All posts tagged Second World War

Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris CBE (born 1957) has had a spectacularly successful career. He went from a humble background in Nottingham, to Cambridge University, and then to the BBC where he worked on flagship news programmes Panorama and Newsnight before becoming political editor of The Observer at the age of just 30.

In the later 1980s he wrote half a dozen factual journalistic books, and then in 1992 published the first of his fiction books, ‘Fatherland’, which became a popular bestseller. Since then he has kept up an impressive workrate, producing a new novel in the popular thriller genre, every three or so years.

The first few were set against the Second World War which has been a recurring setting (‘Fatherland’, ‘Enigma’, ‘Munich’, ‘V2’) but he soon branched out, writing page-turners set in the contemporary world, (‘The Ghost’, ‘The Fear Index’), late nineteenth century France (‘An Officer and a Spy’), the ancient world (‘Pompeii’), the future (‘The Second Sleep’). In 2006 he embarked upon a brilliant trilogy based on the life of Cicero, the leading writer and political player at the time of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian.

Several of Harris’s novels have been adapted into films – for example, The Ghost Writer (2010), An Officer and a Spy (2019) – but he recently hit gold when ‘Conclave’ was made into a movie directed by Edward Berger with award-nominated performances by Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci.

Harris’s novels

1992 Fatherland A brilliantly gripping alternative history in which the Nazis won the Second World War. The story’s protagonist, Xavier March, is an officer of the Kripo, the criminal police, who is investigating the murder of a Nazi government official who participated at the Wannsee Conference. Slowly he realises he has stumbled on a vast conspiracy at the heart of Nazi rule, the Holocaust which, in this world, has been hushed up. The documents March eventually uncovers contain some of the most searing descriptions of going into the gas chambers of a concentration camp I’ve read in any genre.

1995 Enigma Enigma as in the famous code-cracking operation at Bletchley Park. The story focuses on gifted cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, a cipher clerk, but when he gets back to Cambridge, Claire has gone missing. Who? Why? Where? Another gripping mystery.

1998 Archangel Set in the present: Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso is a historian attending a conference in Moscow. He meets an old communist who tells him about a secret notebook which contains a secret concerning Stalin which threatens to turn history upside down.

2007 The Ghost The unnamed ghost writer who narrates the story, has been hired and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to help write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, transparently based in Tony Blair, who Harris was close to. The unexplained disappearance of the writer whose place he’s taken prompts the narrator to undertake investigations which (like the previous two thrillers) lead to a momentous revelation.

2011 The Fear Index Also set in the modern world, this concerns the way an artificial intelligence created to dabble in the stock market, runs out of control.

2013 An Officer and a Spy Leaping back a century, this one follows French military intelligence officer Georges Picquart who begins to discover that the evidence used to convict Alfred Dreyfus of espionage was likely invented, in which case a German agent is still at large in the French military.

2016 Conclave Set in the present, this bestseller describes in typically thorough fashion what happens when Pope dies and a conclave is called to elect a new one: taking us into the heart of the process during which various leading contenders turn out to be ineligible for all manner of Machiavellian reasons. Clever, gripping.

2017 Munich Set over four days in September 1938 during the Munich Agreement, the novel describes the activities of two characters, aides to the British and Nazi delegations. This has the structure and mannerisms of the previous thrillers but, for the first time, didn’t have the same ‘grip’. All the historical detail is there, and the panic-stricken meetings and the twists and turns. Except we know this changed nothing. The Second World War still came. So who cares?

2019 Second Sleep Set in the future after some disaster has set England back to medieval technology and culture. In this world a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives at a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor to bury a priest who has died ‘in mysterious circumstances’. Slowly he realises the locals are concealing a secret i.e. the book builds to the same kind of Revelation that characterised Harris’s first half dozen novels. Except the final revelation is deeply underwhelming: we find out that the Old World (i.e. our world) experienced some catastrophic breakdown of its digital infrastructure. This is deeply disappointing because a) we knew right from the start that this was a future after some catastrophe; b) so it is just like many, many other science fiction novels set in the future after some catastrophe wiped out ‘our’ culture, all the ones I’m familiar with (The Chrysalids, A Canticle for Leibowitz) being much, much better; and c) the final revelation, that the satellites which keep global digital tech working all crashed, is not really a believable cause for a worldwide apocalypse. OK there’d be disasters but surely we’d just revert to life in the 1970s before digital tech: cars would still drive, food would still grow, not as much but still quite a lot; livestock would be farmed etc etc. The idea that the end of digital tech would devastate the world beyond recognition is not plausible or thrilling. This is the first Harris novel I read but couldn’t be bothered to review because it’s the first one that’s actively bad.

The Cicero trilogy

A brilliant trilogy of novels describing the fraught political career of ancient Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC). They manage to stick very closely to the historical record while at the same time conveying the genuine excitement and danger of 1st century BC Rome.

2006 Imperium All three are narrated by Cicero’s secretary, Tiro. This first volume covers 15 years and is divided into two parts: Part one, ‘Senator’ (79 to 70 BC) leading up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres; Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covers his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state.

2009 Lustrum Continues Cicero’s career in fraught first century BC Rome, as related by his secretary Tiro. It covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (the Latin word lustrum referring to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by state officials)and is again divided into two parts: Part one ‘Consul’, covers the dramatic year of 63 BC giving a thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. Part two, ‘Pater Patriae’, covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC: beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC).

2015 Dictator The final book in the trilogy covers the last 15 years of Cicero’s life, from 58 BC to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC. It’s divided into Part one, ‘Exile’ (58 to 47 BC), and Part two ‘Redux (47 to 43 BC), leading up to Cicero’s flight form Rome and eventual murder by agents of Mark Anthony’s. Outstanding.

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by Simon on March 27, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged Adam Lang, Alfred dreyfus, An Officer and a Spy, ancient Rome, Archangel, BBC, Bletchley Park, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Catalina, Christopher Fairfax, Christopher Kelso, Cicero trilogy, Claire Romilly, code-cracking, Communism, Conclave, cryptanalysis, dictator, Dreyfus Affair, Edward Berger, Enigma, Exmoor, Fatherland, fiction, First Triumvirate, Gaius Verres, gas chambers, Georges Picquart, Imperium, journalism, Julius Caesar, Kripo, Lucius Sergius Catalina, lustrum, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Moscow, Munich, Munich Agreement, Munich Crisis, Nazi, Newsnight, Nottingham, novels, Panorama, Pope, Ralph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Roman Catholicism, Rome, Second Sleep, Second World War, Stalin, Stanley Tucci, The Fear Index, The Ghost, The Holocaust, The Observer, thriller, Tiro, Tom Jericho, Tony Blair, USSR, Vatican, Wannsee Conference, Xavier March

Posted by Simon on March 27, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/robert-harris-reviews/

Alistair MacLean reviews

Alistair Stuart MacLean (1922 to 1987) was a very successful Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories. His books have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time. He wrote high-concept, tightly engineered thrillers with a strong emphasis on plot twists and suspense mechanics, which push his tough male protagonists to extreme physical and psychological limits. The novels from the late 1950s are good but he really hit his stride in the 1960s with a string of gripping thrillers, many of which were quickly made into movies. This streak tailed off in the early 1970s and by the mid-70s they’d become almost unreadably bad. Night Without End and Fear is the Key are personal favourites.

First phase: third-person narrators and war settings

1955 HMS Ulysses War story about a doomed Arctic convoy.

1957 The Guns of Navarone War story about commandos who blow up superguns on a Greek island.

1957 South by Java Head A motley crew of soldiers, sailors, nurses and civilians endure a series of terrible ordeals in their bid to escape the pursuing Japanese forces.

1959 The Last Frontier Secret agent Michael Reynolds rescues a British scientist from communists in Hungary.

Second phrase: first-person narrators: the classic novels

1959 Night Without End Arctic scientist Mason saves plane crash survivors from baddies who have stolen a secret missile guidance system.

1961 Fear is the Key Government agent John Talbot defeats a gang seeking treasure in a crashed plane off Florida.

1961 The Dark Crusader Counter-espionage agent John Bentall defeats a gang who plan to hold the world to ransom with a new intercontinental missile.

1962 The Golden Rendezvous First officer John Carter defeats a gang who hijack his ship with a nuclear weapon.

1962 The Satan Bug Agent Pierre Cavell defeats an attempt to blackmail the government using a new supervirus.

1963 Ice Station Zebra MI6 agent Dr John Carpenter defeats spies who have secured Russian satellite photos of US missile bases, destroyed the Arctic research base of the title and nearly sink the nuclear sub sent to rescue them.

Third phase: ripe

1966 When Eight Bells Toll British Treasury secret agent Philip Calvert defeats a gang who have been hijacking ships carrying bullion off the Scottish coast.

1967 Where Eagles Dare Six commandos are parachuted into snowy South Germany to rescue an American General who has the plans for D-Day and is being held captive in the inaccessible Schloss Adler, the Eagle’s Castle. Except this is merely a cover for a deeper mission – and the pretext for a ripping yarn chock-full of twists, turns and nailbiting excitement.

1968 Force 10 From Navarone The three heroes from Guns of Navarone parachute into Yugoslavia to blow up a dam and destroy two German armoured divisions.

1969 Puppet on a Chain Interpol agent Paul Sherman battles a grotesquely sadistic heroin-smuggling gang in Amsterdam.

1970 Caravan to Vaccarès British agent Neil Bowman foils a gang of gypsies who are smuggling Russian nuclear scientists via the south of France to China.

1971 Bear Island Doctor Marlowe deals with a spate of murders aboard a ship full of movie stars and crew heading into the Arctic Circle.

Fourth phase: bad

1973 The Way to Dusty Death World number one racing driver Johnny Harlow acts drunk and disgraced in order to foil a gang of heroin smugglers and kidnappers.

1974 Breakheart Pass The Wild West, 1873. Government agent John Deakin poses as a wanted criminal in order to foil a gang smuggling guns to Injuns in the Rockies and planning to steal government gold in return.

1975 Circus The CIA ask trapeze genius Bruno Wildermann to travel to an unnamed East European country, along with his circus, and use his skills to break into a secret weapons laboratory.

1976 The Golden Gate FBI agent Paul Revson is with the President’s convoy when it is hijacked on the Golden Gate bridge by a sophisticated gang of crooks who demand an outrageous ransom. Only he – and the doughty doctor he recruits and the pretty woman journalist – can save the President!

1977 Seawitch Oil executives hire an unhinged oil engineer, Cronkite, to wreak havoc on the oil rig of their rival, Lord Worth, who is saved by his beautiful daughter’s boyfriend, an ex-cop and superhero.

1977 Goodbye California Deranged Muslim fanatic, Morro, kidnaps nuclear physicists and technicians in order to build atomic bombs which he detonates a) in the desert b) off coastal California, in order to demand a huge ransom. Luckily, he has also irritated maverick California cop, Ryder – by kidnapping his wife – so Ryder tracks him down, disarms his gang and kills him.

Short stories

1985 The Lonely Sea A motley collection of ‘short stories’, clearly thrown together to exploit his reputation. Of the 14 texts no fewer than 8 are really newspaper articles about disasters at sea, and most of the others are poor; apart from The Dileas, the powerful short story which kick-started his entire career and, maybe, the unexpectedly comic story set on a canal. I’ve read it so you don’t have to.

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by Simon on March 23, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged 1873, Amsterdam, Arctic, Arctic convoy, Bear Island, Breakheart Pass, Bruno Wildermann, Caravan to Vaccarès, CIA, Circus, Cronkite, D-Day, Doctor Marlowe, Fear Is The Key, Florida, Force 10 From Navarone, Golden Gate bridge, Goodbye California, Greece, heroin, heroin smuggling, HMS Ulysses, Hungary, Ice Station Zebra, Interpol, John Bentall, John Carpenter, John Carter, John Deakin, John Talbot, Johnny Harlow, Lord Worth, Mason, Michael Reynolds, Morro, Neil Bowman, Night Without End, novel, nuclear sub, nuclear weapon, Paul Revson, Paul Sherman, Philip Calvert, Pierre Cavell, Puppet on a Chain, Ryder, Schloss Adler, Seawitch, Second World War, short stories, South By Java Head, The Dark Crusader, the Eagle's Castle, The Golden Gate, The Golden Rendezvous, The Guns of Navarone, The Last Frontier, The Lonely Sea, The Satan Bug, The Way to Dusty Death, thriller, When Eight Bells Toll, Where Eagles Dare, Wild West, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on March 23, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/23/alistair-maclean-reviews/

Hammond Innes reviews

Hammond Innes (1913 to 1998) was a British thriller writer novelist who wrote over 30 novels. His protagonists tend to be ordinary men thrust into perilous situations, often in extreme locations or situations. In fact in many of his novels the exotic locations are as – if not more – important than the human protagonists. I’ve always admired the fact that he was a very organised writer, spending six months travelling to settings around the world, doing thorough location research, followed by six months of writing.

Best one?

When I read them, I thought The Wreck of the Mary Deare was the best one, but years later it’s the unforgiving frozen landscape of the Antarctic in The White South which has stayed with me.

Innes’ novels

1940 The Trojan Horse Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines reveals an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land; features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute battle on the Nazi ship.

1940 Wreckers Must Breathe Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a lady journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.

1941 Attack Alarm Wartime thriller set during the Battle of Britain, drawing heavily on Hammond Innes’s own experience as an anti-aircraft gunner. Barry Hanson is a former journalist now serving on an RAF airfield gun crew in 1940 who comes to believe a network of Nazi fifth columnists is planning to sabotage the airfield ahead of a major German attack, but none of his superiors believe him.

—Second World War—

1946 Dead and Alive A short post-war thriller divided into two halves. It begins on the Cornish coast, where ex–Royal Navy officer David Cunningham, emotionally adrift after the war, helps salvage a stranded landing craft with fellow veteran McCrae. They refit it as a small commercial venture, planning to trade goods in post-war Italy. A newspaper article about their efforts brings a letter from a French woman asking them to find her missing daughter, Monique, who was sent to Italy during the war. When they sail to Naples they profit from selling goods but become entangled in local criminal networks after McCrae angers a powerful figure.

1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.

1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.

1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.

1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complicated enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.

1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig leads his strife-torn crew to safety.

1950 The Angry Mountain Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.

1951 Air Bridge Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.

1952 Campbell’s Kingdom Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.

1954 The Strange Land Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.

1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.

1958 The Land God Gave To Cain Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.

1960 The Doomed Oasis Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.

1962 Atlantic Fury Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.

1965 The Strode Venturer Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose cause he champions.

1971 Levkas Man Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this time one convinced he can prove his eccentric theories about the origin of Man, Ice Age sea levels, the origin of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.

1973 Golden Soak Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up the invitation to visit from a rancher’s daughter he’d met. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the persistent rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.

1974 North Star One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his complex past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.

1977 The Big Footprints TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle, all tied up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.

1980 Solomon’s Seal Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two old albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, the last surviving son of which is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational, business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.

1982 The Black Tide When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has gone aground near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyd’s of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe in time?

1985 The High Stand When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.

1988 Medusa Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.

1991 Isvik Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.

1993 Target Antarctica Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cartwright is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to rescue a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. It takes a lot of shenanigans, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is a scam to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, diamonds like the ones the survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.

1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a story which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania during the chaotic days leading up to the overthrow of the communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller with car chases and shoot-outs – before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s boys adventure stories as Cartwright and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started.

Essays

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by Simon on March 19, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged Aegean Sea, Air Bridge, Alec Falls, Alex Kirby-Smith, Andrew Kilmartin, Antarctic, Antarctic ice shelf, Arabia, Atlantic Fury, Atlantis, Attack Alarm, Australia, Barry Hanson, Battle of Britain, Berlin Airlift, Bill Gansert, Bill Saeton, Bougainville Island, Bruce Campbell, C-130 Hercules, Campbell's Kingdom, Canada, Canadian Rockies, Colin Tait, Colonel Charles Whitaker, Cornelius van Delden, Cornwall, David Cunningham, David Thomas, Dead and Alive, Delta Connection, Derek Engles, Diana Carter, Dick Farrell, Duncan Craig, Duncan Ross, elephants, Else, Geoffrey Bailey, George Farnell, George Grant, Golden Soak, Hammond Innes, Iain Ward, Ian Ferguson, Indian Ocean, Iris Sunderby, Isvik Wood, Jarra Jarra, Jim Pryce, Jim Vardin, John Sands, Kenya, Khmer Rouge, Khyber Pass, Labrador, Laerg, Levkas Man, Lloyd's of London, Maddon's Rock, Mafia, Mary Deare, McCrae, Medusa, Michael Cartwright, Michael Randall, Mike Steele, Minorca, Monique, Morocco, Mount Vesuvius, Nantes, Naples, Nazi, Nazis, Neil Fraser, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Nirvana, North Sea oil, North Star, Norway, novel, novels, Outer Hebrides, Pakistan, Patch, Paul Cartwright, Persian Gulf, Peter Kettil, Peter Strode, Philip Latham, Philip Redfern, Pieter Van der Voort, Postwar Italy, RAF, Romania, Roy Slingsby, Second World War, smuggling, Solomon Islands, Solomon's Seal, Southern Star, Strode shipping company, Target Antarctica, The Angry Mountain, The Big Footprints, The Black Tide, The Blue Ice, The Doomed Oasis, The High Stand, The Killer Mine, The Land God Gave to Cain, The Lonely Skier, The Strange Land, The Strode Venturer, the Trikkala, The Trojan Horse, The White South, The Wreck of the Mary Deare, thriller, Tom Halliday, Trevor Rodin, Tubby Carter, Vikings, Walter Craig, Whalecatching, Wreckers Must Breathe

Posted by Simon on March 19, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/19/hammond-innes-reviews/

Samurai @ the British Museum

This is a magnificent exhibition, beautifully staged, showcasing a huge number of objects (over 280) from both the British Museum’s collection and 29 other national and international lenders, most of them objects of exquisite beauty, accompanied by highly informative and fascinating captions.

Suit of samurai armour with bullet-proof cuirass embossed with crest, 1600–1700 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Debunking myths

It follows the basic template of many of the British Museum’s big blockbuster exhibitions which can be summarised as: ‘Think you know about X? Well, think again, because everything you’ve ever been taught about X is wrong and this exhibition showcases the latest scholarship to set you straight’.

So the idea is that we in the West are victims of myths, clichés and stereotypes about the Japanese samurai which this exhibition is going to correct. In the past the Museum has taken the same debunking approach to the Vikings and the Roman emperor Nero, among many others.

The two most common myths the exhibition debunks are 1) all samurai were men (no – a notable number were women) and 2) samurai were all about violence (no – in the post 1600 period they were more like a landed aristocracy versed in the arts of peace and good living).

Definitions and dates

The samurai began as mercenaries for the imperial court and developed over time into rural gentry. From the AD 900s to 1300s, Japanese fighting men were organised into ‘warrior bands’ (bushidan), often based on family loyalties. After a series of brutal and bloody civil wars, a warrior government, or shogunate, was established in 1185. Though the first shogunate collapsed and was replaced by another, warrior governments ruled Japan until the 1570s. The warrior era as a whole is said to come to an end in 1603 with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Samurai helmets ornate and simple in ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum

Both military training and engagement in cultural activities were essential to a warrior’s identity. The imperial court, which co-existed with the shogunate, provided a cultural model for samurai to emulate.

By the eighteenth century Japan had enjoyed a century of peace and the samurai had become local administrators and benchmarks of civilised behaviour. In this they reminded me a bit of the English lord of the manor who was also a justice of the peace.

NB: The word samurai is more commonly used in the West than in Japan.

Chronological structure

1. Civil wars 900 to 1600

Broadly speaking the first third of the exhibition describes the historical reality of the rise of the samurai, embedding them in Japan’s long period of civil wars and conflict from the dark ages of the 900s, through a prolonged period of civil wars to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603.

2. From 1600 peace

From that date Japan enjoyed about 250 years of peace and prosperity and the exhibition shows how the samurai tradition was adapted to more peaceful times in the 1700s and 1800s with a wide range of objects demonstrating their role in civil society. If the earlier displays focused on weapons of war, many objects from this phase are domestic, and demonstrate one the exhibition’s chief debunkments, one of the core stereotypes it aims to overthrow, which is the notion that all samurai were men. No they weren’t. There were female samurai warriors during the heroic age of civil wars and this number increased in the peaceful times until up to 50% of samurai were women. Who knew.

3. Nineteenth century stories

The 19th century section looks in detail at how the stories of half a dozen or so of the legendary figures from the golden age of samurai in the middle ages were depicted in woodcuts and fabrics and fans and other media. Here’s a typically striking coloured woodcut of a female samurai, Tomoe Gozen.

Woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797 to 1861) showing Tomoe Gozen riding away after the Battle of Awazu (1852) © The Trustees of the British Museum

4. Japanese empire

A further section briefly explains how the samurai tradition was co-opted into the rise of Japanese nationalism from 1900 to 1945, was used to justify Japan’s aggressive imperial expansion into Korea and China, and was invoked during the Second World War, before reaching its nemesis in the defeat of 1945.

So far, so historical, the exhibition beautifully displaying often rare and precious objects from all aspects of samurai life, accompanied by detailed historical explanations.

5. Commercial exploitation of the samurai image

This all changes in the final stretch of the exhibition which shows how, in the post-war period, the image of the samurai was fabricated, idealised and adapted for many purposes, both within Japan and beyond.

The most obvious one was making money from movies and TV, manga comics and video games. There are clips from a surprising number of these running on half a dozen video screens where you can watch in detail, as well as projected as vivid displays onto half a dozen big hanging screens. I counted 20 or so TV shows, both Japanese and Western, plus umpteen video games, but probably missed some. And then there’s a selection from the modern world of samurai-themed merchandise, toy swords, figurines, helmets, magazines, you name it, in the display cases underneath.

This final section is in quite a different mode and vibe from the previous, sober and scholarly displays. It’s visually and aurally loud and dynamic, a bit overwhelming. For me it really goes to show how any historical trope is liable to be exploited and milked to the hilt by modern consumer capitalism. Obviously the curators are highly invested in merch about the samurai but this final section makes you realise that the same process of complete commercialisation applies just as much to the Vikings, the Romans, to medieval knights and so on. You could find just as many contemporary movies, TV shows and merchandise about any of them. Pretty much any historical culture which relied on violence, and especially sword fighting, has been turned into violent video games and violent movies.

Proving Karl Marx’s old adage true that History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as Netflix (or HBO or Disney+) historical drama.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing the hanging video screens which display composite feeds from scores of samurai films, TV shows and videogames, with selections of modern samurai merchandise in the display cases (photo by the author)

Modern artworks

All this slashing and bleeding tends to overshadow an interesting aspect of the final section which is that it includes a few pieces of modern and contemporary art. Some of them are by men who fought in the Second World War and lived on to reflect on war and peace. One is by the ‘celebrated’ Japanese artist, Noguchi Tetsuya who, in my ignorance, I’ve never heard of.

Fair enough – but I think these works would have benefited from having their own, quiet space and not being placed next to video screens of hyperactive men in pigtails eviscerating each other with enormous swords.

The paradox of civilised exhibitions about hyper-violence

Thus saturated in the history and imagery of the samurai, when I got home I toyed with watching one or other of the recent samurai movies – 47 Ronin, the Last Samurai, Shogun etc – but they almost immediately had so much hacking off of limbs and necks and blood spurting everywhere that I quickly stopped. On the same day I read about the suicide bomb in Pakistan, the total casualties to date in the Ukraine War, the rapes and murders taking place in Sudan. God knows there’s enough bloody violence in the world without inviting even more into my living room.

And this led onto an obvious reflection that an exhibition like this is, in a sense, the height of civilisation: created by highly educated people working with international networks of museums in Japan, America and elsewhere, to create a beautifully staged show of exquisite objects all described with minute scholarly scrupulousness. And yet the subject of the show is based on appalling violence and butchery.

These beautifully crafted swords which we are encouraged to admire, well, in a clip from a Japanese TV series we watch the hero slash open the chests, cut off the fingers, and behead all-comers in an epic fight using just such a razor sharp sword. They are instruments of atrocious brutality.

I was particularly struck by adjacent cases showing a huge bow, a quiver and some metal arrows. The arrows had obviously been selected for the beauty of their varied designs and the craftsmanship of their metalwork. And yet, as I admired their curves and points, I reflected that they were designed to pierce the advanced armour and undervests which warriors wore, in order to enter the body and cause as much tearing eviscerating damage as possible to muscles and organs.

I looked up and around the lovely calm gallery, at the other old ladies and gentlemen pottering politely between exhibits, and felt for a moment that I’d entered a parallel universe.

Three ages of samurai

Now I’ll go back over the three ages of the samurai in more detail, and naming some of the most striking exhibits in each section. According to the curators, the history of samurai can be divided into 3 periods.

1. 800 to 1600: Rise of the samurai

mid-900s AD: a warrior class emerges in service to the aristocracy
1185: the Minamoto clan establishes the first shogunate (warrior government)
1330s: the Ashikaga clan seizes power and establishes a new shogunate
1570 to 1615: intense conflict as a series of warlords attempt to unify Japan; attempted invasion of Korea

2. 1600 to 1850s: The long peace

1603: the Tokugawa shogunate is established
Japan enjoys 250 years of peace and prosperity
1867–8: after more than a decade of violence between competing samurai clans, the Tokugawa shogunate collapses
1871: Samurai status is abolished; subsequent samurai rebellion fails

3. 1876 to the present: After the samurai

1894 to 1910: conflict with China and Russia for control of the Korean peninsula; Japan annexes Korea
1931 to 1945: Japan participates in the Second World War, ending in defeat
1945 to the present day: in peacetime, the samurai image is taken up around the world in popular culture

Part 1: 900 to 1600: war

The samurai – known in Japan as musha or bushi – were engaged in protracted warfare and gained political dominance from the 1100s. This section includes detailed looks at their arms and armour.

Cuirasses and armour

The small warrior bands (bushidan) of early battles comprised full-time mounted archers and part-time foot soldiers. Archers wore oyoroi armour with a square, loose form, optimised for drawing the bow. The exhibition includes a cuirass (breast and backplates) with no fewer than 2,000 scales of lacquered iron or leather laced together and covered with leather, making it tough yet flexible. The huge shoulder-guards deflected arrows, serving in place of a shield.

Suit of armour and helmet made of iron, silk, wool, leather, gold and lacquer: Japan, 1519 (helmet), 1696 (armour) and 1800s (textiles) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Bows and arrows

Samurai employed a distinctive tactic in which archers on horseback circled and manoeuvred around each other on open ground, while small groups of foot soldiers skirmished in denser, hilly terrain. Archers used a longbow with the grip below the centre that bent more easily. Bows developed from wood coated with lacquer to a more powerful laminate of wood and bamboo, increasing flexibility and the arrows’ flight range. The quiver developed in form from the open ebira (giving easy access to the arrows) to the closed utsubo (designed to protect arrows from humidity.

The establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603 to 1868) ushered in an era of peace. The new government created a social hierarchy with samurai at the top, followed by farmers, artisans and merchants. The superior social status of the samurai derived from their identity as warriors, so they needed to maintain their military training even during peacetime. In earlier centuries archery had been the primary mode of combat (rather than swordsmanship) and it remained an essential military skill. This set of archery equipment comprises two quivers and two bows, with a bowstring, all decorated with the Tokugawa crest.

Set of archery equipment made from wood, lacquer, leather, gold, metal, bamboo, feathers and silk, Japan, 1800 to 1900 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Saddles

Beautiful yet practical, Japanese saddles were designed as platforms for shooting arrows. (I imagine scholars have made comparisons with Scythian saddles, designed for the same purpose.) Made of red oak and richly decorated with lacquer of various colours, they were sometimes inlaid with mother-of-pearl and other fine materials. Thick leather pads provided cushioning. Larger saddle-flaps protected the horse’s flanks from the lacquer-coated iron stirrups, which supported the rider standing up. Arches at the front and back were often decorated with motifs taken from the natural world.

Swords

As mentioned, swords were less important for samurai than archery. For much of the samurai’s existence as warriors, swords played a limited role in warfare. However, they were always markers of status and refinement. Their forms developed over time. The long tachi, worn with the blade down, was suitable for warriors on horseback. Several examples here indicate the sophistication and skill of sword-makers from the 1200s. (Later on we see swords made for entirely ceremonial purposes up to and including the ones handed over by surrendering Japanese officers in 1945.)

A surcoat

Toyotomi Hideyoshi is a prominent figure in samurai history. In the late 1500s he rose from foot soldier – more peasant than samurai class – to the highest rank in the land, thanks to his military ability and political skill. He became a trusted general of the warlord Oda Nobunaga. After the latter’s demise Hideyoshi forged alliances, built palaces and castles, and received the title ‘regent’. This jinbaori (surcoat), with a target design, supposedly belonged to him. Originally protective garments to be worn over armour, jinbaori became statements of the personal taste of the wearer.

Jinbaori (surcoat) Pheasant and drake feathers mounted on hemp, with Chinese silk, Japan, 1570 to 1598 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Beheading

Warfare was brutal and bloody. Samurai warriors cut off enemy heads and presented them to claim rewards from their daimyo (lord). The exhibition includes a handscroll which records the suppression of a revolt in 1083-7. It depicts bodies and limbs lying heaped under a shield. One warrior carries a head on the end of his curved blade (naginata). Another holds his trophy by the hair. ‘Brutal’ is a word which recurs in the descriptions of the warfare of the period.

Culture

And yet throughout this era, alongside his military skills, a fully rounded warrior was expected to be culturally sophisticated. Samurai patronised the arts and hosted social gatherings, including the ritualised consumption of tea. Performances of Nõ, an aristocratic dance-drama, were sponsored by shoguns and regional warlords. Samurai petitioned Buddhist deities for success in combat and a peaceful afterlife. Some samurai were diplomats, travelling to Europe to negotiate trade relations. And the exhibition features extensive displays of the arts of peace and civilised living. This is the other great debunking the exhibition aims to carry out: to show us that samurai weren’t just about relentless warfare, but were also symbols of civilised living.

Hosting

Powerful lords used formal social gatherings to cement relationships with their allies and followers. Such events were richly furnished with paintings and objects. Hosts sat before folding screens decorated with shimmering gold leaf. The exhibition includes several such screens including this one, which depicts cherry trees above a stream, denoting spring, and deutzia flowers at left for summer. It was created during the Muromachi period (1336 to 1573), a time of immense political turmoil and civil wars.

Folding screen made of ink, silver and gold on paper, Japan, 1500 to 1600 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Part 2: 1600 to 1900: peace

Tokugawa shogunate

By 1615, Tokugawa leyasu had achieved military supremacy and boasted the title shögun. After more than a century of warfare, the Tokugawa government brought peace and stability. Japan was divided into about two hundred and sixty domains each with a ruling lord who pledged allegiance to the shogun.

10%

The samurai became a hereditary class forming about ten percent of the population. Beneath them were ranked merchants, artisans and agricultural labourers. The role of samurai changed from warrior to bureaucrat. Men and women of samurai rank participated in the arts and intellectual life. Many were artists and poets and began the process of recording and idealising the the legendary warriors of the past in books, prints and theatre.

Culture of peace

During the long era of peace from 1615, the samurai moved away from the battlefield to serve as government officials, scholars and patrons of the arts, with women making up to half of the samurai class. To demonstrate this the exhibition includes: hanging scrolls, cutlery, incense, woodblock books, fashion plates in the forms of scrolls and hangings, hats and tunics, kimonos, poetry, a sedan chair, naginata or ‘polearms’, spear covers with clan emblems, the miniature toggles known as netsuki, a mirror decorated with peacocks, children’s toys, and much more.

Staging and soundscape

In the first, warrior section, the entire wall is given over to a dramatic film of charging samurai done in a highly stylised way as black silhouettes against a scarlet background. In the peace section there’s an extended (20 minute) soundscape recreating the sounds of Japan’s then capital, Edo (Samurai march and horses hooves thump on the packed earth street. Music from Kabuki theatre drifts in and out, and temple bells ring. There are birds and other wildlife.)

A woman’s firefighting jacket and hood

On loan from the John C. Weber Collection, worn by women serving within Edo Castle. Fires were so common in the wooden city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) that they were known as the ‘flowers of Edo’, and this jacket’s design of tasselled grappling hooks amid surging water evokes protection against the flames. Many women took part in these fire brigades.

Woman’s firefighting jacket and hood made from wool, satin-weave silk appliqué, and silk and gold-thread embroidery, Japan (1800 to 1850) John C. Weber Collection. Photo © John Bigelow Taylor

Nostalgia

In a period of peace, people became fascinated by legendary samurai heroes from the civil wars of the 1180s. Historical tales offered action and fantasy as an escape from everyday life. Print artists, painters and artisans created dynamic renderings of famous samurai in every available medium. Stories of heroism, sacrifice and betrayal provided endless inspiration for theatre.

I’ve mentioned that this part of the exhibition consists of sections or ‘booths’, each one devoted to a particular legendary figure and bringing together woodcuts, prints and other formats in which their adventures were dramatised. I suppose this is a bit like nineteenth century British nostalgia for a bygone age of chivalric heroes, the knights of the Round Table or Sir Walter Scott’s medieval heroes. The samurai heroes described and depicted here include:

Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159 to 1189) who learned special fighting techniques from the King of the Goblins
Kumagai Naozane who challenges the fleeing Taira no Atsumori to a fight but upon removing Atsumori’s helmet, realises he is only young and takes his life tearfully, afterwards, Naozane renouncing the world to become a monk
Nitta Yoshisada (1301 to 1038) who offered up his sword to the Dragon God
the battles of between rival warlords Takeda Shingen (1521 to 1573) and Uesugi Kenshin (1530 to 1578)
Minamoto no Yoshi-ie (1039 to 1106) who, while returning to Kyoto victorious from battle, paused to compose a poem about the poignancy of falling cherry blossoms
The Tale of the Drunken Acolyte (Shūten-dōji) which describes Minamoto no Yorimitsu’s (944 to 1021) quest to vanquish an ogre who abducted and devoured women
Minamoto no Tametomo (1136 to 1170) was an archer of legendary strength and skill in the conflict of the 1150s between the Minamoto and Taira clans. The victorious Taira exiled him to the ‘Isle of Demons’

And so very much on.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing one of the sections or ‘booths’ which gather together 19th century depictions of a specific samurai hero, in this instance Minamoto no Yoshitsune who ‘trained with goblins’ (photo by the author)

Abolition of samurai status

A new government took power in 1868, ruling in the name of the emperor. The new era was named ‘Meiji’, or ‘enlightened government’. In 1869 the samurai’s hereditary status was abolished. Many former samurai struggled to find employment and resented the loss of their stipends and other privileges. They lost their traditional right to wear swords in public. Disaffected ex-samurai gathered in the southwestern island, Kyushu, planning what became known as the Satsuma rebellion until in 1877 government forces moved to suppress them. The exhibition includes dramatic prints of this whole sequence of events.

Ironically, the abolition of the samurai class released thousands of suits of armour onto the market. Huge numbers were exported to Europe and the United States as part of a fashion for medievalism. The show includes an example bought by the architect William Burges (1827–81) and displayed at his house in Holland Park, London.

Part 3

Japanese imperialism

From the 1890s onwards, Japan was involved in military conflicts in a struggle for geopolitical influence. The ‘samurai legacy’, including the supposed bushido ethos, was used domestically as motivation for Japanese soldiers, and as the basis for propaganda and stereotypes by Japan’s enemies during the Second World War (1939–45).

In fact the exhibition argues that foreign powers used samurai images as much or more than the Japanese themselves in order to stereotype their opponents. The impressive poster on the wall in this photo was actually created by an Italian artist, Gino Boccasile, since Japan was allied with Germany and Italy. It celebrates the Japanese sinking of the British ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse in 1941.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing a display case which deals with the use of the samurai image leading up to and during the Second World War (photo by the author)

The curators don’t mention it but this action resulted in the deaths of 840 seamen and the thousand or more survivors went into Japanese captivity where many more died in the brutal conditions inspired by the Japanese military’s ideas of ‘honour’. The war is mentioned here but, in my opinion, the role of the thousand-year-long warrior cult in the formation of Japanese fascism, and in the way they treated the countries they conquered and Allied prisoners of war, isn’t really explored, not as much as it deserves.

Imagine an exhibition which covered the 1,000-year-long role of the Prussian aristocracy and its military ethos up to and including the Second World War but then only briefly mentioned their role in supporting the Nazi regime, and skated over the appalling atrocities which ensued from their sense of their racial and moral superiority, which didn’t mention the Holocaust at all. You’d rightly feel that something was missing.

Same here. Inspired by militaristic pride indissociable from the samurai ideal, wartime Japan committed unspeakable atrocities not only on Allied prisoners but on the populations of conquered Korea and China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Indochina.

Caption showing cover of a Japanese wartime magazine introducing students to the Japanese values of bushido (photo by the author)

Sure, the exhibition includes a 1942 magazine cover showing a Japanese instructor in its newly conquered colony, the former Dutch East Indies, introducing students to bushido, the military’s guiding ethos (see above). And there’s a shin-guntō sword with scabbard, of the type all Japanese soldiers were meant to wear to associate themselves with the samurai ideal. There’s another sword handed over to a British general at the surrender with a photo of the event. And that’s it, when it comes to homegrown Japanese products.

There are samurai-themed images created by foreigners, like the Italian poster shown above, a British cartoon of a samurai in Punch and mention of a Nazi pamphlet which praised the samurai warrior ethos. But that’s about it. There’s almost as much in the next section about Star Wars memorabilia (because Darth Vadar’s helmet and uniform were influenced by samurai armour).

To be fair to the curators, if you check out the exhibition catalogue it looks as if there are 30 or more pages which go into the role of the samurai ideal in Japanese fascism in much more detail. So it looks like it’s been worked through in print but not so much in the physical exhibition which most people will visit.

Fun, film and video games

Instead, much more space is devoted to the post-war era when Japan (under American control for a decade) reinvented itself as a peaceful producer of hi tech goods and products. This is the section which goes heavy on umpteen movies and TV shows which have exploited / recycled the samurai image, not to mention a slew of video games.

Hence the monitors showing suitable violent clips from popular video games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (2025) and Nioh 3 (2026). Apparently, the latter game launched just three days after the exhibition opened. If you read the (characteristically thorough and informative) object label you discover that in Nioh 3 you play as the heir of the shogun, tasked with stopping the spread of non-human powers across four eras in Japanese history, while encountering famous figures, such as the famous 16th century warlord Takeda Shingen. What better way to while away the hours?

Still from the videogame Nioh 3, 2026. Koei Tecmo

Summary

Amazing exhibition. Beautifully staged, with the dramatic animated backdrops and atmospheric soundscapes. Nearly 300 objects, far too many to process in one visit, giving you a tremendous overview of samurai culture in all its historical extent and cultural breadth. I’ve mentioned my personal reservations about the wartime period, but they don’t detract the impact of such a carefully curated collection of stunning objects. An amazing achievement.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing the beautiful, themed set design – imagine the 20-minute-long soundscape of street sounds from 16th century Edo echoing round you as admire the beautiful artefacts and read the fascinating captions (photo by the author)

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by Simon on February 7, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History, Japan

Tagged Archers, Ashikaga clan, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Battle of Awazu, beheading, British Museum, brutality, bushi, bushidan, bushido ethos, China, consumer capitalism, cutlery, daimyo, Darth Vadar, Disney, ebira, Edo Castle, enlightened government, exhibition, fashion plates, female samurai, first shogunate, flowers of Edo, Gino Boccasile, hanging scrolls, HBO, historical drama, history, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse, Holland Park, incense, Japan, Japan civil wars, Japanese Empire, Japanese fascism, Japanese history, Japanese imperialism, Japanese nationalism, jinbaori, kimono, King of the Goblins, knights of the Round Table, Korea, Kumagai Naozane, London, longbow, manga comics, Meiji era, Minamoto clan, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, Minamoto no Yoshi-ie, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Muromachi period, musha, naginata, Nõ, Netflix, netsuki, Nioh 3, Nitta Yoshisada, Noguchi Tetsuya, Oda Nobunaga, oyoroi, polearms, Punch, saddles, samurai armour, Samurai helmet, samurai rebellion, samurai tradition, Satsuma rebellion, Second World War, sedan chair, shin-guntō sword, shogun, Shogunate, Shūten-dōji, Sir Walter Scott, soundscape, spear covers, Star Wars, surcoat, swords, tachi, Takeda Shingen, the Isle of Demons, The Tale of the Drunken Acolyte, Tokugawa leyasu, Tokugawa shogunate, Tomoe Gozen, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, utsubo, video games, video screens, violence, warlordism, William Burges, woodblock books, woodblock print

Posted by Simon on February 7, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/07/samurai-the-british-museum/

Alberto Giacometti and Daria Martin @ Tate Modern

In my ignorance I didn’t even know ‘the Tanks’ at Tate Modern existed. Instead of going in the main entrance, go round the back to the entrance of the Blavatnik Building (next to the shop), then instead of catching a lift to a higher gallery or the bridge across to the main building, walk down the wide concrete spiral staircase. This brings you to a dark and claustrophobic warren of spaces with big beams and arches made of raw concrete, which makes it feel like an underground car park. And it’s in this gloomy space that Tate have arranged a display creating a dialogue between two artists, Alberto Giacometti and Daria Martin.

Alberto Giacometti in the Tanks at Tate Modern, showing (from left to right) ‘Four figurines on a stand’, ‘Tall figure II’ and ‘Woman of Venice IX’ (photo by the author)

Giacometti figures

Giacometti is, of course, famous for the stick-thin, elongated statuettes or figurines he developed during and after the Second World War. The classic way to read them is through an existentialist filter, as post-Holocaust, post-atom bomb figures, wasted and mutilated by war and horror. As you can see they are displayed here with dramatic son-et-lumiere lighting which emphasises darkness and shadows.

Alberto Giacometti in the Tanks at Tate Modern, showing ‘Man pointing’ from 1947 (photo by the author)

Giacometti sculptures

But before the war, in the 1930s, Giacometti was involved in Parisian surrealism and made a series of surrealist-inspired cage-like sculptures. One of these is displayed in a funky circular room off to one side, which has retained its original industrial iron girders and riveting. Within an expensive glass case is displayed the work titled ‘Hour of the Traces’.

Alberto Giacometti in the Tanks at Tate Modern, showing ‘Hour of the Traces’ from 1932 (photo by the author)

What appear to be, or nearly are, household objects (a small table, a coat hanger) are placed in precarious balance to create a mobile indicating, maybe, precarity and fragility, the sense of vulnerability Giacometti was to carry over into his wasted, burned-away figures.

Daria Martin

Daria Martin (born 1973) is a contemporary American artist and filmmaker based in London since 2002. In a space next to the Giacomettis, and in the same subterranean gloom, there’s a big screen onto which is projected one of her films, ‘In the Palace’. This shows four performers holding poses within a cage-like structure as the camera circles round them.

And the connection between the two artists? Well, the set Martin’s performers move in is a large-scale reproduction of Giacometti’s 1932 sculpture ‘The Palace at 4 a.m.’ Martin explains that her film started as a daydream about what it would be like to enter one of Giacometti’s surreal-era sculptures and developed from there. The eventual result was a 25-foot-high version of The Palace that she built with art-school friends and then choreographed the performers’ movements within.

Installation view of the film ‘In the Palace’ by Daria Martin (2000) (photo by the author)

The performance is accompanied by a soundtrack of birdsong and rain, which both feel rather incongruous in this dark and forbidding post-industrial setting. In fact, for me, the architectural setting itself was the star – all those slabs and columns and unfinished walls of raw concrete rather overwhelmed the changing gestures of the performers in the film, let alone the subtle angles and perspectives generated by the moving camera.

Conclusion

There are ten Giacometti sculptures here. If you’re a big Giacometti fan it may be worth the pilgrimage to Tate Modern just to see them, not in the usual antiseptic white gallery, but staged with dramatic lighting effects in these echoing catacombs. For non-fans maybe not quite worth the trek but, if you’re visiting Tate Modern anyway, definitely worth a 15-minute detour to see this atmospheric display.

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by Simon on November 29, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Film, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on November 29, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/29/alberto-giacometti-and-daria-martin-tate-modern/

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World @ the National Portrait Gallery

From the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones…

Introduction

Cecil Beaton (1904 to 1980) was a phenomenon. He made himself into the leading fashion photographer of his day, but that was far from being his only achievement: he was also a fashion illustrator, a painter, a writer of fashion essays and books (34 books in total), a social caricaturist, a serious wartime photographer, a costume and set designer for theatre and the movies, while all the time keeping one of the classic celebrity diaries of the century (at his death he left no fewer than 143 diaries which were published in 6 handsome volumes).

But the core of his achievement was the forty years he spent as a leading figure in fashion photography and that’s what this grand exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on. Aptly titled ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’, it is the first exhibition to exclusively explore Beaton’s pioneering contributions to fashion photography.

It’s designed to be a landmark show, with some 250 items on display, mostly wonderful photos but also including Beaton’s:

drawings
illustrations
magazine covers
a youthful home movie he and friends made of fooling around
several painted portraits of him by artist friends
and, in display cases:
- a handsome collection of first editions of 20 or so of his books
- the actual Kodak camera he did his early work on
- the Oscar he won for ‘My Fair Lady’

1920s and ’30s

After the Second World War Beaton spent more time doing set and stage design, and in America working in Hollywood. It’s from this period that date the many classic portraits of notable actors and artists and, in particular, of Hollywood stars from the 1950s and ’60s, which many of us are familiar with. These are regularly shown in exhibitions with titles like ‘Cecil Beaton: Portraits’ but that’s not what this one is about. This one really does focus on his fashion photography and related work (illustrations, covers, books) and so has lots of his photos for Vogue magazine from 1927 to 1937, depicting upper-middle class debutantes and society ladies in wonderfully elaborate outfits against ornately staged backdrops, none of whom we’ve heard of and will ever hear of again.

Princess Emeline De Broglie by Cecil Beaton (1928) Gelatin silver print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Thus the very first room hosts 16 very big silver gelatin prints which survive from the landmark exhibition of Beaton portraits which the National Portrait Gallery held back in 1968. The curators point out that it was the first such show accorded a living photographer and helped to cement his reputation as ‘the finest arbiter of taste of the twentieth century’. And these 16 big black-and-white portraits are, indeed, stunning in composition and execution. But what I’m saying is they’re all of people you and I have never heard of: society figures from the 1920s and ’30s who are long forgotten. For example:

Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala, 1935
The Honourable Mrs Richard Norton (Jean Norton), late 1920s
Paula Gellibrand, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928
Mrs Harrison Williams (Mona Williams), 1936
Hazel, Lady Lavery, late 1920s
Mrs Robert H. McAdoo (Lorraine McAdoo), 1934
Lady Sylvia Ashley, 1934
Mrs Allan Ryan, Junior (Janet Ryan), 1929
Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, 1932

A few leading actors are included (the beautiful young Vivienne Leigh) but the Hollywood celebs, for the most part, come a lot later.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing three portraits from the first room recreating of the 1968 show: note the elaborate paper-cut roses on the wall, echoing Beaton’s classic floral backgrounds (photo by the author)

Beaton’s beginnings

After this introductory room of greatest hits from the 1920s, The show is laid out in a straightforward chronological order. It starts with Cecil being born the son of a prosperous timber merchant in Hampstead. He had two sisters (Nancy and Barbara aka ‘Baba’) who appear in his earliest photos, as well as photos of his mother, Etty. After prep and public school, he got a place at Cambridge, where he studied history, art and architecture but wasn’t very academically minded and put most of his energy into theatre and the Footlights Revue.

The early rooms contain photos of his two glamorous sisters, Cambridge friends and society contacts. These include a wonderful picture of the artist Rex Whistler posing as a character from a Watteau painting. We learn that this was one of a series of tableaux en fête champêtre (‘pictures from a country festival’), a homage to the stylised paintings of Lancret, Watteau and Fragonard held at Wilsford Manor, Stephen Tennant’s family home, which Cecil organised in the summer of 1927. Next to it is a large portrait of Stephen Tennant, brightest of the Bright Young Things.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing the big portrait of a young Stephen Tennant

It’s in this room that the home movie is showing. It was made at Weirbridge Cottage near Savay Farm, Denham, in Buckinghamshire, the country home of the Mosley family and featured Bright Young Things such as Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman, Georgia Sitwell, John Strachey, and the ubiquitous Tennant.

The point is Beaton’s ambition and determination. His parents were affluent enough to send him to private school and Cambridge but the rest was up to him and so he became a networker of genius. He managed to be taken up by all the important cultural circles of the day, namely: 1) Lady Ottoline Morell, the famous hostess of artists and writers at her country house, Garsington Manor, 2) the Sitwells, led by the poetess Edith Sitwell.

Charming, clever, charismatic, ambitious, talented, Beaton made friends and contacts wherever he went and people were flattered to be photographed by him. So in this room are photos of Lady Ottoline and some of her circle, of Edith and her brothers Sacheverell and Osbert. He is quoted as saying he learned an immense amount about posh upper-class manners and taste from his stays at Sacheverell’s country house at Weston Hall, Northamptonshire. Study, copy, rise.

Originally taken for the larks, Beaton’s photographs of Tennant and his circle now have considerable historical value, being considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties.

What comes over from all these wonderful black-and-white shots is the extent to which modernist art had been assimilated into the culture, especially in the 1920s. The tranquil rural settings of the Watteau homages are the exceptions because most of the photos are highly stylised interiors, taken against often striking Art Deco backgrounds, which make the photos works of art in themselves, as in the striking polka dot backdrop for Princess Emeline De Broglie, above. Here’s an installation view showing half a dozen of his wonderfully stylised 1920s and ’30s portraits. Note the striking modernist backdrops, the lovely outfits and the dramatic poses.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery

One modernist technique he used to dramatic effect was deploying multiple exposures. There are one or two examples here, although not the famous masterpiece, his portrait of Nancy Cunard.

Cecil’s self-creation

Part of Beaton’s ambition to get into the best social and artistic circles of the day was the drive to invent himself, to curate, mould and promote his own image. One result was that, over the years, a huge number of photos were taken of Beaton himself, a large number of artful self portraits but also portraits by other snappers, especially in his post-war celebrity period. The curators boast that the National Portrait Gallery alone holds 360 portraits of Beaton, by some of the most celebrated practitioners ranging from Man Ray to Richard Avedon, Dorothy Wilding to David Bailey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Arnold Newman. And so the exhibition includes photos of:

Cecil play-acting as King Cnut
Cecil outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice
Cecil in Room 1806 at the Ambassador Hotel, New York
Cecil dressed up as the popular novelist Elinor Glyn
Cecil on the Menai Suspension Bridge
Cecil in RAF photographer’s uniform, the Western Desert
Cecil and Truman Capote in Tangier
Cecil and Audrey Hepburn on the set of My Fair Lady
Cecil looking grand in a cloak by the great American photographer Irving Penn in 1950

And many more.

Cecil’s stagings

I thought the single most important piece of information in the exhibition was the curators’ own observation that Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer. Instead, he focused on staging a compelling model or scene.

At school, university and after there’s plenty of evidence that he loved the theatre, loved staging plays and performances (the home movie, the Watteau series), loved not just acting in them but costume and set designing. Indeed, it was not just photography alone but his ability to make designs for the charity galas staged by fashionable London society, which boosted his reputation among the rich and titled. Here’s an installation view showing three of his photo portraits from a 1930s charity ball, which demonstrate just how elaborate these settings could be, almost dwarfing the human subjects. Note the mad profusion of flowers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery (photo by the author)

Once this talent for dressing a set is explained you see it everywhere. We are told that Beaton owned a couple of trunks full of props and spent a lot of time dressing and arranging the set or backdrop before he got around to the person or model to be shot. In so many of the shots it’s the dress and costume the sitter is wearing (this is fashion, after all) that has a lot to do with it – but what made it so Beaton would be the elaborateness or artfulness of the backdrops.

And so this is what a lot of the photos here consist of: classic debutante and society shots from the ’20s and ’30s – tall, elegant ladies in stunningly beautiful dresses, against stylishly imaginative backdrops. Here’s a photo which demonstrates both his flair for self-presentation and an example of his elaborate and stylish backdrops, in a self-portrait from the 1930s. See what I mean by ornate and elaborate backdrops. And flowers. Lots of cut flowers.

Cecil Beaton (c.1935) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

The sources of Cecil’s style

Almost entirely self-taught, Beaton established a highly distinctive photographic style which combined 1) Edwardian stage portraiture, 2) hints of contemporary European surrealism, 3) the more modernist approach of the great American photographers of the era, all filtered through 4) a pointedly English sensibility. The more I looked the more this ‘English sensibility’ could be summarised as lots of flowers.

Once you’ve recognised these elements, you can see how the mix varied in different shots or periods. For example, the portraits of his arty friends (the BYTs, the Sitwells) use a European modernist sensibility, all Art Deco lines and geometric backdrops, whereas the debutante balls are all English roses (lots and lots of roses). When, in the 1950s, he did Hollywood film stars, there are a few staged settings but most are shot in a more American, democratic, unstaged way. The famous portraits of Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe are all about capturing (supposedly) unstaged and natural moments.

Elizabeth Taylor by Cecil Beaton (1955) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Reflecting on this, you realise that being invited to do the costume and set design for the Broadway musical, and then for the movie version, of ‘My Fair Lady’ was a dream come true for Beaton, because it is a costume drama, a period piece, set in his beloved Edwardian era, but heightened and stylised through a 20th century sensibility. The outfit and backdrop in the photo below, for instance. They have the feel and apparent shape of an Edwardian outfit, but the details of the dress design, and especially the receding square of the backdrop, owe more to the 1960s Op Art of Bridget Riley than the 1900s world of Edward Elgar.

Audrey Hepburn in costume for ‘My Fair Lady’ by Cecil Beaton (1963) The Cecil Beaton Archive, London

Beaton and British Vogue

Cecil managed to sell his first photo to British Vogue while still an undergraduate and signed a contract with them in 1927. For the next decade he worked as a staff photographer for Vogue and the core of the exhibition is lots of work from this period. This includes not just fashion shoots but illustrations and covers.

Regarding the illustrations, about half a dozen are on show here, all of them are good, and some of them are sublime. Obviously it’s fashion with its eternal body fascism, so all the women are immensely tall with unfeasibly long necks but, if you enter that world, those are the rules.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing one of Beaton’s many fashion drawings: note the extreme thinness and elongation of the models; in fashion, everything changes and yet nothing changes

Vogue covers

More light is shed on Beaton’s strengths and weaknesses in the matter of magazine covers. You’d have expected the young genius to have supplemented his elaborate fashion shoots with umpteen cover shoots for Vogue but, surprisingly, no. Very few of his classic shots made it onto the cover of Vogue. This was, apparently, because he was too opinionated to submit to the requirements of art directors who needed to arrange images to have lots of text imposed over them. Cecil wouldn’t play ball. So surprisingly few covers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ showing the display case of holding some of his (relatively few) magazine covers (photo by the author)

Cecil’s antisemitism

Then disaster struck. In 1937, for reasons he could not immediately explain, as he put the finishing touches to a finely-detailed decorative border to a double-page illustration for Vogue, Beaton added in tiny writing an antisemitic slur – basically, he used the k word. Though almost microscopic, it did not go unnoticed. 130,000 copies of the early February 1938 edition were pulped as the magazine’s editors fielded a backlash from advertisers who threatened a boycott. Condé Nast forced Beaton’s resignation from Vogue. Beaton’s humiliation was sudden and total. Then again, this is the world of fashion. Two years later, partially rehabilitated by the seriousness of his war photography (see below), Vogue rehired him.

The Royals

In 1939, much to his own surprise, Beaton was invited to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth, wife of the reigning monarch, George VI. Only two years earlier he had potentially alienated the Royals by doing portraits of the two figures at the heart of the scandal which rocked the family, the 1936 Abdication Crisis, namely Edward Prince of Wales and the American divorcee he fell in love with, Wallis Simpson. His 1937 portraits of them are here and very impressive, too, especially Wallis in a striking black and white Schiaparelli jacket.

But despite having taken stylish photos of the Royals’ enemy, he was now invited into the heart of the establishment, to take photos of the loyal Royals, and this was to open up a whole new aspect of his career. Queen Elizabeth (who was to become the Queen Mother) was charming, her husband mild and unassuming, and he took various sets of them. But over the next decade or more it was their daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth, who stole the show, who emerged from girlhood into young maturity and be captured in a series of photoshoots. Beaton was the official photographer for her coronation (2 June 1953), and captured the growth of her young family. There’s a great shot of her with the toddler Prince Charles.

Meanwhile, her sister, the more fashionable and flirtatious Princess Margaret, was also given the Beaton treatment, but in a more stylish and elegant manner than her more homely sister. Beaton’s long association with the Royals, during which he helped to mould their public image, has been the subject of more than one exhibition and numerous books.

Cecil Beaton: royal photographer

War photographer

If Beaton’s reputation was dented by the antisemitism scandal, it was in part rehabilitated by the advent of war in September 1939. He was recruited into the Ministry of Information and tasked with creating propaganda photos. At first these focused on the Home Front, especially during the Battle of Britain (10 July until 31 October 1940) and the Blitz (7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941). This section of the show features a fashionably dressed young woman set against a completely bombed-out London building.

But the star of the section is the iconic photo Beaton took of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet joined the war, but images like this did much to create the climate of public opinion in the States favourable to lending Britain arms and materiel.

The Men Who Fly Planes by Cecil Beaton (1941) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

I haven’t really brought out Beaton’s work rate. You don’t become the leading fashion photographer of your age by accident. It took a lot of hard work, ambition and commitment, honing your craft, maintaining contacts and delivering the goods. And the point of mentioning this now is that when the war came, Beaton applied the same commitment and work rate to his war work. At first on the domestic subjects of the Blitz and air battle but, once it was possible, he travelled beyond Britain to other theatres of war, to document all aspects of the war effort: from the shipyards of Tyneside to the Middle East and then the Far East to record the war against Japan.

In total Beaton took some 7,000 photographs for the Ministry of Information covering all aspects of the Second World War, and produced an impressive ten books with titles like ‘History Under Fire’ and ‘Air of Glory’. Like so many other aspects of Beaton’s career this one, too, has been the subject of an exhibition, held, appropriately enough, at the Imperial War Museum.

Cecil Beaton: war photographer

So much so that I wondered: why is there a whole section devoted to Beaton’s war photography in an exhibition about fashion?

Two country homes: Ashcombe and Reddish

The exhibition takes another digression away from purely fashion shoots to devote a room to Beaton’s two homes. From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. It was a small, elegant house, undisturbed for years and Beaton lavished years of care, decorating and adorning it with tasteful theatricality, and it became a venue for hosting his many friends in the arts.

Unfortunately, when the lease expired in 1945 it couldn’t be renewed, so he was bereft for a few years. Then, in 1947, he discovered Reddish House, a ‘miniature Queen Anne jewel-box of a house’, set in a couple of acres of gardens, a few miles east of the village of Broad Chalke.

Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Once again, it became a venue for visitors, friends and celebrities, not least his sometime inamorata, Greta Garbo (the very improbable affair between Beaton and Garbo lasted from 1946 to 1960). Grand personages for a quiet English backwater. Beaton remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the parish church graveyard.

State and film design

In Britain, the end of the war saw a continuation of rationing and austerity. The most obvious change in Beaton’s world was the advent of colour photography. During the 1930s colour image making was a labour-intensive exercise and Beaton wasn’t fond of it. Technological advancements in colour reproduction had been led by The Condé Nast Publications at its state-of-the-art printing works outside New York so that Vogue was at the cutting edge. The curators claim that Beaton made some of his most
impressive fashion photographs in colour, usually within his trademark stylised format. Frankly, I’m not so sure.

The room of post-war colour photos seemed to me by far the weakest. His colour photos lack the style, precision and thrilling modernity of the black and white ones. I can think of no better way of saying it than that the subjects in the 1920s and ’30s black-and-white images look like flawless gods and legends whereas the people in his colour photos look like people, freckles and skin blemishes and all. Here’s one of his solo colour portraits from just after the war. Nicely staged and lit and everything, but… plain. Amazing dress, lovely little bouquets etc… But lacking any oomph.

At the Tuxedo Ball (Nancy Harris) by Cecil Beaton (1946) The Condé Nast Archive, New York

He’s a lot better when he can arrange his figures into the kind of idealised, stylised Edwardian drawing room ambience which became his post-war brand, as here, less close-up, more stylised. Like a set design.

Worldly Colour (Charles James evening dresses) by Cecil Beaton (1948) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Designer for stage and screen

Possibly this is why his post-war career took a detour away from photography back towards his first love of the stage, costumes and theatrical design. Immediately after the war, in 1946, he designed sets, costumes and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which he also acted. Eight years later, in 1956, he won plaudits for the costumes he designed for Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist and librettist) and Frederick Loewe (composer)’s musical play ‘My Fair Lady’. The association led to the invitation to be designer to the Lerner and Loewe film musical, ‘Gigi’, in 1958. And then, the climax of his career, to design costumes for the award-winning movie version of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, released in 1964. Astonishingly, Beaton won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for both these movies.

The last room in the exhibition is devoted to Beaton’s designs for and photos of the stars of ‘My Fair Lady’, not least a montage of shots of the incomparable Audrey Hepburn, along with a couple of the original star of the stage production, Rex Harrison, and the young actress who made the part onstage but was dropped in favour of Hepburn, Julie Andrews (note the roses).

Celebrities

As mentioned, before the war it’s mostly debutante and fashion photos of the 1920s and ’30s are of people we’ve never heard of (apart from the Royals). It’s after the war, when he went to work in America, that Beaton started shooting celebrity actors and performers in large numbers. Thus the exhibition includes memorable portraits of:

John Wayne
Gary Cooper
Fred Astaire
Katherine Hepburn
Buster Keaton
Johnny Weismuller
Marlon Brando
Yul Brynner
Joan Crawford
Elizabeth Taylor
Marilyn Monroe

Artists:

Salvador and Gala Dali
Lucien Freud
Francis Bacon

Comments

1. Absence of analysis

Exhibition curator Robin Muir is quoted as saying ‘Beaton’s impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography and design.’ OK. Why? How? Explain what lasting impact he had on 1) fashion, 2) photography, 3) design. What, exactly, were his, say, three major innovations in photography?

I was surprised at the lack of analysis of any of this. Blank assertion a-plenty – he was ‘one of the leading visionary forces of the British twentieth century’, he ‘made a lasting contribution to the artistic lives of New York, Paris and Hollywood’ and so on. Yes, but how exactly? In what way did he ‘mould the visual style between the wars’? Why exactly was he called ‘the King of Vogue’? What was it about his compositions or lighting, his arrangement of models and so on, that defined the age?

The wall captions overflow with names of all the sitters, who they were and who they married or divorced – there’s no end of celebrity tittle-tattle, so that much of the exhibition reads like a society gossip column from a hundred years ago:

Marjorie Seely Blossom (1890-1969) divided her time between New York, Palm Beach and Biarritz, where she cultivated a much-admired rose garden. In a letter to Beaton, Diana Vreeland praised Mrs Wilson as ‘the most divinely beautiful woman that ever was’.

Or:

Lady Mendl, the former Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950), was married late in life and to the surprise of friends, to Sir Charles Mendl, press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. They kept separate
residences but entertained together. An interior decorator of influence, Lady Mendl sits in the circular hall of her Paris home in a blue taffeta dress by Mainbocher. Beaton considered her ‘a woman of unquenchable vitality… a living factory of chic.’

There’s hundreds of miles of this stuff. But insights into the precise nature of Beaton’s innovations and discoveries, what his look consisted of and why it was so influential, or indeed an outline of the main developments in fashion during the 1920s and ’30s – disappointingly little.

2. Comparison with Lee Miller

It’s a happy coincidence that the Beaton exhibition (ends January 2026) is running in parallel with Tate Britain’s exhibition of another pioneering twentieth century photographer, Lee Miller (running until February 2026).

In a nutshell, I think Miller is incomparably the greater photographer and artist. While Beaton had a good eye as a photographer, Lee was a genius. Presumably the Beaton has been carefully curated to be the best of the best and so I was very surprised that quite a few of the photos were actually poor. Some seemed to fail the elementary test of being in focus. Many of the post-war colour images seemed to me clumsy and graceless.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery showing four of Beaton’s colour photos from the 1940s

Many of the debutante photos and, of course, the Royal portraits, are nice. Nicely composed, chaste and demure, cascades of roses complementing billowing dresses etc. I take the point that the style he developed took a lot of effort and flair and so on but they are all, essentially, conservative, in subject matter (all those posh debutantes) and feel and style. Beaton adapted the feeblest British aftershocks of surrealism into his vision, tame and well mannered.

By contrast, Miller went to the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, tracking down and buttonholing Man Ray and forcing herself to become his collaborator and lover. With him she developed dazzling new ways of seeing and using photography (notably the famous solarising technique). The nudes she did in the studio with Man Ray invented new types of beauty, took the concept of the nude to new places. Her surrealist shots of Paris street scenes are inspired. Her war photography was inspired. She not only had a dazzlingly good eye but was brave in the face of actual combat in a way most of us can’t imagine.

For all that Beaton is photographed smiling and larking around, his humour comes over very little in his actual work, whereas Lee Miller’s quirky surreal take on the world comes over in scores of her images.

Maybe Beaton’s concoction from various elements of a sort of modernised Edwardian elegance for the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s was very influential in his day, in fact for a generation – but it is, all of it, tame and contained and good mannered. While Miller blew the lid off photography not once but several times, with the searing intensity of genius.

I know they come from different worlds and are doing different things. ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is a very good, very interesting and very entertaining exhibition. But almost anything by Lee Miller blows it out of the water.

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by Simon on November 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Fashion, Photography, Second World War

Tagged abdication crisis, Air of Glory, Alan Jay Lerner, Antisemitism, Art Deco, Ashcombe House, Audrey Hepburn, Baba Beaton, Barbara Beaton, Battle of Britain, black-and-white photography, Bridget Riley, Bright Young Things, British Vogue, Buckingham Palace, Buckinghamshire, Cambridge, Cambridge Footlights, Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, colour photography, Condé Nast Publications, Denham, Diana Vreeland, Edith Sitwell, Edward Prince of Wales, Eileen Dunne, Elinor Glyn, Elizabeth Taylor, Elsie de Wolfe, Etty, exhibition, fashion, fashion photography, Fragonard, Frederick Loewe, Garsington Manor, George VI, Georgia Sitwell, Gigi, Greta Garbo, High Society, History Under Fire, Hollywood, Illustration, Imperial War Museum, John Strachey, Julie Andrews, King Cnut, Kodak camera, Lady Lavery, Lady Mendl, Lady Ottoline Morell, Lady Sylvia Ashley, Lady Windermere's Fan, Lancret, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Marilyn Monroe, Marjorie Seely Blossom, Menai Suspension Bridge, Ministry of Information, Mosley family, Mrs Allan Ryan, Mrs Harrison Williams, Mrs Robert H. McAdoo, My Fair Lady, Nancy Beaton, National Portrait Gallery, New York, Northamptonshire, Op Art, Osbert Sitwell, Oscar, Paula Gellibrand, photographs, photography, photography exhibition, Prince Charles, Princess Emeline De Broglie, Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, Reddish House, Rex Harrison, Rex Whistler, Robin Muir, Sacheverell Sitwell, Savay Farm, Schiaparelli, Second World War, Sir Charles Mendl, Sita Devi, society, Stephen Tennant, Teresa Jungman, the Blitz, The Honourable Mrs Richard Norton, Truman Capote, Viscountess Castlerosse, Vivienne Leigh, Vogue, Wallis Simpson, war photography, Watteau, Weirbridge Cottage, Weston Hall, Wilsford Manor

Posted by Simon on November 8, 2025

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Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life @ the Courtauld Gallery

‘The laureate of the lunch counter.’

I know. Another American artist. And a very old one. The curators tell us that American painter Wayne Thiebaud had his big stylistic breakthrough back in 1961.

Still, according to the Courtauld, Wayne Thiebaud is ‘one of the most original American artists of the 20th century’, ‘one of the major figures of 20th-century American art’ and ‘ one of America’s most beloved artists’, although it’s a little hard to believe from this relatively small (21 paintings, two rooms) but beautifully presented exhibition.

Everyday Americana

Basically Thiebaud’s schtick, his brand, was realising that everyday objects of mid-century American life – bubble gum dispensers, fruit machines, cake counters in diners – could be painted with the same seriousness as the countless vases, flowers, plates of fish and so on painted by the Old Masters of the European tradition – still lifers from Chardin to Cezanne. Why not? As he put it, in a quote you come across several times in the wall labels, ‘Each era produces its own still life.’

In the mid-1950s Wayne was painting displays of food such as you see in delicatessens or butchers shops but, as the first couple of examples in this exhibition demonstrate, in a blurred and murky style which feels like it owes a lot to Francis Bacon and other Holocaust-haunted existentialist painters.

Meat Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1956) The Kondos Collection

Then he had a Eureka moment. According to the curators:

In 1956 Thiebaud travelled to New York to meet the avant-garde artists working there. Willem de Kooning was especially inspirational and encouraged him to find his own voice and subjects as a modern painter. Back in Sacramento [Thiebaud’s home town], he began painting commonplace objects of American life, largely from memory, and soon crystallised his unique approach, isolating his richly painted subjects against spare backgrounds.

Thiebaud’s big breakthrough was to lighten up and get happy, to paint his subjects 1) with more clarity, accuracy and precision 2) against clean white backgrounds, in order to make them stand out more, in order to make them feel more like exhibits.

Pie Rows by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Wayne Thiebaud Foundation

1961 is the key date because it was in that year that he took this body of modern still lifes to New York looking for a gallery to show them.

Having been rejected by almost all of them his last stop was at a gallery run by a young dealer, Allan Stone. Stone understood what he was doing and took him on. The following year, Thiebaud staged his first solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, which was an overnight success, propelling him into the limelight. Important collectors and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, purchased works and the exhibition sold out. His career was set.

Five Hot Dogs by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image credit: John Janca

Thiebaud’s roots in graphic design

For me the key fact about Thiebaud’s art is that he began his working life as an illustrator and commercial art director. The curators tell us:

Thiebaud lived and worked almost his entire long life in Sacramento, California, and was a longstanding teacher at nearby University of California, Davis. In the 1940s and 1950s, before becoming a painter, he worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director, including a summer spent in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and a role as a graphic designer for the US army as part of his military service during the Second World War.

So he spent years and years honing the ability to present commercial products to best possible advantage. This, it strikes me, has two consequences:

1) At some point he realised: all the effort and creativity devoted to designing adverts and promotions, why not transfer it into the realm of ‘high art’, ‘serious’ art? In a sense his career amounts to making that transfer, that move, from arranging everyday products for commercial photoshoots to arranging everyday products to be painted in a serious, fine art style.

2) It gave him a tremendous ‘eye’. Being a graphic designer means understanding the energy and impact of images within a frame, how to position them, how to create visual effects. Although he was not aiming for advert-level flashiness, nevertheless that eye for a product, a strong fundamental sense of design, underlies all his work.

Three Machines by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Photograph by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Thiebaud and Pop Art

In the same year as his solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, 1962, Thiebaud (born 1920) was included in two historic shows that established the Pop Art movement, alongside other artists of his generation like Andy Warhol (born 1928) and Roy Lichtenstein (born 1923).

Now on the face of it Thiebaud has the classic profile of a Pop artist: 1) a background in commercial design (like Warhol), 2) a belief in taking the everyday bric-a-brac of American consumer life as a subject for fine art, and 3) a predilection for presenting the objects in a sterile, formalised way, like exhibits. I.e. there are no people in them, there’s nobody serving behind his counters, there’s no crowds in the cake shop, there’s no-one pumping the fruit machines, all his objects are painted as if they’re exhibits in a sterile museum context.

BUT Thiebaud never considered himself part of the movement and the thing which sets him apart is this: most Pop Art rejoices in reproducing its objects on flat canvas, prints or silk screens, flat and slick and clean. By sharp contrast, Thiebaud’s work is painterly almost to the point of exaggeration. What this means is that he laid his paint on with a trowel. One of the main things about going to this gallery rather than just flicking through the images online is that online reproductions make them look and flat and clean whereas in the flesh you immediately realise that all the paintings are made of thick layers of paint laid on very heavily, with the brushstrokes big and heavy and deliberately visible.

Also, to emphasise the effect, instead of self-effacing matt paint, he used high shine gloss paint which, under gallery lighting, really brings out the swirl and contours of his brushstrokes. To be honest, after the first half dozen paintings of cakes, cake counters and cake displays, my mind began to glaze over a little. I found it more interesting to go really close up to the paintings and savour the thick, heavy, super-visible brushstrokes, that’s where the interest seemed to me. I took a number of close-ups to try and capture the effect. Note the thick heavy gloopy brushstrokes and the shiny gloss paint in this one.

Detail of cake by Wayne Thiebaud (photo by the author)

And the raw messiness of the paintwork in this one.

Detail of Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) (photo by the author)

This is what the critics mean by ‘painterliness’. They mean the deliberate application of the paint so as to leave each brushstroke and the squeezed out ridges between strokes as visible as possible. And it is this deliberate drawing attention to the paintedness of the works which distinguishes him from the cool, ironic and flat surfaces of all the other Pop artists.

Thiebaud and Abstract Expressionism

One last point. Remember how Thiebaud went to New York in 1956? Pop Art didn’t exist then. The dominant art movement was Abstract Expressionism, epitomised by the splat paintings of Jackson Pollock, all highly visible drips and dribbles. And the artist who encouraged him most was Willem de Kooning, a leading light of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

So you could say that Thiebaud’s achievement was to take an Abstract Expressionist sensibility and apply it to Pop Art subject matter.

Thiebaud’s limited subject matter

The curators make a deal out of how Thiebaud realised the everyday objects of American life were worthy of a high art, fine art, classical treatment, the modern-day equivalent of the great still lives of the European tradition, and they reel off a list of his subject matter: ‘quintessential modern American subjects’ such as cream cakes and meringue pies, hot dogs, candy counters, gumball dispensers and pinball machines.

Yes, but it turns out that these subjects fairly quickly pall. Seen one painting of slices of thick gooey iced cakes on a shop counter and, well, it quickly feels like you’ve seen them all. A moment’s thought makes you realise, that if you take the phrase seriously, we are absolutely surrounded by ‘everyday objects’: phones, cookers, fridge and freezers, pots and pans, tables, chairs, sofas, TVs and that’s just in the home, before you get to streets and cars and buses and taxis and advertising hoardings and street signs, phone boxes and letter boxes and so on, and that’s before you get to the huge variety of buildings you see in an urban environment. Cigarette packets. Chewing gum packets. Newspapers.

Some of this was depicted by the Pop artists or American artists of urban life but none of it is in Thiebaud, along with the other really glaring absence in his work, which is of any people. Looking round each of the two rooms it feels like a very, very restricted, self-imposed restriction of subjects. Here’s a complete list of the 21 paintings in the show:

Meat counter (1956-9)
Pinball machine (1956)
Penny machines (1961)
Cold cereal (1961)
Candy counter (1962)
Caged pie (1962)
Pie rows (1961)
Five hot dogs (1961)
Cup of coffee (1961)
Three cones (1964)
Pie counter (1963)
Boston cremes (1962)
Delicatessen counter (1962)
Delicatessen counter (1963)
Candy counter (1969)
Peppermint counter (1963)
Cakes (1963)
Three machines (gumball machines) (1963)
Yo-yos (1963)
Four pinball machines (1962)
Jackpot machine (1962)

As you can see from the number of counters in this list, the smart-alec critic who called Thiebaud the ‘laureate of the lunch counter’ was actually being very accurate.

Mind you, maybe it’s an artificial uniformity created by the curators. One of the wall labels from a late-60s work (Candy counter, 1969) tells us that by the end of the decade ‘Thiebaud’s work extended beyond still life and, during his long career, he was also famed for his figure paintings and cityscapes.’

Ah. OK. None of that is here. Shame. It would probably be optimal to see the cake works in the broader context of the figures and cityscapes, in other words to have a really extensive retrospective of his career. But the gallery visitor can only judge by what is presented by the curators.

Candy Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1969) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025

American graffiti

Nostalgia. Despite all the burning political issues of the day – the Cold War, the spectre of nuclear war, Civil Rights issues and many more – America was in fact enjoying an economic boom. The 1950s saw affluence spread among the middle classes. Thiebaud’s gloopy still lives, especially the many thickly decorated cakes, convey a sense of this new post-war abundance. A kid in the Depression-era 1930s, for young Wayne all these brightly coloured cakes and candies represented boyish joy and freedom.

Now we know that all these cakes and candies have contributed to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease across the western world. Speaking as a man on a low cholesterol diet, I came to feel surfeited and then a little sickened by the sight of all this sugary poison. We know too much.

But looking at these cake counters and fruit machines and gum machines now, and pondering their provenance from the early 1960s, before (for example) the Vietnam War ruined everything, they also feel like exercises in boyish nostalgia, reminiscent of the candy-coloured nostalgia of a movie like George Lucas’s ‘American Graffiti’.

Comparison with Manet

The curators recommend that we compare and contrast Thiebaud’s arrays of treats with an older work in the Courtauld Collection, Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, a painting Thiebaud greatly admired. If you look away from the dominant figure of the barmaid, you realise that this, too, is a depiction of a counter of treats. They’re mainly alcoholic ones in beautifully rendered bottles but seeing it through Thiebaud’s eyes made me notice for the first time the little pile of mandarin oranges in their shiny glass bowl. Yes, you can see the continuity of interests.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet (1882) The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) © The Courtauld

The most obvious difference is that, whereas the Manet is densely populated with the crowd at a popular bar and features the (rather gawky) interaction between the customer and a barmaid, the Thiebaud paintings on display here contain no human beings at all, not a trace, not in any of them.

Drawings and etchings

There are actually two exhibitions. The one of Thiebaud’s paintings is up in the third floor. A floor below (and easy to miss because of its small doorway) the small gallery devoted to drawings hosts a display of 17 prints and etchings Thiebaud made in the same period (the 1960s). It’s mostly black-and-white prints although four of them have been hand coloured. The display focuses on a portfolio of 17 prints which were published in a 1965 edition titled ‘Delights’.

Two obvious contrasts with the often fairly large paintings in the main display. 1) They’re small, generally A4 size or smaller. 2) They’re flat. They have none of the glossy, gloopy, brushstroke-dominated surface of the paintings. Instead they feel flat and chaste and restrained. Tidy. Sweet (in two senses, given the cakey subject matter).

But they’re almost all of the same very limited topics. Cakes and more cakes, mostly black and white, a few coloured in. An exciting exception is the plate of bacon and eggs.

I sort of liked them, or respected the craftsmanship. In their rather scratchy, sketchy approach they reminded me of the early drawings of David Hockney, which I don’t like very much. The one I liked most was the least characteristic because it was made using graphite i.e. had the warmth and shading of a charcoal drawing, the kind of thing I am more drawn to. It’s a depiction of salt and pepper shakers on a café table. I can’t find it anywhere online so here’s my terrible photo of it.

Installation view of Untitled (Sugar, salt and pepper) by Wayne Thiebaud @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

For Thiebaud completists, there’s a display case containing a first edition of Delights, with a list of all the prints it contained, alongside a display of his etching tools.

Display case containing a first edition of ‘Delights’ alongside Wayne Thiebaud’s etching equipment: note his magnifying glasses at centre back @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

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by Simon on October 24, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Painting, Prints

Tagged 1956, 1961, 20th century American art, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Abstract Expressionism, Allan Stone, American art, American life, Americana, Andy Warhol, art, black-and-white prints, California, Candy counter, Cezanne, Chardin, civil rights, Cold War, commercial design, consumerism, Courtauld, David Hockney, Delights, Edouard Manet, engraving, etching, exhibition, Francis Bacon, graphic design, Illustration, Impasto, jackpot machine, Jackson Pollock, Museum of Modern Art, New York, nuclear war, Old Masters, painterliness, Painting, Pie counter, pinball machine, Pop Art, Prints, Roy Lichtenstein, Sacramento, Second World War, still life, The Courtauld Gallery, Three Machines, University of California Davis, Walt Disney Studios, Wayne Thiebaud, Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life, Willem De Kooning

Posted by Simon on October 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/wayne-thiebaud-american-still-life-the-courtauld-gallery/

Lee Miller @ Tate Britain

This is a quite amazing exhibition, a complete eye-opener not only regarding Lee Miller’s extraordinary range and ability as a photographer and her staggering achievement in so many different fields – but at the same time a portrait of an astonishingly blessed and yet, in parts, harrowing life.

This is the largest retrospective of Miller’s work ever staged and easily fills 11 decent-sized rooms. It features 230 vintage and modern prints, many (especially her wonderful Second World War shots) on show for the first time. You might think that’s a lot of items to take in but if anything it’s not enough. I could easily have lapped up more.

The show also includes a wide range of supporting material, including original copies of the many magazines her work appeared in, numerous copies of Vogue as well as wartime publications.

Quick overview

A quick overview would refer to Miller’s success as:

a fashion model
a muse and icon for avant-garde photographers
an actor in an avant-garde film
a core member of French surrealism
a collaborator with the great Man Ray
a travel photographer in the Middle East
a fashion photographer for Vogue in the 1930s and through the first years of the Second World War
a war photographer, at first in Britain among air crews and suchlike, before being early on the scene at the D-Day landings and at the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps
in post-war life hosting her artist friends at the country house in Sussex she shared with husband Roland Penrose
a late-blooming interest in cordon bleu cookery

In room after room, in one area after another, the visitor comes across amazing photos in a wide range of genres. It’s a staggering achievement and this is a thrilling, mind-boggling exhibition.

The exhibition

As I mentioned the exhibition is in 11 rooms. I’ll give a quick summary of each, with an indication of favourite photos.

Room 1. Fashion model

Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State. Her father was a keen amateur photographer and she posed frequently for him from early childhood. She began modelling professionally in New York City in 1926 (aged 18) while studying painting at the Art Students League. In March 1927, aged just 19, she appeared on the covers of British and American Vogue, drawn in pearls and furs against a glittering city skyline. She was photographed by celebrated figures like Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen and room 1 is full of wonderfully atmospheric 1920s photo shoots.

The photos bring out her height, her strikingly long neck, the rather big nose which gives her a slightly tomboy, androgynous look, which perfectly suited the 1920s era of slender flappers.

The experience of being a model inspired her to become a photographer herself, declaring she would ‘rather take a picture than be one.’ Not only that, but she wanted to be at the cutting edge of photography, which was Europe. So in 1929 she moved to Paris.

Room 2. Association with Man Ray

With extraordinary courage, ambition and chutzpah, Miller tracked down Paris’s leading avant-garde photographer, (the American) Man Ray and announced that she was to be his new student. ‘I told him boldly I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you – and I did.’

Impressed by her looks, confidence and evident ability, Man Ray took her not as a student but as an active collaborator, both a model for many of his most famous photos and a photographer in her own right, and then lover.

Lee Miller And Man Ray: A Love Story In Photography

The famous photo of a woman’s bottom as she kneels forward, revealing her feet, that’s Miller, along with scores of other striking and iconic images.

This room explains how they jointly stumbled across the process of solarisation, the process where a negative or print is partially re-exposed to light during development, leading to a tone reversal effect where bright areas become dark and vice versa. You can see an example on the left in this photo.

The Blood of a Poet

Very quickly Miller was established at the centre of Paris’s surrealism circle. In her role as model, she was invited by Jean Cocteau to star in his ground-breaking surrealist film, Le Sang d’un poète, 1930. In it she appears as a classical statue which comes to life. In a darkened room off to one side, you can watch a 3-minute excerpt.

Room 3. The surreal streets of Paris

By the early 1930s, Miller was fully embedded in Paris’s avant-garde circles, in particular befriending artists associated with surrealism, the movement that rebelled against convention and advocated an aesthetic of chance, randomness and the uncanny.

Having established her own studio, Miller took to photographing the City of Light and created a dazzling series of images. Using the avant-garde strategies of photographing everything from above, from an angle, incorporating disorientating reflections – she rendered everyday sights in the city mysterious and surreal.

My favourites were a pair of bird cages set against the ornate metalwork of a shop window. Or the really surreal one of a woman reaching her hand up and behind her to touch her hairdo in a hairdressers’ but which makes the hand look like an alien creature. Tate press give us this one to use, of a sheet of semi-congealed tar oozing across the pavement towards a pair of anonymous feet. All of them weird and wonderful and inspiring.

Returning to New York in 1932, she set up Lee Miller Studios Inc. and opened her first solo exhibition. In both the United States and Europe, Miller exhibited regularly alongside fellow pioneers of modern photography and her work was published in numerous artistic journals and magazines.

Room 4. Egypt and other destinations

By 1934 Miller had spent two years running a commercial studio in Depression-era New York and felt burnt out by the repetitive demands of high-profile clients and brands. In that year she met the Egyptian businessman and engineer Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New York City to buy equipment for the Egyptian National Railways, and they were married.

Aziz Eloui Bey (1938)

At first Miller renounced photography entirely. thanks to her rich husband she no longer needed to earn a living. But a trip to Jerusalem in 1935 reignited her creative spark, and she returned to the camera as a tool of experiment and exploration. Over the next four years, Miller made regular expeditions across remote Egyptian deserts, as well as through Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, Romania and Greece.

Bird Rock (1937)

This room contains lots of stunning images from these trips, images of the desert, tracks in the sand, decrepit cars, a pile of sandals made from car tyres, the strange and disorientating architecture of the desert world.

In Cairo Miller took a photograph of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and used as inspiration for his 1938 painting Le Baiser. Miller also contributed an object to the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery in 1934. There’s a great one of bleached snail shells on an old tree.

The room also includes striking black-and-white images of peasants in Greece, Albania and the other ‘exotic’ countries she visited during this period. All of them are good, some are outstanding. I particularly liked the one with the three Albanian peasants and their two bears.

By 1937, Miller had grown bored with her life in Cairo. She returned to Paris and went to a party the day she arrived, where she reconciled with Man Ray, and met the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose who she would marry in May 1947.

Room 5. Arty friends

Charismatic, creative and intelligent, Miller befriended many of the leading artists and intellectuals of her day and throughout her carer created striking, candid, intimate portraits of them.

‘It takes time to do a good portrait … [and] find out what idea of himself or herself he has in mind.’

There’s a set of entertaining ones of Charlie Chaplin, who claimed the shoot was one of the most entertaining days of his life, and best of which appeared in a popular French cinema magazine as well as in modernist photography exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.

With Picasso Miller had a long and fruitful relationship, taking over 1,000 photos of him during their lives.

Picasso and Dora Maar (1937)
Picasso and Claude Picasso (1949)
Picasso with baby from his sculpture Femme à la poussette (1954)
Picasso and Georges Braque, La Fournas (1954)
Picasso by Lee Miller (1958)
Picasso with Roland Penrose in front of ‘The Three Dancers’ painted in 1925 (1965)

Having returned to Paris in 1937, she took intimate portraits of the surrealists in the troubled period of the late-30s, many of them jolly snaps of larky group holidays. These include Eileen Agar, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Leonora Carrington and many more.

Room 6. Vogue and war

Miller moved back from Paris to London to join her lover, Roland Penrose, in September 1939, just as World War Two kicked off.

As a US citizen, Miller was ineligible for war work in the UK and so she offered her services to British Vogue. Before long, with more established figures tied up, she was the magazine’s leading photographer, and this room contains some of her wonderful, inspired photoshoots in wartime London, including shots of the editorial staff busking it after the offices were Blitzed.

Here is Vogue, in spite of all (1940)

Room 7. Photographing the Blitz and women’s war

From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941 London was blanket bombed by the Germans. Some 30,000 people were killed during the Blitz but Miller wasn’t the only one to notice the bizarre and surreal imagery produced by intensive bombing of urban landscapes. Placing pristine, beautifully dressed models in tailored outfits against the rubble created jarring but striking images. The Blitz was a whole new look.

All aspects of wartime life inspired Miller, from a documentary news-style photo like:

You will not lunch in Charlotte Street today (1940)

To consciously surreal compositions like:

And a great one of a melted typewriter, titled Remington Silent to jokily echo the Remington typewriter company’s advertising claim that their typewriters were very quiet. Well, this one’s never going to bother anyone again.

Remington Silent, London, England 1940

Her sense of humour was never far away.

Many of Miller’s Blitz photographs were published as a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941). Although intended primarily for a US audience, it proved highly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and there are several copies open to various pages here in a display case.

At least ten of her photographs were also included in ‘Britain at War’, an influential exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Touring North and South America over the next three years, these works shaped international perceptions of the Blitz.

Women’s war

Several walls here hold photos describing women’s lives in war. British women, conscripted for the first time from 1941, poured into the workplace. Miller took inspiration photos of women working as mechanics, journalists and searchlight operators, a striking photo of a woman fighter pilot in her cockpit, her photos were a vital contributions to the war effort.

Wrens parachute packing factory (1941)
A Polish pilot [Anna Leska] who flies a Spitfire for the A.T.A. (1942)
Wrens’ Airbourne radio mechanic (1944)

Room 8. In warzones

Once the USA had joined the war (Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941) Miller was able to apply to become an accredited war correspondent with the US Army. This she did in late 1942. She continued to take photos of war work in Britain. it was only after the Normandy landings of June 1944, that she – like most correspondents – was able to follow the army into combat.

This room contains vivid photos of the Normandy beaches still littered with wreckage, and then a series depicting the claustrophobic lamplit environment of army field hospitals, and then photos of sometimes grossly injured soldiers in their makeshift beds.

Most of these stories were produced for Vogue with whom she’d kept all her contacts. She produced a regular supply of not only photos but reporting to accompany them. Up till now she hadn’t written much but she proved a natural journalist, producing vivid first-hand descriptions of what she saw as she followed the US Army in its fiercely contested progress across Europe.

Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing the case containing Miller’s war correspondent uniform and, at the left hip, her lightweight Rolleiflex camera (photo by the author)

She turned out to have the journalist’s fundamental skill, being in the right place at the right time. In France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Romania she produced a range of images: some, as mentioned, of field hospitals, others artillery exploding on nearby buildings. In many of them she drew on the surrealist aesthetic to bring out the absurdity as well as the stupid cruelty of war.

Lee Miller’s Second World War @ the Imperial War Museum

Room 9. The Holocaust

The war thread reaches a peak of horror in room 9. This displays the photos Miller took after entering Buchenwald concentration CAMP on 16 April 1945, soon after it had been liberated. Two weeks later, on 30 April, she visited Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich. Thirty-five years later I went to Dachau.

Most of these photos have never been seen before. They show piles of bones or prisoners so starved they were little more than skin and bones.

A pile of starved bodies (1945)

The trains pulling cattle wagons which used to be packed full of victims, now bestilled in the summer heat with just a few corpses lying around on the gravel. There’s a sequence showing Nazi camp guards who have been soundly thrashed. And one which really stuck in my mind, a discomfortingly idyllic one of a dead German camp guard floating in a ditch or canal – a kind of mid-twentieth century version of Millais’s Ophelia, which hangs not far away in Tate Britain.

Miller’s Rolleiflex camera had no zoom lens and so, in order to get the shots, she had to get very close to the subjects, to all those piles of corpses, to the starved inmates dying of disease in the barracks. Up close with the worst evil in history.

This is a devastating subject, Miller captured images with her usual skill and eye for detail, but the experience marked her for life.

Months later, she was among the first to reach Hitler’s weekend retreat at Berchtesgarten just as American GIs began to loot it. In images overflowing with historical irony, she and her war photographer comrade David E. Scherman photographed each other taking baths in Hitler’s own personal bath The sight of the enemy cavorting in the most private inner sanctum of the great Leader rammed home the message of total defeat. It also represented the par washing off the filth and grime of months living through the apocalypse which the deranged leader started. And, for Scherman who was Jewish, a particularly sweet and apposite revenge on the Antisemite-In-Chief.

Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath (Facebook page)

Unbeknown to Miller and Scherman as they set up these shots, just a few hours later Hitler and Eva Braun would commit suicide in their bunker in Berlin and the war in Europe would soon be over.

Room 10. War’s aftermath

But the suffering wasn’t over, not for tens of millions of people, not by a long chalk. The war left unthinkable devastation all across Europe.

Women and ruins (1945)

Miller continued photographing and reporting into 1946 and recorded how the euphoria of liberation gave way to disillusionment. Her images and writing show people facing mass displacement, starvation and disease. Much of this is covered in Keith Lowe’s harrowing history of the war’s aftermath:

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe (2013)

She travelled in eastern Europe, capturing the poverty of really dirt-poor peasants. There’s an extraordinary photo of the public execution of László Bárdossy, the fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, on 10 January 1946.

Laszlo Bardossy, fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, facing the firing squad (1946)

Throughout she maintained her eye for the surreal detail, the sur- in the real.

The eyes of Sibiu (1946)

She went out of her way to photograph children, believing they represented the future everyone now had to build towards, but this quote shows her acrid realism:

‘I’m taking a lot of kid pictures, because they are the only ones for whom there is any hope … And also we might as well have a look at who we’re going to fight twenty years from now.’

Small tired boy [Raymond Melchers aged 7] waits at cross roads for transport

Room 11. At home in Sussex

Happily married Finally it was over, Miller quit being a correspondent and returned to England. After she discovered she was pregnant by her long-time lover, the artist Roland Penrose, she divorced her Egyptian husband Bey and, on 3 May 1947, married Penrose. Their only son, Antony Penrose, was born on 9 September 1947.

Happy home In 1949 the couple bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s Farley Farm became a popular resort for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Humphrey Jennings and many more…

Cookery In the 1950s Miller drifted away from photography and became increasingly interested in cordon bleu cookery, developing her own eccentric and humorous recipes. But her mental health was problematic. What she’d seen so close-up during the war cast a shadow over the rest of her life.

In this final room are many of the photos she took of the artistic giants of the twentieth century who were also her friends, as well as a charming display case showing magazine features about her staid, domestic home life.

Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing a photospread in a 1973 edition of Home and Gardens featuring the interior of her Sussex home complete with some of her cooking (photo by the author)

Sometimes Miller claimed that her photographic archive had been destroyed. The true extent of her work was only discovered after her death in 1977. The roughly 60,000 negatives, prints, journals and ephemera uncovered in the family attic now form the basis of the Lee Miller Archives and this exhibition represents a dazzling opportunity to delve into those archives and savour their countless treasures.

Summary

What an amazing life! What a prodigious, multifaceted talent! And what a brilliant exhibition!

Promo video

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by Simon on October 15, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Holocaust, Photography, Second World War

Tagged 1930s, Al Bulwayeb, American Vogue, Anna Leska, Antony Penrose, Art Students League, avant-garde, Aziz Eloui Bey, Berchtesgarten, Berlin, Bird Rock, Britain at War, British Vogue, Buchenwald concentration camp, Cairo, Cecil Beaton, Charlie Chaplin, Charlotte Street, Chiddingly, City of Light, concentration, cookery, cordon bleu cookery, Cyprus, D-Day landings, Dachau, David E. Scherman, Dora Maar, Dorothea Tanning, East Sussex, Edward Steichen, Eileen Agar, Elizabeth Cowell, Eva Braun, exhibition, Farley Farm House, fashion, fashion photographer, Feminism, Fire Masks, French surrealism, Georges Braque, Greece, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, Henry Moore, Hitler, Hitler’s bath, Home and Gardens, Humphrey Jennings, Jean Cocteau, Jean Dubuffet, Keith Lowe, László Bárdossy, Le Sang d’un poète, Lebanon, Lee Miller, Lee Miller Archives, Lee Miller Studios Inc, Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Middle East, Millais, Munich, Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York City, New York State, Normandy landings, Ophelia, Oskar Kokoschka, Palestine, Paris, photograph, photographers, Picasso, Poughkeepsie, Remington Silent, Roland Penrose, Rolleiflex camera, Romania, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, Second World War, Siwa, Spitfire, Surrealism, Surrey, Syria, Tate Britain, the Blitz, The Blood of a Poet, The eyes of Sibiu, The Holocaust, United States, Vogue, war in Europe, war photography, Women's war, World War Two, WRENS, Yves Tanguy

Posted by Simon on October 15, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/lee-miller-tate-britain/

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by Christina Lamb (2025)

Warning: This review contains details of really disgusting and evil sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls that goes far beyond rape. If you’re of a sensitive disposition or prone to nightmares, don’t read it.

The more places I went to, the more prevalent I found rape was.

‘It is an everlasting nightmare.’
(Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino survivor of Japanese sex slavery, page 351)

This is a deeply upsetting but profoundly important book, often devastatingly depressing but sometimes genuinely inspiring. Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who has covered a variety of warzones in her career as well as writing 10 factual books. From early in her career she realised just how prevalent rape was as a weapon of war, not just as random outrages, but used systematically to demoralise enemy forces and terrorise entire populations. What she learned about the vicious sexual abuse of women in conflict after conflict was sickening and disgusting. But she also came to realise that the scale of the violence and abuse against women was often overlooked in journalism and history books overwhelmingly written by men (p.459); and by international bodies and courts more often than not run by men.

Everything has to start with the evidence and this means the first-hand testimony of the survivors. Telling their stories not only offers some form of closure for the victims, and the psychological validation of knowing someone believes them. It is also the start of gathering evidence, for use not only in possible court proceedings but to begin to be used in larger historical narratives, to begin to redress the gaping silence about one of the most overlooked and neglected parts of war and conflict – the unspeakable crimes, violence and abuse directed against women and girls, often on an industrial scale.

‘When I saw them laughing and humiliating us, I decided we needed to break the silence. If we didn’t talk about what we went through, and if they were not punished, what could we expect from their children but the same or greater evil?’ (Bakira Hasecic, founder of Association of Women Victims of War in Bosnia, p.167)

And so this substantial book (474 pages) records Lamb’s odyssey, over a seven year period, to track down, interview and record the testimonies of women who have suffered unbelievable horrors in conflict after conflict around the world.

Destinations

Lamb goes to:

2016 August: Leros, Greece The Greek island of Leros was used to house refugees from war in the Middle East including Yazidis who had been enslaved and trafficked by Islamic State.

Free Yazidi Foundation

2016: Baden-Wurtenberg The German province which took in 1,100 Yazidi women and children who had been treated as sex slaves by ISIS.

Yazidi genocide Wikipedia article

2016: Northeastern Nigeria: On 15 April 2014 the brutal Islamic terror group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok and carried them off into sexual slavery. #BringBackOurGirls or #BBOG went viral. Hardly any of the girls have been recovered.

Bring Back Our Girls Campaign

2017 December: Bangladesh: Kutupalong To interview survivors of the 2017 massacres and mass rapes of Rohynga women by Burmese soldiers. In three months more than 650,000 were driven out of the west Burmese state of Rakhine, two-thirds of the Rohynga population.

Every single shack had terrible stories and I had never come across such widespread violation of women and girls. (p.75)

Bangladesh: Liberation War Museum, Dhaka and Sirajganj Up to 400,000 were women raped by Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh’s war of independence as official Pakistan military policy. Lamb learns that the survivors were called birangonas from the Bengali word bir meaning war heroine (p.92).

‘Often when the women were raped the soldiers had grabbed their babies and stomped on them to death or thrown them so hard their brains had come out.’ (Safina; p.110)

Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War

Rwanda Aftermath of the 1994 Hutu genocide of Tutsis, itself the sequel to the 1959 Hutu Revolution, and pogroms of 1963 and 1973.

‘Of course they raped me… Wherever you were hiding under a tree a man would find you and rape you and sometimes kill you. There were lots of different men doing this and they used sticks and bottles into the private parts of many women right up to their stomach…’ (Serafina Mukakinani, p.132)

Rape during the Rwandan genocide

2018, March: Yugoslavia: Sarajevo The appalling atrocities of the Serbs in Bosnia, and the heroic efforts of Bakira Hasecic and her Association of Women Victims of War, founded in 2003, to bring the Serb torturers, murderers and rapists to justice.

Yugoslavia: Srebrenica Dragana Vucetic, senior forensic anthropologist at the International Commission of Missing Persons. On 11 July 1995 Serb militias took away about 8,300 Muslim men and boys, drove them out into fields or football grounds, then massacred them, shooting or bludgeoning them to death. Dr Branca Antic-Stauber who runs a charity for rape survivors and uses horticulture therapy.

Rape during the Bosnian War

2018, October: Berlin Stories of the vast mass rapes of German women and girls during the Red Army’s conquest of eastern Germany and Berlin at the end of the Second World War. In towns and villages every woman from eight to eighty was raped multiple times. ‘It was an army of rapists’ (Natalya Gesse, Soviet war correspondent, p.194) It is estimated that up to 2 million women and girls were rapes and scores of thousands of Germans committed suicide, and killed their children, rather than fall into the hands of the Russians.

Rape during the occupation of Germany

2018, November: Buenos Aires In 1976 a military junta seized control of Argentina and rules for 7 years during which up to 30,000 leftists, trade unions and activists were kidnapped off the streets and ‘disappeared’. Estela Barnes de Carlotta, president of the Grandmothers or Las Abuelas (p.214).

2018, March: Mosul Lamb attends the hurried trials of a handful of the 30,000 or so people charged with being members of ISIS. Justice is a farce. The court doesn’t consider rape as a separate offence, all offences are grouped together as terrorism.

2018, April: Iraq: Dohuk The prevalence of suicide among Yazidi survivors of ISIS sex slavery.

Sexual violence in the Iraqi insurgency

2019, February: Democratic Republic of Congo: Bukavu In 2010 Congo was called the rape capital of the world. Lamb interviews Dr Denis Mukwege, founder of the Panzi Foundation, who has treated more rape victims than any other doctor in the world.

Panzi Foundation (Congo)

In the Second Congo War stories of women who were not only gang raped but then shot in the vagina, or had bayonets shoved in their vagina, or sticks soaked in fuel which was then set alight. Lamb discovers that Dr Mukwege’s clinic is seeing more and more raped babies. Some men believe that raping babies will give them magical powers; they are told this by witchdoctors (p.337).

In a gruelling book this chapter (chapter 13, pages 300 to 334) contains probably the worst atrocities (the 86-year-old who was raped, women’s vaginas set alight or hacked off, the mother who was forced at gunpoint to eat her own baby); but also the most inspiring moments. Lamb meets the inspiring Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, a safe haven for survivors in Congo.

‘It’s about giving a woman value… I hug them and then they are healed and people say I have magic hands but it’s just love… I’m convinced you can change the world only by love’ (p.330)

It also contains the most telling evidence of the way rape used as a weapon of mass terrorisation is tied into broader economic and political structures. Because Deschryver points out that 1) Congo contains more of the rare metals needed to create mobile phones and batteries (cobalt, coltan) than any other country on earth; 2) if you drew a map of the rapes you’d see they cluster around mining areas, and so 3) rape is used as a strategy of terror by the militias and groups who control the mines and the regions around them. Which leads her onto her fourth point, 4) if the international community really wanted to end conflict in the Congo it could but, in Deschryver’s view, it suits multinational corporations to preserve Congo as an unstable mess the better to plunder the country of its cobalt, coltan and gold (p.331).

Sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Democratic Republic of Congo: Kavumu Village where scores of babies and very small girls have been abducted, raped and their genitals destroyed, allegedly by the ‘Army of Jesus’, a militia controlled by a local warlord whose members have been told by a witchdoctor that the blood from raped and mutilated babies will make them invulnerable in battle (p.339). Although the warlord was eventually taken to court and convicted, the case went to appeal and none of the villagers knows whether he and his henchmen are in prison or not. Meanwhile, having lost all faith in the justice system, they have started to take the law into their own hands with lynchings and beheadings of suspect young men (p.348). Thus, chaos.

Manila Lamb meets surviving ‘comfort women’, enslaved by the occupying Japanese Army during the Second World War. They prefer to the term lolas which means grandmother in the local Tagalog language and which they use as an honorific, hence Lola Narcisa and Lola Estelita.

Lila Pilipina: Movement for the Lolas

Concluding chapter 2020

Sexual violence against men

in eastern Congo a quarter of men in conflict zones have experienced sexual violence
in Afghanistan bacha bazi or the abuse of boys is common
in Syrian prisons under Bashar al-Assad, men and boys were submitted to horrifying sexual violence

The challenge of achieving justice Lamb jumps between a number of cases, showing the dedicated work of investigators, researchers, lawyers, prosecutors and judges, but how gruellingly slow it is and how pitifully few convictions are achieved. The Yazidis wait, the Rohingya wait for justice.

Guatemala During the 36-year-long civil war over 100,000 women were raped, mostly Mayans in an attempt to exterminate their ethnicity (p.387). In 2016 11 Mayan women secured the conviction of a retired army officer for sexually enslaving them.

Peru Over 5,000 women raped during the 11-year-long civil war with Shining Path guerrillas.

Peruvian soldiers found guilty of rapes committed during civil war in historic verdict (Guardian)

Colombia Sexual crimes have been included in crimes heard by the tribunal set up at the end of the 52-year-long civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Chad Successful conviction of Chad’s despicable sadist president, Hissène Habré, who ruled through a reign of terror till his overthrow in 1990. In 2000 he was arrested and put on trial in neighbouring Senegal. In 2016 he was convicted of crimes against humanity, torture and rape and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Women in charge Lamb makes the telling point that most of these convictions were only secured when women were judges or prosecutors in the case.

2025 update

2022, May, Ukraine: Berestianka The Russians are back and they’re raping again. And looting everything they can to take back to their pitiful slum of a country. Gang rapes, torture, rape in front of the rest of the family etc (p,409). Rewarded by Putin on their return home. According to Lamb domestic violence is not criminalised in Russia and widely accepted. Figures. Whenever I read about Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky despising the decadent West, this is what I think of. Russia, home of domestic violence, epidemic alcoholism and rapists.

For the first time Ukraine established a court and started prosecuting Russian war criminals while the war was still ongoing (as it is today).

2023, autumn, Tel Aviv On 7 October 2023 Hamas fighters broke through the wall dividing Gaza from Israel and went on a rampage at multiple sites, massacring 1,200 civilians and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages. Lamb meets survivors, and speaks to the many first responders, therapists and women’s activists regarding the widespread evidence of sexual violence against the women victims: gang rapes and sexual mutilation i.e. shooting women in the vagina. In her interviewees’ opinion the intention was the most primitive one imaginable of attacking your enemies’ procreative ability, plus the more modern one of spreading not just terror but horror. The barbaric cruelty was exemplary in the sense that it was intended to traumatise an entire nation (which, arguably, it did).

Hebron in the West Bank. Lamb meets Palestinians who live under extraordinarily tight Israeli supervision, and then survivors of sexual violence inflicted by the Israeli Defence Force, and lawyers and NGOs who have reported on it. Interestingly, the main targets have been men and boys, designed to cause maximum humiliation in revenge for 7 October. The accusations of sexual humiliation in captivity sound identical to the Americans at Abu Ghraib.

‘It was me and two other prisoners and three border police. They filmed us naked then began to touch our bodies and make jokes and insulted us. One of them had a metal detector which he tried to put in our anuses.’ (Palestinian Thaer Fakhoury, p.448)

Avignon, December 2024 Lamb is introduced to Gisèle Pelicot, the woman drugged by her husband who then invited men from a website group to come to their home and rape her. The police found thousands of videos on her husband’s laptop clearly identifying the men which allowed a trial to go forward with 50 accused. The key thing is she waived her right to anonymity in order to speak out and so became a heroine to anti-rape activists, feminists and ordinary people around the world.

Summary When she completed the first edition in 2020 Lamb couldn’t imagine that sexual violence in conflict would return to Europe, in the form of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women, or the horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel, or the eruption of brutal civil war in Sudan. Every year the UN presents a report on conflict-related sexual violence. The 2024 report concluded that conflict-related sexual violence is increasing.

Conflict-related sexual violence – Report of the Secretary-General (2025)

Historical retrospective

Spain The really systematic mass rape of large populations of women probably first occurred in the Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939. It was carried out by General Franco’s Falangist forces. ‘Not just rape but appalling evisceration of peasant women of Andalucia and Estremadura’, including the branding of their breasts with fascist symbols (historian Antony Beevor, quoted p.203).

Nanking The rape of Nanking, December 1937 to January 1938, where the Japanese accompanied mass murder of Chinese civilians with mass rape of women and girls.

Nanjing massacre

Comfort women Euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of women and girls, predominantly from Japanese-occupied Asian countries, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces before and during World War II.

Comfort women

Vietnam War 1961 to 1973: My Lai massacre and Tet Offensive.

Rape during the Vietnam War

Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979. Cambodians murdered 2 million other Cambodians accompanied by mass rape.

Survivors of sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia speak out

Turkish invasion of Cyprus 1974, triggered widespread Turkish soldier rape of Greek women.

Timeline

1863 Abraham Lincoln issues general order 100 making rape carried out by soldiers of the Union Army punishable by death.

1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.

1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

1973 Bangladesh declares rape a crime against humanity.

1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):

Men and women came forward to recount evils beyond imagining – women and girls locked up in schools and suffering repeated anal, oral and vaginal rape, people having their tongues cut off, or being burned alive as human torches as they ‘screamed like cats’ (p.160)

1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania: Lamb interviews raped Tutsi women who testified in the first rape-as-war-crime trial. It was the first time rape was recognised as an instrument of genocide and prosecuted as a war crime.

‘I was raped countless times. The last group that raped me were so many people and one man shouted, “I can’t use my penis in that dirty place so I’ll use a stick.” I know many women who died like that. They sharpened the sticks and forced them right through their vaginas.’
(Cecile Mukurugwiza, p.141)

1998 first conviction for rape as a war crime.

Rape as a form of genocide

1998 Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court defined rape as a war crime.

2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence; for ‘the greater inclusion of women in peace and security’.

2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 1820 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

2009 established the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

2010 Bangladesh sets up an International Crimes Tribunal. As of 2019 88 collaborators and party leaders had been tried for torture, murder and rape.

2011 In a video sent to a Nobel Women’s Initiative conference about sexual violence, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi said:

‘Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.’

2014 then UK Foreign Secretary William Hague organised a four-day conference calling for the end of sexual violence in conflict.

2016 International Criminal Court convicts Pierre Bemba of murder, rape and pillage carried out by his men during the 2002-3 war in the Central Africa Republic.

2018 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”

2019 first conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.

2019 report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.

2019 Gambia took Myanmar to court over the Rohingya genocide, the first time one state had taken another to court over war crimes it had committed. Tried at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, resulting in orders against Myanmar carrying out any further genocide.

2020 first criminal trial of a member of Islamic State for crimes against the Yazidi, held in Germany, resulting in conviction and life imprisonment.

Learnings

Systematic mass rape, sexual violence, sexual torture and sexual mutilation are far more widespread than the bleakest pessimist could ever have expected.

Rape in conflict is rarely ad hoc, random and incidental. More often it is the result of encouragement or orders from the highest levels of military and political leadership, as in: mass rapes in Germany; mass rapes in Rwanda; mass rapes in Bosnia; mass rapes in Syria, and so on.

These kinds of mass rapes are now recognised, not as accidental by-products of the chaos of war, but as conscious war strategies, and as such, defined as war crimes. They are also associated with genocide, the conscious attempt to wipe out a people or group.

The genocidal intent is demonstrated in cases like the mass rape of Bangladeshi women and girls by the army of Pakistan, or the mass rapes of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, or the mass rape of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers. In each instance the intent wasn’t sexual per se, the intent was to wipe out the victims’ ethnic group by breeding a new generation with the blood of the conquerors in them. In Bangladesh:

‘They had orders of a kind from Tikka Khan [Pakistan’s military governor in the East]… What they had to do was impregnate as many Bengali women as they could… so there would be a whole generation of children in East Pakistan that would be born with blood from the West.’ (p.97)

In Bosnia:

The victims ranged from between six to seventy years old and were raped repeatedly and often kept captive for several years. Many women were forcibly impregnated and held until termination of the pregnancy was impossible. The women were treated as property and rape was used with the intent to intimidate, humiliate and degrade. (p.156)

This same motive – ethnic triumphalism – explains why foetuses were cut out of pregnant women, babies were bludgeoned to death, and children were shot or had their throats cut.

Speaking about it helps. Sharing their stories in safe, supportive environments helps the survivors.

‘It’s all about giving them respect and them owning their stories. After a month, when they begin to tell their stories, sometimes OMG… and the transformation after six is huge. We turn pain into power and give victims strength to be leaders in their communities.’ (Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, Congo, p.327)

But it never goes away. These women are profoundly damaged forever, as are their families, all their relationships, and their wider communities. And that was the intention.

‘That’s why rape really was a calculated weapon. The fellows who raped them and planned to rape them: they knew you either die now or die later but you’ll never be human again after this ordeal.’ (Rwanda Justice Minister Johnston Busingye, p.153)

As much or more healing comes from having the state formally recognise their plight, a formal recognition that it happened and that it was a crime.

‘It’s not possible to heal from this forever but it helps to speak about it as soon as possible and to share the story with someone compassionate. What I have seen definitely helps their healing is when perpetrators get punished because that gives the victim confirmation by authority she was not the one at fault for what happened to her and that she’s innocent.’ (Dr Branca Antic-Stauber, p.190)

‘Talking to the judges was the beginning of my rehabilitation. For so many years society did not want to listen… But now we could tell our side of the story… Seeing the life sentences at long last, after all they did to us, truly, it gives you your life back.’ (Graciela Garcia Romero, p.238)

In conservative societies state recognition can support recognition at local, village and family level. A striking example is the way the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who recognised the horrific scale of the mass rapes carried out by the Pakistan army and coined a term of praise for the victims, calling them Birangona, or ‘war heroines’.

Better still, though, is the healing effect of watching their perpetrators brought to justice, tried and convicted of their crimes. This validates the victims’ experiences and assures them that the world around them understands and values their suffering.

‘Their actions changed the law and criminal justice for every woman. The women showed you can take the worst trauma and turn it into a story of strength and victory.’ (Erica Barks-Ruggles, US ambassador to Kigali, on the rape survivors who travelled to the Rwanda genocide tribunal to testify against the perpetrators, p.149)

The only problem is it happens pitifully rarely.

Meanwhile, many of the women interviewed wanted their perpetrators to be killed (p.119).

‘I want the worst things to happen to the men that did this to me. I want them to die not in a quick or humane way but slowly, slowly, so they know what it’s like to do bad things to people.’ (Naima, a Yazidi enslaved by ISIS, p.264)

‘I feel so angry at what those Japanese did to me and my family, that if I saw them today I would kill them.’ (Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino woman enslaved by the Japanese p.357)

‘I hate them so much and wish death to all of them and Putin.’ (Vika, Ukrainian woman raped by Russian soldiers, p.403)

Charities have discovered that a good way to draw survivors out of their often disastrous mental suffering is to give them tasks, jobs, skills training and agency. Like the farm bought by Christine Schuler Deschryver, to be run by rape survivors in Congo (p.329) or Dr Branca Antic-Stauber’s idea of setting up a rose-growing business to employ survivors in Bosnia (p.185)

Snaga žene (Bosnia)

No index

There’s no index. Why?

Similarly no list of the organisations mentioned in each country, or organisations addressing sexual violence generally. I supply my own list below.

Human history

Well, I’ve explained my view of human history in a separate blog post:

Human history

History is an abattoir. What was written down is a tiny fraction of what happened, and it was written by the educated and privileged, mostly sucking up to kings and khans. The reality of human existence for most humans for most of human history has been unspeakably brutal.

Last thought

In his brilliant series of books about conflict and international order in the 1990s, Michael Ignatieff divides the world into zones of conflict and zones of safety. Every day I thank my lucky stars that I was born and lived all my life in what he calls a ‘zone of safety’. Way before you get to my white privilege or my male privilege, I give thanks for my safety privilege.

Credit

‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’ by Christina Lamb was first published by William Collins in 2020. I read the updated 2025 paperback edition.

Organisations mentioned in the text

Gabriela Women’s Party (Philippines)
International Commission on Missing Persons (Bosnia)
One Billion Rising (South East Asia)
The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan
Physicians for Human Rights
TRIAL International
Yazda (Iraq)

Support organisations

At the end of the Unsilenced exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the curators give a list of support organisations, which I repeat here:

Related reviews

Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum (October 2025)
New World Disorder reviews
Africa reviews

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by Simon on October 10, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Feminism, History, Second World War, War

Tagged #BBOG, #BringBackOurGirls, 7 October, Abraham Lincoln, Abu Ghraib, Antony Beevor, anus, Argentina, Argentine military junta, Army of Jesus, Arusha, Association of Women Victims of War, Association of Women Victims of War in Bosnia, atrocity, Aung San Suu Kyi, Avignon, bacha bazi, Baden-Wurtenberg, Bakira Hasecic, Bangladesh, Bangladesh Liberation War, Bangladesh war of independence, Bengali, Berestianka, Berlin, bir, birangonas, Boko Haram, book, Bosnia, Bosnian war, Bring Back Our Girls Campaign, Buenos Aires, Bukavu, Burmese army, Cambodia, Cecile Mukurugwiza, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Chibok, Christina Lamb, Christine Schuler Deschryver, City of Joy, cobalt, Colombia, coltan, comfort women, Commission of Responsibilities, Conflict-related sexual violence, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dhaka, Dohuk, Dostoyevsky, Dr Branca Antic-Stauber, Dr Denis Mukwege, Dragana Vucetic, East Pakistan, End Violence Against Women Coalition, Erica Barks-Ruggles, Estela Barnes de Carlotta, Falangist forces, FARC, Free Yazidi Foundation, Gabriela Women's Party, Gambia, Gaza, General Franco, Geneva Convention, genital mutilation, genocide, Gisèle Pelicot, Global Survivors Fund, Graciela Garcia Romero, Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Greece, Guatemala, Guatemala civil war, Hamas, Hebron, Hissène Habré, history, horticulture therapy, Hutu genocide, Hutu Revolution, ICTR, ICTY, Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, Imperial War Museum, International Commission of Missing Persons, International Commission on Missing Persons, international community, International Crimes Tribunal, International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, ISIS, ISIS sex slavery, Islam, Islamic State, Israel, Israeli Defence Force, Japanese Army, Johnston Busingye, Kavumu Village, Khmer Rouge, kidnap, Kigali, Kutupalong, Las Abuelas, Leros, LGBTQ+ Rape and Sexual Abuse Helpline, Liberation War Museum, Lila Pilipina: Movement for the Lolas, Lola Estelita, Lola Narcisa, Lola Narcisa Claveria, Lolas, Manila, massacre, Mayans, Michael Ignatieff, Middle East, misogyny, Mosul, Muslims, My Lai massacre, Myanmar, Nadia Murad, Naima, Nanjing massacre, Nanking, Natalya Gesse, National Association for People Abused as Children, new world disorder, Nigeria, No Means No Worldwide, Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, One Billion Rising, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Pakistan, Palestine, Palestinians, Panzi Foundation, Peru, Philippines, Physicians for Human Rights, Pierre Bemba, pogrom, Putin, Rakhine, Rape as a form of genocide, Rape Crisis, rape survivors, Red Army, Refuge, Rehabilitation, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Rohingya genocide, Rohynga, Rohynga genocide, Rome Statute, Rwanda, Rwanda genocide, Safeline National Male Survivor Helpline, Sarajevo, Second Congo War, Second World War, Senegal, Serafina Mukakinani, Serb militia, Serbs, sex slave, sex slavery, sexism, sexual abuse, Sexual crimes, sexual enslavement, sexual mutilation, sexual slavery, sexual violence, Sexual violence in the Iraqi insurgency, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Shining Path, Sirajganj, Snaga žene, Spain, Spanish Civil War, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Srebrenica, survivors of sexual abuse, Survivors UK, Syria, Tagalog, Tanzania, Tel Aviv, Tet Offensive, Thaer Fakhoury, the disappeared, the Grandmothers, The Havens, The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, The rape of Nanking, The Survivors Trust, the West, the West Bank, Tikka Khan, Tokyo war crimes tribunal, Tolstoy, TRIAL International, Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Tutsi women, Tutsis, UK War Crimes Team, Ukraine, UN Security Council, United Nations, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, vagina, Vietnam War, Vika, Vladimir Putin, war, war crimes, war heroine, war heroines, weapon of war, William Hague, witchdoctor, Women and Girls Network Ascent Helpline, Women's Aid UK, Women's Refugee Commission, World War II, Yazda, Yazidi genocide, Yazidis, Yugoslavia, zone of conflict, zone of safety

Posted by Simon on October 10, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/10/our-bodies-their-battlefield-what-war-does-to-women-christina-lamb/

Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum

This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. Imperial War Museum advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.

This is a really important exhibition on a very important subject. Most exhibitions stimulate or entertain me but this one significantly changed my understanding and attitude towards a horrific and ongoing crisis.

‘Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict’ is the UK’s first major exhibition dedicated to describing, analysing and understanding sexual violence in conflict. It includes 162 objects which illustrate all aspects of the issue, from wartime propaganda posters to testimonies from women victims from the First and Second World wars, as well as more recent conflicts such as Yugoslavia, Darfur and Congo, Gaza and Ukraine.

Expert views

The first and last galleries house no objects, just video screens which feature interviews with experts in the field. In the first room they introduce key facts and concepts around sexual violence in conflict, including the term itself and its definition, what it means, who perpetrates it, and who the victims are. In the final room, the same experts suggest ways to bring about change. These experts are:

Charu Lata Hogg – founder and Executive Director of All Survivors Project
Dr Zeynep Kaya – Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sheffield
Dr Paul Kirby – Queen Mary University
Christina Lamb – Sunday Times journalist and author of ‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’
Sarah Sands – journalist and former Chair of the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council

Why sexual violence in conflict has gone unreported

According to the experts, sexual violence has accompanied conflict and war for as long as we have records.

Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.
(Sara Bowcutt, Women for Women International)

For most of history it has been repressed and unrecorded, for numerous reasons.

Until the advent of photography and, nowadays, smartphones and social media, it’s been difficult to document and record.
This has led to sexual violence being under-reported at the time and so all but ignored in official records and historical accounts.
Perpetrators and the bodies they serve in (armies, militias, informal groups), wanting to preserve their ‘honour’ and prestige, suppress information.
But victims, families of victims, their communities and wider societies sometimes cover it up because of the ‘shame’ and social stigma attached.

But there are other occasions when sexual violence is the opposite of hushed up, when it is used to terrorise and demoralise civilian populations, with a view to depriving fighting forces of support or bringing pressure on them to surrender and end the abuse of their civilian communities. This was practiced in Darfur and more recently by Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine. In these situations incidents of sexual violence are widely advertised – but the challenge remains the same: of identifying the exact perpetrators, and trying to establish who in the chain of command gave authorisation for it. This can be frustratingly difficult to achieve.

Why it’s important to discuss sexual violence in conflict

The stance of this exhibition is that the subject must be directly addressed, discussed and aired, for a number of reasons:

Allowing victims to speak allows the crimes to be documented and so evidence gathered for legal proceedings.
But it also allows for something equally important, which is for the victims’ voices to be heard, their ordeals to be recognised, and so some kind of closure to be achieved.
Legitimating speech on the subject also helps to overcome social taboos around shame and keeping silent, which obtain in many if not most societies.
So: speaking out both helps victims recover and contributes documentary evidence to investigations and trials.

As a survivor explains:

‘To leave a little bit of what I had behind, that affected me, you don’t forget it but you learn to live with it, and by talking you take off a weight, a stigma, so I leave relaxed, free and happy.’

Four charities

With these aims in mind in mind, the penultimate room focuses on the ongoing work of four NGOs working in the field of sexual violence in conflict, namely:

Women for Women International
All Survivors Project
Free Yezidi Foundation
Waging Peace

There’s a panel on each of these organisations, alongside photos of the work they do, and moving testimonials from victims who have benefited hugely from being listened to and validated. As one of them wrote:

‘We all want to mean something to someone, that we matter. That we’re important.’

These testimonies are accompanied by objects:

a traditional cloth toub titled ‘Peace by Piece’, created by Sudanese women affected by the war in collaboration with Waging Peace
a handmade animal toy created by women through Free Yezidi Foundation’s programme to empower women through training, job opportunities and income generation
policy and testimony from All Survivors Project, the only international NGO dedicated to addressing acts of sexual violence in conflict against men and boys

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing panels explaining the work of three of the four featured NGOs, including written and spoken testimony (via the headphones) © Imperial War Museum

Why an exhibition like this is part of the solution

Having explained all these processes you can see why an exhibition like this fits into the process of solution, by 1) documenting and recording abuses 2) allowing victims’ voices to be heard 3) increasing public awareness and understanding 4) making it easier to discuss abuses and, potentially, identify and target the patterns of behaviour which underpin or lead to sexual violence: the underlying attitudes which have made it ‘acceptable’ or ignorable in the past.

I would say that two major threads or themes run through the exhibition, one about gender, the other about justice.

Gender norms

Charu Lata Hogg is the most feminist or deploys the most academic feminist point of view. All I mean by this is that in her interviews she talks liberally about toxic masculinity and the patriarchy, two phrases which don’t appear in any of the other interviewees.

Hogg claims that sexual violence in conflict does not take place in a vacuum. It follows logically from the gender stereotyping widespread in peacetime society and then promoted in much wartime propaganda. She sees sexual violence in conflict as arising directly from ‘toxic gender norms’ i.e. the widespread perception in so many societies which associates masculinity with strength, power, dominance and violence, and women with passivity, domesticity, secondariness and victimhood.

This is why the first room of the exhibition, immediately after the introductory videos, is devoted to an impressively large number of images, posters and propaganda leaflets etc, from the First and Second World wars but also other conflicts, which play up to these gender stereotypes. They shows women as sexy spies, seducers, security risks, with a whole fleet of striking leaflets designed to be dropped over enemy troops depicting their beloveds back home having sex with non-combatants while they’re living in misery and fear at the front.

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing posters promoting gender stereotyping in wartime © Imperial War Museum

In other words, the exhibition argues that the widespread deployment of sexual and gender stereotyping in peacetime society feeds into the propaganda accompanying a conflict, and both lay the foundation for the sexual violence which then occurs in the conflict itself.

In the final room of videos which addresses possible solutions, Hogg returns to this theme and says the only way forward is to target the patriarchy, to target ‘toxic gender norms’ and target ‘the patriarchal seeds’ that establish these gender stereotypes at such an early age, and so ubiquitously, that when conflict arises, men act accordingly, i.e. abuse the exaggerated positions of power which conflict gives them in order to rape, enslave, terrorise, mutilate and murder the vulnerable i.e. mostly (but not only) women.

You can see that this approach has a number of weaknesses. 1) It’s problematic knowing exactly what you mean by ‘patriarchy’ and ‘patriarchal seeds’; in a general way probably everyone could agree with the idea that, despite half a century of feminism, it’s still ‘a man’s world’, but can you be more specific? 2) ‘Targeting the patriarchy’ sounds fine as a slogan but, like ‘levelling up’ or ‘Make America Great Again’, the challenge is in formulating concrete proposals to make this happen.

3) But surely the biggest problem is that if you tie sexual violence in conflict to every type of gender stereotyping across all of society, and claim that you won’t be able to end the violence until you’ve ended all gender stereotyping, this means you’re going to be waiting a very long time. It is, in other words, a utopian wish rather than a practical solution.

Justice

This is why I was more attracted by Christina Lamb’s contribution in the final video room which discusses the way forward. Lamb says the solution is simple: hold the perpetrators to account. Encourage and support victims to speak out (as per the work of the NGOs listed above). Document the crimes. Empower international bodies such as the United Nations’ International Court of Justice to set up courts of enquiry into specific conflicts. Gather evidence, name names, and bring individuals to justice.

Although this has proven dismayingly difficult in practice, it is at least a practical agenda, and it harmonises with work already going on i.e. it can be based on the speaking out supported by the NGOs and also helps to validate the accounts of victims, make them feel that they’re not being ignored.

In this practical area of justice progress has been made over the last 30 years or so, which the exhibition describes.

Timeline

1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.

1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):

1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania and for the first time recognises rape as an instrument of genocide to be prosecuted as a war crime.

1998 First conviction for rape as a war crime.

1998 The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defined rape as a war crime.

2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence.

2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 2008 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

2009 Establishment of the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

2019 First conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.

2019 Report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.

Reconciliation

The comfort women

But it’s not only justice in the sense of arresting and charging individuals. Only by acknowledging the existence of sexual violence can any progress be made towards broader reconciliation.

The most striking example, and also an example of how difficult this is in practice, is probably the case of the ‘comfort women’ of south-east Asia. Before and during the Second World War the Japanese Army forced hundreds of thousands of women and girls into sexual slavery. They came from many different nationalities but the large majority were from Korea.

The exhibition describes the Wednesday demonstration, more fully the ‘Wednesday Demonstration demanding that Japan redress the Comfort Women problems’, which began to assemble outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul at noon on Wednesdays in 1992. Japan claims to have made a formal apology for the scandal and to have offered reparations but the wrangle goes on about precise details.

Meanwhile, the Koreans have erected several statues in memory of the comfort women, one outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, another in front of the Japanese consulate in the southern port city of Busan. Here’s a newspaper article about it. The exhibition includes a miniature reproduction of this statue with an explanation of its symbolism.

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing a tiny replica of the Korean Sonyeosang or statue of peace, and the panel explaining its symbolism © Imperial War Museum

My overview

I asked at the museum Information desk but there is, regrettably, no catalogue for the exhibition, so I intend to provide a public service and give a fairly thorough breakdown of its content. It is in six rooms. The headings are the titles of each room, the bullet points are sub-sections within each room.

1. Prologue

Video clips of the experts addressing the following questions:

What is sexual violence in conflict?
Who is affected by sexual violence in conflict? Mostly women but some men and boys, particularly homosexuals
Who are the perpetrators? Armies, militias, military police, armed bands
Does sexual violence in conflict still happen today? Yes, widespread in current conflicts including Ukraine, Sudan
Why are we talking about this now? It is bad now but with the stresses and displacements of climate change is only likely to get worse

2. Structures and representations

Wartime presentations: sexist imagery and propaganda (see photo, above) including a couple of unintentionally hilarious films from the 1940s informing soldiers about the risks of sexually transmitted infections
Power and accountability:

3. Acts and manifestations

Mass incidents:
- Red Army: the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army as it fought its way across Germany at the end of the Second World War; Stalin notoriously commenting that he could understand why battle-scarred soldiers would want to have some ‘fun’ with enemy women; over 2 million German women were abused, leading to death and serious injury, infections and suicide
- ISIS: in 2014 Islamic State authorities organised the enslavement and mass sexual abuse of Yazidi women and girls: the exhibition includes the guidelines ISIS published for its soldiers on how to capture and treat sex slaves
Power imbalance: the little-known stories of sexual abuse of evacuees, particularly children, including in Britain during the Second World War
Sexual humiliation and torture:
- Abu Ghraib: the show includes the New Yorker magazine article by Seymour Hersh detailing the shocking abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003
- les tondues: French women who, at the liberation of villages, towns and cities, were seized, displayed and had their hair shaven off as a form of punishment and social condemnation for alleged collaboration with the German occupiers – the show includes documentary photos of tondues taken by Lee Miller

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing, on the wall on the right, the section about comfort women; on the wall in the middle evidence of the ISIS mass enslavement of Yazidi women; and in the glass cases letters and memoirs from child evacuees who were sexually abused © Imperial War Museum

4. Justice and reconciliation

Legal justice: history of attempts to set up courts and tribunals starting with the first arrest warrants for rape issued by the Yugoslavia tribunal in 1993; in 1998 the International Criminal Court recognised sexual violence in conflict as a crime against humanity
Children born of sexual violence in conflict: the work of TRIAL International and The Forgotten Children of War Association and how it took until 2022 for Bosnia and Herzegovina to acknowledge children born as a result of sexual violence during the Bosnian War 1992–1995 as civilian victims of war

5. Rebuilding

As described, a panel apiece on the four charities:

Women for Women International
All Survivors Project
Free Yezidi Foundation
Waging Peace

6. Final thoughts

Video room with the five experts listed above giving their thoughts on the following topics:

How are attitudes towards sexual violence in conflict changing?
Why is it important to listen to victims and survivors?
What does justice look like for victims and survivors?
How can we create change?

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing the videos of expert opinion (photo by the author)

Niggles

On 2 November the exhibition ends and will be dismantled. Why? Surely an exhibition on such an important and universal subject as this should become a permanent display. Not least if it’s true, as the curators claim, that sexual conflict has always been a part of war and continues to be, right up to the present day. Well then, shouldn’t a key element of conflict be addressed in a permanent display in Britain’s leading museum of war and conflict?

In the same spirit, why is there no catalogue of the exhibition? I’ve been to hundreds of exhibitions, and even the most trashy or superficial have usually been accompanied by catalogues or brochures. Surely an important exhibition on such an important subject warrants a permanent documentary record.

Poster created by the Mansudae Art Studio, Pyongyang. The text, in Korean, can be translated as: ‘No! Rid the twenty-first century of sexual violence!’

Support

At the end of the exhibition, there’s a list of support groups. For public information, I include it here:

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by Simon on October 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Feminism, Museum, War

Tagged Abu Ghraib, All Survivors Project, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian war, Busan, Charu Lata Hogg, child abuse, Christina Lamb, comfort women, Congo, Darfur, Dr Paul Kirby, Dr Zeynep Kaya, End Violence Against Women Coalition, exhibition, First World War, Forgotten Children of War Association, Free Yezidi Foundation, Gaza, Global Survivors Fund, Imperial War Museum, Imperial War Museum London, International Court of Justice, Japan, justice, Korea, Lee Miller, les tondues, LGBTQ+ Rape and Sexual Abuse Helpline, Mansudae Art Studio, National Association for People Abused as Children, New Yorker, No Means No Worldwide, Our Bodies, Peace by Piece, propaganda, Pyongyang, rape, Rape Crisis, reconciliation, Red Army, Refuge, Safeline National Male Survivor Helpline, Sara Bowcutt, Sarah Sands, Second World War, Seoul, sexual humiliation, sexual slavery, Sexual Violence in Conflict, Seymour Hersh, Sonyeosang, speaking out, Stalin, statue of peace, Survivors UK, the patriarchal seeds, the patriarchy, The Survivors Trust, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Three Guineas, torture, toub, toxic gender norms, toxic masculinity, UK War Crimes Team, Ukraine, United Nations, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, Virginia Woolf, Waging Peace, Wednesday Demonstration, Women and Girls Network Ascent Helpline, Women for Women International, Women's Aid UK, Women's Refugee Commission, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on October 8, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/unsilenced-sexual-violence-in-conflict-the-imperial-war-museum/

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All posts tagged Second World War

Harris’s novels

The Cicero trilogy

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First phase: third-person narrators and war settings

Second phrase: first-person narrators: the classic novels

Third phase: ripe

Fourth phase: bad

Short stories

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Best one?

Innes’ novels

—Second World War—

Essays

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Debunking myths

Definitions and dates

Chronological structure

1. Civil wars 900 to 1600

2. From 1600 peace

3. Nineteenth century stories

4. Japanese empire

5. Commercial exploitation of the samurai image

Modern artworks

The paradox of civilised exhibitions about hyper-violence

Three ages of samurai

1. 800 to 1600: Rise of the samurai

2. 1600 to 1850s: The long peace

3. 1876 to the present: After the samurai

Part 1: 900 to 1600: war

Cuirasses and armour

Bows and arrows

Saddles

Swords

A surcoat

Beheading

Culture

Hosting

Part 2: 1600 to 1900: peace

Tokugawa shogunate

10%

Culture of peace

Staging and soundscape

A woman’s firefighting jacket and hood

Nostalgia

Abolition of samurai status

Part 3

Japanese imperialism

Fun, film and video games

Summary

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Giacometti figures

Giacometti sculptures

Daria Martin

Conclusion

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Introduction

1920s and ’30s

Beaton’s beginnings

Cecil’s self-creation

Cecil’s stagings

The sources of Cecil’s style

Beaton and British Vogue

Vogue covers

Cecil’s antisemitism

The Royals

War photographer

Two country homes: Ashcombe and Reddish

State and film design

Designer for stage and screen

Celebrities

Comments

1. Absence of analysis

2. Comparison with Lee Miller

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