Re: Art Behind Barbed Wire

Date: February 28, 2004

"Art Behind Barbed Wire, The Walker, Liverpool

By Philip Key, Daily Post
 

THERE are some stark photographic images of the home front in World War II.

But it was often the art of official war artists like John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash which remained in the memory.

The same thing happens with a new exhibition titled Art Behind Barbed Wire opening at The Walker, Liverpool.

Much of the art was created in 1940 by two intern-ees at the World War II internment camp at Huyton.

In fact, photographs of the camp are rare, although the exhibition does feature a giant enlargement of the buildings and some of the men.

But to capture the reality of day-to-day life in the camp, and the people interned there, posterity had the good luck to have artists Hugo Dachinger and Walter Nessler on hand.

Together they captured - often in quick sketches - the look and mood of the place from gloom and depression to occasional jolly moments.

Austrian Dachinger and German Walter Nessler spent only three months in the camp before moving on, Dachinger to another camp in the Isle of Man, Nessler, a Jew, to join the British Army.

Dachinger's work is the best represented, much of it interestingly enough painted on old newspapers of the day because of paper shortages. The newsprint seeps through the work adding an extra element.

There are bold watercolour portraits of fellow internees - among them Kurt Jooss, a ballet master and choreographer - all created with a flair for character and strong use of colour.

Over one scene of huts and wire, guards and towers, hovers a ghostly image of a man's face, the features emotionally blank.

In his drawings an element of humour creeps in with smiling guards and in one scene, prisoners bowing extravagantly to a Ruritanian-style officer.

Nessler concentrates on the look of the camp, his characters anonymous and mostly sketched in: the bleakness of the place is apparent but not totally forbidding.

Both later settled in London. Dachinger died in 1995, Nessler in 2001 and The Walker has now acquired the works on view.

As a contrast, there is work by Liverpool-born Thomas Burke, a merchant seaman who spent time in Milag prisoner of war camp, Germany, from 1943-45. His drawings show tents and huts and prisoners coping with the drudgery of camp life.

Given the conditions under which these artists worked, the results are both surprising and often moving. There are no masterpieces but the background to the works creates its own special dimension.

* ART Behind Barbed Wire runs until May 3 2004.
© owned by or licensed to Trinity Mirror Plc 2004"