A Brush With War: Military Art From Korea to Afghanistan
June 29, 2012 – December 2, 2012
Exhibition Details
The Founders’ Gallery was very proud to have hosted artist Gertrude Kearns for a lecture on October 25, 2012. She spoke about her paintings depicting The Somalia Affair of 1993, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and Canadian soldiers after a 2006 suicide bomber attack in Kandahar. In case you missed it you can download her talk here.
Canada’s personal, dramatic, and poignant involvement in international conflict since the Second World War is highlighted in, A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan.
A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan draws on important yet often little-known artwork in the Canadian War Museum’s Beaverbrook Collection of War Art and other collections to provide a visually striking presentation of the Canadian military experience from 1946 to 2008. The exhibition reflects a surprising variety of Canadian artistic responses to recent military events ranging from the relatively documentary to the highly personal and emotionally charged.
The first two war art programs of the First and Second World Wars, the Canadian War Memorials and the Canadian War Records, engaged more than 150 artists, including celebrated painters A. Y. Jackson and Alex Colville, and produced over 5,000 works. The advent of the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program (CAFCAP) in 1968 and the ongoing Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP) marked the re-establishment of official military art in Canada.
Over the next 27 years, 40 civilian artists created nearly 300 works depicting the Canadian Forces operating and training in Canada and around the world. The Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies provided rich subject matter while later artists captured Canada’s peacekeeping missions and participation in the Gulf War conflict.
In the 1990s, CAFCAP artists responded to new directions in contemporary art, as did those working independently or on commissions, including Gertrude Kearns, William MacDonnell and Allan Harding MacKay. Witnesses to Canada’s complex missions in Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Afghanistan these artists adopted more heavily interpreted A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan is organized by the Canadian War Museum in partnership with the Directorate of History and Heritage, Department of National Defence (DND). It has been made possible in part by a generous donation from the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation.and abstract approaches. Often large in scale, their works differ noticeably from the generally smaller and more documentary art previously produced.
A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan is organized by the Canadian War Museum in partnership with the Directorate of History and Heritage, Department of National Defence (DND). It has been made possible in part by a generous donation from the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation.