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Sketches from Iraq, 1943, speak to us still
James Boswell’s drawings of Iraq in the 40s speak out to us across the years, writes Simon Farr
James Boswell – Unofficial War Artist by William Feaver, Muswell Press, £25. order this book
WE are in Iraq in 1943. In the war of Private James Boswell, army radiographer, Communist Party member and artist, there is not much action, no great battles, no bombs and bullets.
“Here in the Euphrates valley we work and play. We do all the things that soldiers have always done – drink, gossip, gamble, sleep as much as we can...” Later in Lilliput magazine he wrote. “Heat, dust and boredom were our enemies...”
Yet Boswell’s drawings sketches and paintings of the tedium of army life away from the front line are fascinating in their detail and sensitivity.
Such titles as Carrying Stores, Stuck in the Sand and X-ray at the Divisional Unit are typical.
His main focus was always people, yet Boswell made strong surrealist images too and wonderful desert landscapes.
“The sun became a butter coloured disc, shadows disappeared, colour died and at times a dim tangible dusk came down upon the desert. Dust seeped steadily through us”. Probably familiar images for British soldiers in Iraq today
Boswell was never an official war artist like Sutherland, Moore, Ravillious or Piper. Like Ronald Searle who made almost the only recorded images of life as a Japanese prisoner of war, he was there with the impulse, and this is his record.
Like many artists and intellectuals of the 1930s Boswell, a New Zealander who studied at London’s Royal College of Art, was inspired by the great Soviet experiment.
He joined the Communist Party and abandoned painting for the more widely accessible forms of printmaking, graphic art and illustration.
From 1932 Boswell was a founder and leading member of The Artists International Association, which campaigned on broad left issues – unemployment, rising fascism and Spain.
They extolled the virtue of art as propaganda, the importance of subject over form.
Some of Boswell’s most interesting work is from the 1930s though not covered in this book – lithographs of working-class London life, around Camden Town – subjects he returned to after the war (many of these can be seen on the Tate Britain website collection).
This was the area he knew best – he lived in Parliament Hill both before and after the war.
He was greatly influenced by the satirical art of George Grosz and was a regular contributor of cartoons to the Left Review, the Daily Worker and the Daily Mirror.
William Feaver’s book focuses on Boswell’s work during the war, (a frustratingly small slice from the artist’s life), first in Scotland where he was trained, a year in Iraq from which most of the images are drawn, and then back in London where he was commissioned and transferred to Army education.
The work he did in the Iraqi desert speaks to us across the years. His ferociously anti-war satirical drawings are all the more disturbing when you look at them 63 years on.
They pose a depressing question about the state of humanity and its politics. Will we ever learn?
And his depiction of life for the squaddies achieves what he set out to do. He wanted to “extract the dream reality, to evoke the unreality of the soldier’s life”.
After the war, Boswell worked as art editor for Lilliput Magazine and commissioned many of the great artists of the day.
In the 1960s he was editor of Sainsbury’s House magazine, (he had done the same for Shell before the war) he continued to paint, draw, write and and exhibit until his death in 1972.
Although his membership of the Communist Party had lapsed by 1950 he remained on the left politically and is credited for the design of the 1964 Labour Party election campaign that swept Harold Wilson to power.
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