In both world wars, Britain established various schemes for employing its contemporary artists that were more extensive in scope and ambition than in any other combatant nation. Brian Foss's book provides the first comprehensive account of the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) in World War II that does justice to the significance of the project in terms of both understanding its contribution to British art in the twentieth century and examining the means and forms through which Britain at war projected its identity, not least to itself. In contrast to the official artists' schemes in the First World War, which were left incomplete at the war's conclusion, the experience of WAAC and the audiences it engendered for art were crucial for postwar state patronage in the form of the Arts Council, established in 1945. Three of Foss's six chapters examine the mechanisms of patronage and propaganda. Alongside these, the author undertakes engrossing analyses of the imagery of the Blitz, the role of women, and the question of making art out of war, including the problematic issue of representing the Holocaust and the visualization of masculinity in crisis. Altogether, the study assembles a richly resourced account of British art in the Second World War that establishes itself as the standard work on the subject.

The official artists schemes in the First World War provided one precedent for the WAAC, and some artists from these earlier schemes were prominent in the Second, especially Muirhead Bone, the man who virtually invented the idea of an official war artist, and Paul Nash. A more immediate antecedent was the Federal Arts Project in the United States, run by the Works Progress Administration. While the WAAC lacked the monumental murals of this project, its general emphasis on illustrative, accessible realist works that mediated a people's war to popular audiences was closer to the aspirations of the American project than to the official schemes of the Great War. The Second World War did not give rise to work comparable to the monumental history paintings commissioned in 1918 by the British War Memorials Committee from artists such as Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Wyndham Lewis, but this says more about the nature of the later war, often imagined as a banal and intensified repetition of the first and extensively anticipated and visualized in cultural anxieties during the 1930s. Wherein the first war produced fantasies of closure, as the “war to end all wars,” the second did not promulgate myths of redemption or give rise to an extensive cult of remembrance. In one sense, works of art from 1939 to 1945 in Britain are less compelling than the works from 1914 to 1918. There is nothing comparable to Paul Nash's The Menin Road or Wyndham Lewis's A Battery Shelled, nor is there any post-1945 body of work to compare with Stanley Spencer's epic series at Burghclere Chapel. Moreover, in contrast to 1914–18, Britain's “official” avant-garde (including artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson) sat out the war in St. Ives and, except for Henry Moore with his well-known shelter drawings, on the whole neither contributed to the WAAC nor pictured the war. However, this makes the WAAC's pictures unpretentious and democratic. Often modest and sensitive, the work produced for the WAAC can be summed up in Mary Kessell's drawings of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; hitherto almost unknown but here amply analyzed by Foss, these sketches of survivors are “cursory and abstracted, … isolated in private universes of loss … on small, scrap-like pieces of fragile paper” (146). The drawings’ tiny scale and fragility attempt to register the enormity of the horror of a war that resisted representation.

The WAAC's attempt at comprehensiveness in the depiction of Britain at war inevitably meant omissions and exclusions. No women artists ever contributed a major canvas to the British First World War schemes, and their underrepresentation was only partially mitigated in the Second, and, as Foss shows, assumptions about femininity meant women were frequently assigned what were supposedly women's subjects (30). Even more tellingly, no work was ever commissioned or purchased from any émigré artist, despite the presence in Britain of significant figures such as Oscar Kokoschka, Siegfried Charoux, Kurt Schwitters, Lazlo Peri, and John Heartfield, each of whom was prominent in antifascist activities, and accounts of their work are almost entirely absent from British literature of this period. Rather than cosmopolitanism or avant-garde modernism, what dominated WAAC's vision of Britain under the direction of its influential chairman, Kenneth Clark, was the insular and conservative aesthetic of neoromanticism, most successfully promulgated in the work of Graham Sutherland and John Piper. The tenor of WAAC's pictures, some 6,000 works by around 400 artists extensively distributed throughout British public art collections after the war, was a middlebrow view of middle England consonant with a projection of Britain as a moderate and fair-minded liberal nation. Foss does not dodge the problematic questions or the contradictions and inconsistencies in the ways Britain projected itself in the Second World War in this fine and well-judged study of the vicissitudes of a nation at war revealed through the works of art it assembled for its national collections. Brian Foss has laid the groundwork and set the standard for further study of this immensely important period in British art history.