Eye Magazine

Like a number of his contemporaries, Edward Ardizzone (1900-79) aimed for a deliberate anachronism of style. Yet more than most of them, he made old methods work effectively to depict the modern world. For many British artists of his generation, there was bound to be a crisis brought on by the challenge of Modernism. At first sight, Ardizzone seems exempt from this, and did not appear to lose confidence or look for new directions, as did Edward Bawden and John Piper. Yet beneath the surface there was undoubtedly self-questioning and anxiety.

Ardizzone’s career had launched in the 1930s. Like Piper, he was a late developer and for a similar reason, that his father insisted on him following a ‘reliable’ career after leaving school. For Ardizzone, the path to becoming an artist was through the evening classes he attended at Westminster School of Art, and in 1927 he broke free of office life and began to earn his living as a graphic artist and painter. By 1939 he was a well known national figure, with his first three children’s books selling well and rapturously reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, annual one-man shows in London galleries and inclusion in the art section of the British Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. He owed much to the patronage of Kenneth Clark, who responded to his style, which combined elements of seventeenth-century classicism and a nineteenth-century taste for low-life subjects treated with benign humour. Clark’s enthusiasm for Ardizzone got him a place as one of the first Official War Artists, alongside Bawden, Eric Ravilious and Barnett Freedman.

At the end of March 1940 he went out to France with the British Expeditionary Force, along with Bawden and Freedman – the trio were also protégés of Oliver Simon at the Curwen Press (see Eye 70). For most war artists, the pace of production and the unfamiliar subject matter was both a challenge and a stimulus. With Baggage to the Enemy (John Murray, 1941), Ardizzone became the only one of the group to publish an extended written record of his experience in the retreat from Belgium and France that ended at Dunkirk, and in this, with later diaries kept during the North Africa and Italian campaigns, we can listen to his responses to the experience. While generally expecting the worst to happen, as it did in the lead up to the evacuation at Dunkirk, Ardizzone maintained a cheerful attitude, possibly fortified by his undemonstrative Catholicism. He saw plenty of dead bodies and when he drew them critics sometimes complained that he was taking the war too lightly. They wanted the emotional wrench of Goya, but as Osbert Lancaster explained, not many modern artists were up to that level. Instead, in Lancaster’s classification, he gave them something more like Jacques Callot – a seventeenth-century printmaker who recorded the European wars of his time with graphic clarity.

Ardizzone’s strength was in capturing moments of human action, often slightly comical ones, but his work matured as he moved away from the heat of the action in the course of the slow and painful campaign by British and American troops to break through the ‘Gothic Line’ established by the Germans across central Italy during 1944-45. Bawden, who had reappeared in this theatre of war, urged him to take the landscape as his subject rather than the sometimes conventionally-posed figure groups. This he did, in a few large paintings, such as A Battery Position in an Orchard of Young Fruit Trees in Snow, 1945 (Imperial War Museum), with a grid of trees stretching out of sight on the white hillside and no sense of spring in the air.

With his 400 war paintings completed, Ardizzone returned gratefully in 1945 to civilian life, teaching at Chelsea, Camberwell and the Royal College of Art, and resuming a hectic level of illustration for books, magazines and advertising. The postwar decade seems a glorious period for illustrators, since there were so many publications demanding line work for reproduction, a technique at which he excelled. It was during this time some of his most enduring illustration work was done, including Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress for Faber.