London.- Focusing on work by women war artists from the First World War to the Kosovo conflict, the “Women War Artists” exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London is on view from 9th April 2011 to 8th January 2012. The exhibition highlights the Museum’s outstanding art collection as it explores artists’ response to conflict, whether as eyewitnesses, participants, commentators or as officially commissioned recorders. Women War Artists illuminates both the constraints and possibilities offered to female artists in war time and offers a unique opportunity to revisit key moments in the last century of Britain’s history of war and conflict, through a largely unexplored perspective. Featured artists will include Anna Airy, one of the first women officially commissioned during the First World War, Dame Laura Knight RA, Linda Kitson and Frauke Eigen. A book to accompany the exhibition has been published by Tate Publishing in association with the Museum and is now available online.
In 1917 the Cabinet decided that a National War Museum should be set up to collect and display material relating to the Great War, which was then still being fought. The interest taken by the Dominion governments led to the museum being given the title of Imperial War Museum. It was formally established by Act of Parliament in 1920 and a governing Board of Trustees appointed. The Museum was opened in the Crystal Palace by King George V on 9 June 1920. From 1924 to 1935 it was housed, under very difficult conditions, in two galleries adjoining the former Imperial Institute, South Kensington. On 7 July 1936 the Duke of York, shortly to become King George VI, reopened the Museum in its present home. The Museum was closed to the public from September 1940 to November 1946 and vulnerable collections were evacuated to stores outside London. Most of the exhibits survived the war, but a Short seaplane, which had flown at the Battle of Jutland, was shattered when a German bomb fell on the Naval Gallery on 31 January 1941 and some of the naval models were damaged by the blast. At the outset of the Second World War the Museum’s terms of reference were enlarged to cover both world wars and they were again extended in 1953 to include all military operations in which Britain or the Commonwealth have been involved since August 1914.
The building which accommodates the Imperial War Museum London was formerly the central portion of Bethlem Royal Hospital, or Bedlam, as it was commonly known. Designed by James Lewis, it was completed in 1815. Sidney Smith’s dome was added in 1846 and contained the chapel. The east and west wings were demolished in the early 1930s to make room for the park which now surrounds the Museum. Bethlem Royal Hospital dates back to 1247, when Simon Fitz-Mary, a wealthy alderman and sheriff of London, founded the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem on the site which is now part of Liverpool Street Station. In the fourteenth century the priory began to specialise in the care of the insane. In 1547 Henry VIII granted the hospital to the City of London. Bethlem was moved to a new building in Moorfields in 1676. Until 1770 there were no restrictions on visitors, and the patients, who were often manacled or chained to the walls, were a public attraction. Patients included Mary Nicholson who tried to assassinate George III in 1786, Jonathan Martin, committed in 1829 after setting fire to York Minster, the painters Richard Dadd and Louis Wain, famous for his cartoons of cats, Antonia White, author of ‘Frost in May’ and ‘Beyond the Glass’ and the architect A W N Pugin who designed the Houses of Parliament and St George’s Roman Catholic Cathedral opposite the Museum. Visit the museum’s website at … http://london.iwm.org.uk