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Painting
War George Plante’s Combat Art in World War II
Kathleen Broome Williams
Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2019 Hardcover. xvi+279 pages. ISBN 978- 1682474266.
$29.95
Reviewed
by Brian Foss Carleton University, Ottawa
War is a
serious business. No one knew this better than front-line war artists. Many
approached their subject with grim solemnity. Some of them—Wyndham Lewis and
Paul Nash, for example, during the First World War—were driven by rage against
the shocking evidence of humanity’s most base, destructive instincts. “I am no
longer an artist interested and curious,” Nash famously wrote in 1917 from the
Ypres Salient. “I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are
fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will
be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy
souls.”(1) Others, including Eric Kennington during the Second World War, worked
themselves into fits of hero worship that drenched their portraits of
servicemen in what sometimes verges on almost caricatural representations of selfless
military heroism. Many other artists, overwhelmed by the anti-humanist immensity
and the apocalyptic nature of mechanized twentieth-century combat, attempted to
more or less ignore war’s ugly realities, sometimes by retreating to the
quotidian trivia of military life away from the front lines: servicemen eating,
sleeping, bathing, exercising, and so on. Yet other
artists reveled in their exciting wartime exposure to novel surroundings and
experiences. Anthony Gross, for example, was a full-time official war artist for
almost all of the Second World War (1940-45), and as such traveled extensively
through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. “There is one thing I really
enjoy in all this,” he wrote, “and that is being told to go somewhere, to do
something I have never done before, then the arriving there, finding myself
face to face with the subject and at last having to work out how to do it,
starting from scratch.”(2) But of the many artists who approached war in this
way, few can have been as thoroughly engaging as George Plante, the subject of
Kathleen Broome Williams’s equally engaging book, Painting War: George
Plante’s Combat Art in World War II. Plante was
born in in Edinburgh in 1914, seven weeks after the First World War exploded
onto the international scene. He died in 1995, in South Carolina, where he had
been living since 1980 and where he had recently become an American citizen. He
trained at the Edinburgh College of Art, continued his studies in Berlin, and worked
as a commercial artist in London during the 1930s. In 1937 he married Evelyn
Smith, another student from the Edinburgh College of Art. Following an unsuccessful
attempt to enlist in the Royal Air Force in the spring of 1940, he was admitted
to a radio operator training course back in Edinburgh, and joined the SS
Sourabaya, an Antarctic whaling ship that found new life during the war as a
Merchant Navy tanker. Plante spent more than two years with the Merchant Navy,
crisscrossing the Atlantic between Britain and North America. When off duty
at sea he made drawings, watercolours and gouaches, several of which Broome
Williams reproduces in colour, of shipboard facilities, personnel and events.
The Sourabaya, with Plante on board, was sunk in an October 1942 torpedo
attack. Later that year or early in 1943 he joined the SS Southern Princess,
another Merchant Navy tanker, only to see it, too, sunk in a U-boat attack in
the spring of 1943: an event that almost ended his life. To Plante’s
surprise, the loss of the Southern Princess signaled the end of his
career with the Merchant Navy. Instead of receiving a new posting, he was ordered
to report to the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department (PID),
apparently on the strength of his reputation in commercial art, the field in
which he had been employed in the years leading up to the war. The PID was purportedly
responsible for producing private reports on foreign affairs, but it was in
fact a cover for Britain’s Political Warfare Executive (PWE). Created in 1941,
the PWE was charged with coordinating both white propaganda (overt,
acknowledged efforts that supported Britain) and grey or black propaganda (which
actively undermined the Fascist war effort in southern and eastern Europe). The
PWE’s work took the form of radio broadcasts, leaflets, and miscellaneous
printed materials. Plante’s involvement was with the illustration and layout of
mountains of documents that featured his anti-Fascist cartoons and other
drawings, along with accompanying texts. (Britain’s Ministry of Information, in
comparison, was responsible for propaganda aimed at the populations of Britain,
allied countries, and neutral countries.) In this new capacity Plante was posted
first to Cairo, and later (from November 1944) to the southern Italian Adriatic
port of Bari, which had been captured by the Allies in September 1943 following
Mussolini’s deposition as prime minister in July of that year. “Now that I have
brought about the downfall of Mussolini,” wrote Plante to his wife to explain
why he would not be returning to England anytime soon, “you can’t expect me to
stop at this stage!” [130]. Following the
end of the war, Plante opted not to return to Everetts Advertising—the British
firm he had joined in the second half of the 1930s—and instead to capitalize on
his commercial art skills and what he had learned about mass persuasion while
working for the PWE. Discouraged by Britain’s dire economic straits, fascinated
by New York City ever since his first wartime visit there with the Sourabaya,
and eager to immerse himself in the innovative advertising techniques that
catered to the consumer paradise exemplified by post-war America, Plante joined
the London office of the highly successful New York advertising agency Young
& Rubicam. There he became one of the fifty members (all by invitation
only) of the newly created Advertising Creative Circle, the goal of which was
to elevate the status of British advertising “by encouraging high standards of
creative skill, and … providing opportunities for the interchange of ideas
amongst advertising creative people” [211]. In the early 1960s, on the lookout
for new challenges, he accepted the position of world-wide creative director
for Unilever International. His marriage to Evelyn Smith had ended in the early
1950s, and in 1980 he and his American second wife, Jane Shenfield, retired to
South Carolina, where painting occupied much of the time that Plante had
devoted to commercial art and advertising over the previous four decades. Kathleen
Broome Williams—Jane Shenfield’s daughter and thus Plante’s stepdaughter—notes
that as Young & Rubicam’s creative director Plante “stay[ed] at the leading
edge of [advertising] developments that took him from print, to black-and-white
television, to color television, and to film. He was always creative,
innovative, and eager to try something new” [212]. Indeed, Plante’s creativity
and innovativeness are the leitmotifs of this book, and account for why the
reader will find him such an interesting and attractive personality. Whenever
he had shore leave in New York he used the opportunity to make contacts in the
world of American commercial art and advertising. This included a remarkable
range of activities, even by the standards of the energetic and self-promoting
Plante. He took advantage of shore
leaves to drop off a painting at the offices of the New Yorker magazine,
as well as to show his sketches to the art director of Young & Rubicam,
thereby earning his first commission from the agency that would become his
postwar employer. On another occasion in New York he so impressed Jan Juta (of
the Exhibition Section of the British Library of Information, which operated
through the British consulate in New York) that Juta arranged for him to give
radio talks on the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic. Plante even managed to have
twenty of his wartime artworks included in a 1942 exhibition of contemporary
British drawings and watercolours, at the American-British Art Centre on West
56th Street. But Plante’s ardent socializing was not done solely to build foundations for the thriving postwar career that he envisioned for himself in illustration and advertising. A great deal of it also sprang from his intensely social nature and his hunger for new experiences. For example, while on a brief layover in New York in October in 1941 he visited a cousin who happened to be the next-door neighbor of the actress Lillian Gish (one gets rather used to this sort of coincidence when dealing with Plante), and with whom he met all kinds of celebrities and dined in all the places in vogue: Sherman Billingsly’s Stork Club, the 21 Club, the Copacabana, Sardi’s, and more. Through his cousins he became close friends with Russell Patterson, the illustrator / designer for the Ziegfeld Follies, and through Patterson he met all kinds of people in show business, the music business, and the fringes of the art world. He was thrown right into the heady social life of prewar New York [66-67]. All of this, remember, was while he was on leave, between trans-Atlantic convoy trips with the Merchant Navy. During that same stopover in New York he visited Radio City Music Hall, which confirmed for him the accuracy of jokes that “the Americans do everything bigger and better” [61]. This frantically busy layover concluded with Plante socializing with some firemen at Jack Dempsey’s bar on Broadway, when he suddenly recalled that the Sourabaya was about to sail. The firemen came to his rescue, “taking me back at great speed with sirens wailing and lights flashing. It was a great thrill and impressed my shipmates immensely who had been convinced that this time I really wasn’t going to make it” [67]. That refence to “this time” says it all; Plante was no stranger to theatrical entrances and exits. The overwhelming impression of him on shore leave is that of the principal figures in On the Town, the Broadway musical and 1949 film about three sailors on leave in New York City, where they’re determined to see and experience the entire city in a mere 24 hours. Nor does the frenetic and coincidence-laden reality of Plante’s wartime life end there. While he was waiting to learn his
next naval posting, following the 1943 sinking of the Southern Princess,
he was instead called to London to report to the Political Intelligence
Department. There, according to Broome Williams, he was asked by Ian Fleming if
he would be “willing to undertake a confidential mission about which they could
say nothing except that it meant leaving for Cairo at once” [112]. (Admittedly,
Broome Williams elsewhere, and rather more prosaically, describes Plante’s
departure for Egypt as having been preceded by the artist being “sent off to
spy school deep in the English countryside” [5].) This all came as a surprise
to Plante (but probably not to the reader), although much of the potential
glamour of the event is blunted by the fact that at the time Fleming was
assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence, and not the literary figure he is
today. (He didn’t write his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, until
1952.) But by this point in Broome Williams’s narrative the fact that George
Plante was plucked “out of the blue” [111] to be sent to do propaganda work in Cairo,
in the process becoming chummy with a later lion of the spy novel genre,
scarcely raises eyebrows. In Egypt,
exactly as he’d done in New York City, Plante combined work with an
impressively ardent free-time agenda that included everything from sightseeing
in the El Mosky bazaar in Cairo, to partying with members of the city’s large
Jewish population that had fled to Egypt from 1920s and 1930s anti-Semitic
violence in Europe, to meeting belly dancers—who, he complained to his probably
skeptical wife, bathed too infrequently for his taste. Lively cocktail parties
at Shepheard’s Hotel (events that gave Plante opportunities to chat with
visiting glitterati such as Noël Coward) were a staple of his time in Cairo. All
of this socializing took place despite the heavy demands of his work, all of
which he took seriously. Broome Williams notes that that in September 1943 alone,
he and his handful of colleagues designed and produced a total of 115 leaflets
with a print run of nearly 60 million copies. But even that pace wasn’t frantic
enough to prevent him from taking a short leave in October, traveling down the
Nile to visit the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Karnak complex near
Luxor. Reflecting on
the impact of Plante’s wartime experiences, Broome Williams concludes that her
stepfather had returned from war a changed man, partly because of the suffering and
carnage he had witnessed but more because he had been introduced to another
side of life—one that was affluent, urbane, and cosmopolitan. In Manhattan he
had come face-to-face with the real life he had seen previously only in glossy
images in American magazines” [211]. In fact,
however, Broome Williams’s book spends little time dealing with anything
resembling “suffering and carnage”. Even her gripping narrative of how Plante
reached British shores after surviving the destruction of the Southern
Princess ends with a comical episode in which customs officials at his port
of arrival made the mistake of asking Plante if he had anything to declare. At
the time Plante was wearing nothing but a loaned raincoat, his own clothes
having been coated in tanker oil while he had bobbed about in the North
Atlantic, waiting to be rescued. “I opened my raincoat wide,” he recounted,
“and invited them to search me, and if they found anything I told them they
could keep it” [108]. To be fair, though, Broome Williams’s narrative depends
heavily on Plante’s own unpublished document titled “A Very Personal View of
World War II”: a text that she describes as putting “such a humorous face on
that deadly conflict that I have had to keep rereading such accounts as
Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea to remind myself of the harsher reality” [7].
Indeed, Plante’s approach to the Second World War seems to have been very much
like that of official War Office artist Edward Ardizzone, whose visual and
verbal descriptions were based on empathy, humour and local colour, not on death
and destruction. It seems significant that in this book’s sole reference to Plante’s
thoughts about Britain’s official war artists, he gives Ardizzone the highest
praise [32]. Kathleen
Broome Williams is an accomplished naval historian, and it shows. Her
familiarity with naval history and practice, including the movements of the Sourabaya,
and the geographically shifting menace of U-boats in the Atlantic, permeates
her biography of Plante, providing welcome context without displacing Plante as
the focal point of her discussions. In particular, her description of the March
1943 attack on HX229 convoy as it sailed from New York to Europe is gripping in
its inclusion of accounts by eyewitness. This was the biggest convoy battle of
the Second World War, with thirteen ships sunk—and Plante was in the middle of
it. The Southern Princess, with Plante aboard, was one of the thirteen
destroyed ships. “My approach to this topic is as a historian” [3] writes
Broome Williams, who also makes highly effective use of Plante’s lively
recollections, both oral and written, including his many wartime letters home
to his wife. However, it is
precisely Broome Williams’s reliance upon her naval history expertise that
presents the only significant flaw in this otherwise fine book. As she notes,
“I have neither been trained in, nor am I qualified to discuss, the artistic
merit of Plante’s work” [3]. On the one hand she is on relatively sure ground
when dealing with the illustrations and designs (six of which she reproduces) that
Plante made for the Political Welfare Executive, first in Cairo and then in
Bari. This makes sense. Like all visually effective propaganda, Plante’s imagery
had to be quickly readable, its symbolism immediately translatable into a simple,
punchy narrative. In their visual straightforwardness, Plante’s illustrations
emphasize content over aesthetic complexity. But Broome Williams’s reluctance to deal with Plante’s war paintings as aesthetic statements causes her to run into problems when it comes to dealing with the images the artist made while serving in the Merchant Navy. In this regard her book’s title—Painting War : George Plante’s Combat Art in World War II—seems a singularly odd choice. Whereas Broome Williams has little difficulty in setting Plante’s visual propaganda within the context of his parallel fascination with influencing consumer behavior through advertising, she is at a loss to connect his wartime paintings with the art that we’re told he enjoyed viewing in Scotland, England and New York before and during the war. Discussion of paintings is limited to generic statements for which little or no support is provided. On page 122, for example, the author remarks: “As [Plante’s] paintings of the Battle of the Atlantic had already shown, he had a sure touch when depicting the high drama of war.” Yet of the nine gouache paintings reproduced in the book (happily, all in colour), only two deal with what could be termed “the high drama of war”: one shows a destroyer dropping a depth charge, and the other the burning and sinking of the Southern Princess. Nor does the author explain what visual qualities are evidence of “a sure touch when depicting the high drama of war”. No figure numbers or other citations link individual illustrations with specific passages in the text. No information is provided about how Plante’s treatment of his subjects did or did not accord with how other war artists treated similar subjects. To be fair, this is not an unusual state of affairs in much history writing that uses art as illustration of events rather than as personal experiences translated into aesthetic form—but it seems out of place in a book whose title suggests that Plante’s wartime paintings constitute the thematic cornerstone of the research. Towards the end of the book, Broome Williams quotes Plante to the effect that Nature does a pretty good job, and I don’t want to try to compete with nature. So I make my paintings an abstraction from nature. I use colors that
will evoke an emotion, an emotional response in the person looking at the
picture, and that is sometimes better by not doing what is done in nature
[221-222]. It would be
helpful for Plante’s war paintings to have been discussed within that
framework. Similarly, the
author’s comments on the relationship of Plante to the War Artists’ Advisory
Committee (WAAC)—the Ministry of Information body that was responsible for
commissioning and purchasing art that documented British involvement in the
war—is lacking in precision. The WAAC acquired only one artwork by Plante: A
Rescue Ship in the Atlantic, March 1943, purchased from the artist. (It
seems significant that when this painting is reproduced in the book, the caption
gives not its actual title, but rather a narrative summary of the event depicted:
“Gouache painting of burning, sinking tanker Southern Princess, Battle
of the Atlantic, March 1943”.) Overall, Broome Williams’s text tends to suggest
a closer relationship between artist and committee than was actually the case.
For example, although she is correct in noting Plante’s brief lobbying of the
WAAC to pay attention to Merchant Navy subjects, she is on shakier ground when
she asserts that Plante received “official encouragement” as well as “recognition
and support” from the committee. Certainly Plante was warmly commended to the
WAAC in the spring of 1942 by Jan Juta, and the committee did indeed recommend
to the Marconi Company (the largest employer of radio officers, all of whom
were civilians rather than official military personnel) that Plante be given
opportunities to make art when possible. (“While dodging U-boats and battling
the elements he never stopped painting,” claims Broome Williams in her
“Foreword”, with a pardonable degree of exaggeration [x].) But all in all the
WAAC had minimal and quite cursory dealings with Plante. Even Broom Williams’s implication
that the committee ultimately donated multiple Plante paintings to the Imperial
War Museum ignores the fact that the committee acquired only one of his
paintings in the first place. Yet there is
also much to admire in Broome Williams’s otherwise thoroughly documented study.
George Plante is an artist who has not received significant attention from
previous writers. He emerges from this book as an ambitious, accomplished and
delightful figure. _
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