled Berlin for England in 1939 after Kristallnacht, with other family members remaining behind. A moving essay she wrote about a series of paintings she made from family photographs taken just before the war felt relevant to my work about WWII. It can be found on the CBP website here: The Lido in the Forest
In the text, she explained how, for several years, both her painting practice and her theoretical work considered “the relationship between the practice and objects of landscape painting and theoretical concerns relating to intergenerational transmission”, or what is referred to by Professor Marianne Hirsch as “postmemory.” Postmemory is a concept that is used to describe the relationship that the next generation bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before. They “remember” via the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. The experiences are so deep and affecting that they feel as if they are their own memories. The past is accessed and mediated not by recall, but by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” Hirsch notes that the traumatic narratives that precede the second generation’s own lives or consciousness are so powerful that they can sometimes overshadow or displace that generation’s own life stories, with events from the past, which continue to impact on the present.
Judith Tucker used her grandmother’s family photographs to form a powerful group of paintings of swimming pools and diving boards in the landscape. The series started in 2005/6 were from photographs taken in East Germany of her mother learning to swim. She is interested in what she refers to as ‘paranoid readings’ the term used by Marianne Hirsch, where “when looking back into old photographs, they look back at you with the knowledge that something happened.” A photograph shows what looks like a hangman’s noose behind the child’s smiling face in the pool. Although this is likely to be a device to stop novice swimmers from going under, it has chilling symbolism that, while unknown at the time the photo was taken, appears horrifically prescient.
She also visited other sites where the family holidayed in the ‘30s, at a time when Jewish people could not easily be present in the public realm, obtaining archive footage of the construction of the pools and holiday site where the swimming lessons took place. She considers the social agenda of swimming pools as part of Modernism’s direct response to the connected problems of health issues and poor housing. She notes that the Germanic interest in health, and the notion of social hygiene, was also disturbingly linked to what was termed “racial hygiene”. Swimming pools were designed to merge within the landscape in an aesthetic way rather than be viewed as utilitarian municipal facilities. The pool in this inland resort - Friedrichroda - fits this image, being surrounded by landscaped lawns and terraces with the forests (painted much earlier by Cranach) behind. She later learned that Jews were able to swim in this pool because a larger one to be developed for the 1936 Olympics had recently been built nearby.
Although pools were conceived as social spaces for escapism and a ‘home away from home’, Judith Tucker states that “What intrigues me for my series of paintings is the potential of these designed spaces to contain these informal activities; whilst the paintings and drawings have very few figures depicted in them there is a potential place for them. To image empty pools and their surroundings is, therefore, to invite considerations of who is not there. In my paintings it is very the fact that the depicted spaces are relatively empty that creates a tension and thus the possibility of imaginative projection for any viewer.” Absence in the paintings allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions about who is absent and why, and the relationship with Nazi ideology and actions that may underpin these absences.
She notes that in contemporary times, swimming pools are more likely to be viewed as sites of contagion for superbugs. She states that “In this image of apparent health there are in fact the incipient beginning of a deadly illness, toxicity in the midst of wellbeing. This seems very apt for my project. Thus, implicit in my images of the pool, these images of spaces of pleasure and leisure, are thoughts about those other bodies, those far from healthy bodies that perished in the same forest: in Buchenwald and at Ohrdruf. The entwining of resort and camp is explicitly examined in a sequence in Memories of the Camps. This documentary film of the camps as they were liberated lay for years in the archive of the Imperial War Museum London since, intended for de-nazification purposes, it was considered too inflammatory for release in the aftermath of the war and as new alliances were being formed. The section I describe takes place at the beginning of chapter four and is part of the less polished footage taken by the Russians. The hand-held camera hovers and wobbles slightly as it moves over idyllic-looking scenes of a chalet by a lake surrounded by trees; couples, holiday makers and locals in lederhosen and traditional dress sit, chat, walk and boat; and then, as instructed, the camera pans across to barbed wire and inmates, demonstrating the closeness of the camp to the everyday.”
This chilling imagery was explored more recently in the film “Zone of Interest” which depicts the banality of evil by portraying the lives of a German family living next to Auschwitz who are emotionally immune from the atrocities happening on their doorstep.
The series of painted pools contain an atmosphere of anxious unease with their motifs of high diving boards, springboards and the changing rooms set against a backdrop of trees and sky. There is a dialogue between the manmade and the natural world which creates a tension that Tucker states is one of the subjects of these paintings. “The landscape here serves both as a refuge from city life but also as a threat to the designed spaces of play.” These high diving boards chillingly are depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film ‘Olympia’. Tucker states “There are other images of the platform derived from photographs of its construction. In one photograph the workers standing atop seem to have a sense of pride and achievement in their task, yet they become transformed through paint to become much less certain: there is a sense of a fragility in the scaffold wrapped around the shadowy diving board, an ambiguity to the figures and in the whole a sense of surveillance. The chiaroscuro has been heightened and the tower is painted in predominantly cool dark blues with some highlights in warmer colours. The ground is painted in reds, pinks and golds, infusing this muddy building site with a hint of violence.”
As a landscape artist interested in holiday resorts, another series was developed when she visited Ahlbeck where her grandparents also holidayed. This is explored in a separate paper entitled Resort ii. In this, she focused on the rich motif of the Strandkörbe which is a hybrid deck chair/beach hut providing temporary shelter - situated on the beach between land and sea - a place of protection, from which to view the sublime. Their looming presence on the flat beach is also a elegiac vehicle for human absence. Working from contemporary sketches of the Strandkörbe and historical photographs, the paintings atmosphere and feel, allow the viewer to sense the meaning and sense of loss and mourning in the works, rather than being overtly intellectualised or articulated.
The third set of work was made in Borneholme, an island in Denmark. On visiting she came across several concrete installations in the dunes that were made during the German occupation. These became the subject of a set of paintings of what she refers to as ‘unresolved reminders’ or ‘spectral traces’ - remnants of the Third Reich, now neglected but sitting in close proximity to holiday homes. She explores how visiting places such as this bring back traces of the lives of others that cause us to empathise or ‘remember’, even though rationally we know that experiencing the memories of others is an impossibility. She states: “My paintings and drawings are infused with a sense a sense of being elsewhere than the site of direct experience, of being not there but here. I realised that the paradox of distancing and then attempting to connect across that distance created a tension that became the subject of the work….When working on location now it is as if I attempt to anchor fragments of relived experience in a new embodied encounter, perhaps in an attempt to create a corporeal echo of a ghostly memory.”
She considers that her painterly explorations of her family’s social history become a sort of interrogation of place - a journey back to the past through an embodied exploration in the present. she quotes Tina Wasserman who when analysing other artists’ work stated: ‘landscape and site are concrete remnants of the past that continue to exist in the present. Thus, they have the capacity to be powerful visual surrogates for a tie that no longer exists.”
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This sense of the shifting back and forth in time and conjuring up WWII anecdotes told to me in childhood by my Grandmother, was what I drew on when making work about the German WWII fortifications in Guernsey. Like Borholme, our coasts have been sites of pleasure for ordinary citizens for centuries. The fortifications near the bays were places we used to explore and play hide and seek in as children, but with the knowledge of later life, they take on a far grimmer significance. The Channel Islands have also always been sites of military significance for the English and French. This is a complex set of emotions and signifiers to work with when painting, and something that I have only just started exploring.
Although life under occupation in Guernsey, or being displaced to England, Scotland or Biberach prisoner of war camp was difficult and sometimes life threatening, it cannot be compared to the murder and persecution of the Jewish race; the trauma of living through that period of history not knowing if or how you would survive, and witnessing friends, relatives or whole villages being exterminated. It is clear though that many local people who had lived through the war years (as children) or who were born just after the war, were deeply scarred by the trauma of occupation. Many were hungry and malnourished themselves, or listened to their parents and grandparents anecdotes growing up as young children, hearing about the hardship near starvation in the final year of occupation. The local population would also have experienced the deprivation of freedom and sense of constantly living under the surveillance of the occupying forces. Others would have been displaced to various parts of the UK either with their mother, or alone and billeted with strangers in a strange place.
The workers who built the fortifications were also victims of the Nazis and their suffering is inseparable from the observation and understanding of the buildings’ history and sense of place. Several older people visiting the exhibition said they remembered seeing large groups of men being marched around the roads by soldiers from the campsite they lived on near La Houguette School. Others reminisced about their parents trying to surreptitiously leave food in hedges or outbuildings for the starving slave workers.
My own work, which has only been a six months in the making, barely scratches the surface of what it may be possible to understand by developing work that uses these sites of war to link together the past, present and future. The archives are a truly remarkable depository of local history, imagery and long-forgotten lives. I feel it is important to memorialise these anonymous men who changed our landscape as they are rarely mentioned and never named as individual people in our local history. The archives hold the names and addresses of all of those who were brought to the Island as labourers, and it would be meaningful to create some site on the Island that recognises them - both in respect of the hardship that they bore, and in terms of the futility of war.
The contributors’ work, which is all very different in terms of medium, scale and subject matter, sparks off each other and creates interesting dynamics and interrelationships. Many visitors have found the exhibition moving, especially those who lived through the war. Several people have been tearful reading through the material accompanying the art work or seeing images of youthful photographs of now dead relatives taken in Biberach.
I hope to write about some of the other contributors’ work here soon.