In Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain during the Second World War, Rebecca Searle presents a fresh angle on the well-trodden subject of renowned art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and its activities during the Second World War. She explores how art and propaganda functioned in the context of Britain's aerial war effort, from the build-up of its fleet in anticipation of conflict with Germany to the role of its bombers in decimating German cities and hastening the war's cataclysmic end. Her social history of Britain's aerial war examines film, painting, drawings, and traces of public opinion gleaned from press reports and Mass Observation, the documentary project launched in 1937 to record responses of ordinary citizens to current events. Searle's larger ambition is to contribute to a history of emotions by probing the mutually constituting relationship between representation and experience during the conflict. She attains this goal with a lucid and compelling glimpse into an underexplored aspect of Britain's Second World War propaganda machine and its successes and failures as it worked to sway the country's citizenry to the cause.

The book unfolds in five chronologically arranged chapters. In chapter 1, Searle rehearses Clark's role as chair of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Founded in 1939 at Clark's urging, the committee formed part of Britain's war propaganda agenda in the Ministry of Information. Accounts of this period note how Clark's commitment to art frequently conflicted with the ministry's desire for documentary approaches to portraying the war effort. While Clark supported modernist artists for commissions by the committee, the ministry eschewed their adventurous avant-garde pictorial strategies. As Searle notes, however, the aims of the ministry and the committee overlapped frequently enough to allow the latter to continue its activities until the end of the war. Germany's programmatic assault on modernist vanguard art was a crucial intervening factor for Clark's promotion of the committee. Under the circumstances, the ministry incorporated support for artistic freedom into its program as a defense of civilization itself against the barbarism of war and dictatorship unfolding on the European continent.

In chapters 2 through 5, Searle contends specifically with representations of Britain's air war and the machinations of both the ministry and the committee to negotiate fluctuating public opinion as the war progressed. Chapter 2, “The Battle for Production,” dwells on Britain's devotion of ever-larger shares of its war economy to the production of fighter aircraft to fend off German aerial assaults and to launch its offensive campaign. Drawing on examples of art produced outside of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Searle illuminates how the committee's notion of what constituted war art excluded important dimensions of the home front war experience, specifically that of the ordinary men and women who labored in component factories to produce parts for combat aircraft. While artists not commissioned by the committee explored the repetitiveness and tedium of factory production, art commissioned by the committee lavished attention on assembly hangars and the sleek, gleaming silhouettes of the flying machines themselves. Showing workers busily engaged in piecing planes together or completed aircraft lined up row upon row, images worked to recruit labor and assure British observers of the readiness and massiveness of Britain's aerial defense fleet.

Searle devotes chapter 3, “The Battle of Britain,” to commissions for the British Air Ministry. She recounts controversies that arose as artists tried to meet Royal Air Force demands for images of pilots deemed sufficiently heroic by the leadership and by a British public raised on images of dynamic flying aces. Here, Searle's discussion of the evolution of the image of the pilot from its First Word War incarnation though its filmic portrayal in the interwar period is especially revelatory. Through penetrating analyses of Eric Kennington's portraits of Air Force men, produced for the committee, in particular, Searle exposes how he and other artists attempted to parse the delicate relationship between honoring aviation heroes while promoting the war as one fought by ordinary Britons. She goes further by showing how these portraitists also struggled with casting men of the Air Force as being more humane and temperate yet no less masculine than their steely and barbaric German counterparts.

In chapter 4, “The Blitz,” Searle turns to artistic responses to war on the home front. As German bombs rained down, propaganda efforts turned to an orchestrated effort to manage the emotional responses of a population under siege. Another artist commissioned by the committee, Henry Moore, produced his famous shelter images during this period; they conveyed a sense of communalism and endurance as civilians huddled together in underground tube stations during German air raids. These appeals to British stoicism were further bolstered by the virtual absence of images showing death and destruction in art commissioned by the committee. Searle's use of Mass Observation accounts exposes the success and failure of these efforts to manage popular emotions as respondents registered both resolve and skepticism about Britain's ability to prevail. Some felt reassured while others remained unconvinced by the sanitized version of the war at home fed to them in images commissioned by the committee and other government propaganda.

In chapter 5, Searle addresses the underexplored role of Britain (and the United States) in the incendiary bombing campaigns targeted at German cities and civilians beginning in 1942. Visual records of any sort become thin at this point in the narrative. This occlusion both mirrors and contributes to the amnesia that has long attended this phase of the war as the role of these bomber crews and their deadly mission was sidelined in postwar congratulatory histories of Nazi Germany's defeat. Searle's study concludes with the work of Paul Nash, whose painting Battle of Germany (1944) provides a poignant exception to this amnesia with a turbulent abstract visual vocabulary suggesting the violence of the British assault on German industrial and civilian targets. Here as elsewhere in the text, her otherwise assured analyses of visual evidence is regrettably compromised by the paucity and poor quality of the book's black-and-white illustrations. Fortunately, a good number of the images Searle discusses in her impressive and illuminating study can be found online.