184
PARTISAN R)EVIEW
"The Italian trip, as I say, was a turning point. But it was really
not until the Blitz in London had passed that I began to realize how
deep-rooted the Italian influences had been.
"At the outbreak of the war I had a studio in Devon, not far from
Dover. And for the first months of the war I continued to work there
undisturbed. In fact, up to the fall of France there were no difficulties
in doing sculpture just as before. During those first months, however,
nothing happened in the art world of London, no exhibitions or anything
of the sort. Then the code gradually became 'to live as usual.' And in
1940 I exhibited the large reclining figure in elm wood, which now
belongs to Elizabeth Onslow-Ford, and several small lead figures at the
Leicester Galleries. But when France fell and a German invasion of
England seemed more than probable, like many others I thought the only
thing to do was to try to help directly. I moved back to London and
applied at the Chelsea Polytechnic for training in precision-tool making
But the training classes were so few in proportion to the numbers of
applications that several weeks went by and I heard nothing. Still I felt
it was silly to start a large sculpture when at any moment I might have
to give it up. So I took up drawing. Months went by, waiting; I went
on drawing. Then the air-raids began-and the war from being an
awful worry became a real experience. Quite against what I expected
I found myself strangely excited by the bombed buildings, but more still
by the unbelievable scenes and life of the underground shelters. I began
filling a notebook with drawings-ideas based on London's shelter life.
Naturally I could not draw in the shelter itself. I drew from memory
on my return home. But the scenes of the shelter world, static figures
(asleep) -'reclining figures'-remained vivid in my mind, I felt somehow
drawn to it all. Here was something I couldn't help doing. I had pre–
viously refu sed a commission to do war pictures. Now Kenneth Clark
saw these and at once got the War Artists Committee to commission
ten. I did forty or fifty from which they made their choice. The Tate
also took about ten. In all I did about a hundred large drawings and
the two shelter sketch books in the Museum Exhibition. I was absorbed
in the work for a whole year; I did nothing else.
"Then at Herbert Read's suggestion I undertook to do drawings
of miners at work in the coal mines-'Britain's Underground Army,' as
they were called-another commission of the War Artists Committee. I
went to my home town of Castleford and spent two or three weeks in
all down the mine. Yet I did not find it as fruitful a subject as the
shelters. The shelter drawings came about after first being moved by the
experience of them, whereas the coal-mine drawings were more in the–
nature of a commission coldly approached. They represent two or three
weeks of physical s.weat seeing the subject and that number of months
of mental sweat trying to be satisfied carrying them out.
