Blog

Photos from the exhibition

15 October 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 2 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

I should have done this ages ago, but as the saying goes, ‘better late than never…’

These are just a few snaps I took of the exhibition today.

The entrance to the exhibition featuring Frank Hurley’s well-known photograph

A replica cast of the ‘Big Digger’ stands guard near the exhibition’s entrance. The real statue stands atop the Bullecourt Memorial

Portraits and uniform jackets of two prominent AIF commanders at Bullecourt. Brigadier John Gellibrand of 6th Brigade (L) and Lt Colonel Raymond Leane of the 48th ‘Joan of Arc’ Battalion (R)

 

Typical battledress of a German and an Australian infantryman on the Western Front in 1917

 

Two large artworks of Polygon Wood and Messines, plus a foot bridge used to cross the Douve near Messines and a stretcher that saw action at Passchendaele

 

This part of the exhibition presents the commemorative aspects, both then and now

 

Signposts from the battlefields

 

A long view down the first corridor of the exhibition

 

Looking back from the far corner

Exhibition Catalogue now available

29 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. No comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

A catalogue of the To Flanders Fields, 1917 exhibition is now available.  It’s 44-pages, is illustrated and sells for AUD $7.95.  It can be purchased at the Memorial’s shop or online.

Lambert in Melbourne

24 August 2007 by Janda Gooding. No comments
News, Exhibition, Gallipoli Mission, Janda's Blog about Gallipoli, Landscapes of war

Here are some of the latest pics of the George Lambert exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. You can see that it looks quite different to how it did in Canberra. As each venue has different physical spaces and facilities and even different visitor patterns, the exhibition is ‘re-designed’ for each specific venue. Whereas in Canberra we used dark wall colours, in Melbourne the works hang on white walls with an even wash of light over them. With slightly more space the exhibition has an ‘airy’ feel about it. And the order in which the paintings and drawings are displayed is very different. Some groups have remained the same but generally, the hanging order has taken into account the way people move around the two adjacent galleries.

Exhibition launch

10 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 1 Comment
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

Last night the Australian War Memorial’s latest special exhibition, To Flanders Fields, 1917 was officially launched.  A large gathering of invited guests saw the Chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, Major General Adrian Clunies-Ross AO MBE (Ret’d), give the opening address and introduce the guest speakers.

The Ambassador for Belgium, His Excellency Mr Frank Carruet gave a sincere and heart-felt speech, followed by The Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, The Hon. Bruce Billson MP, who also made an excellent speech before officially opening the exhibition.

The exhibition opened to the public this morning (10 August).

Photographs by Hans Reppin, Australian War Memorial. Copyright Australian War Memorial, 2007.

Latest media articles

10 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 2 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

10 August – Year of bloodshed best not forgotten, The Sydney Morning Herald

10 August – Exhibition evokes cruel days of 1917, The Canberra Times

11 August – Miners of Messines, The Australian

Reminder – Exhibition opens tomorrow !

09 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. No comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

Just a reminder that this exhibition will open here at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra tomorrow – Friday 10 August.

Admission to the Memorial and this exhibition is free. Hope you can come and see it.

Check our web page ‘Planning your visit’

Also check out online, an excerpt (nearly 3 mins) from the exhibition’s 15 minute film

/blog.awm.gov.au/awm/2007/08/06/exhibition-film-preview/

Exhibition Film – Preview

06 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 2 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition, Photographs & Film

The exhibition will feature a 15 minute film, based on the photographic and film work of Captain Frank Hurley, Official War Photographer during the Ypres-Passchendaele Offensive.

This is a short excerpt from that film (2 mins 43 secs).

[MEDIA=1]

Title: To Flanders Fields, 1917: through the eyes of Frank Hurley
Produced by: the Australian War Memorial
Producer: Ray McJannett
Sound & sound effects: Lenny Preston
Original music: Antoni Rudnicki
Narrators: Craig Marvel, Sharron Parmeter
Archival film and photos: Captain Frank Hurley
Diary extracts of Frank Hurley (courtesy of National Library of Australia)
Copyright: Australian War Memorial (2007)

Rain and Mud: the Ypres – Passchendaele Offensive

01 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 3 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Battles, Commemoration, Exhibition, Passchendaele (Ypres), Research material

Swamp around Zonnebeke, Oct 1917 (E01200) E01200

When considering the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, what immediately springs to mind is a desolate, shattered landscape of mud.  So when looking through the photographs of this battle here on the blog, and in the exhibition, it may be puzzling that some depict this morass with men and horses up to their waists in mud, yet many others show a rather dry and dusty landscape.  The answer is that this was a lengthy campaign (July to November), and the weather conditions proved quite changeable and fickle.  The same applies to the Somme Offensive which ran for a similar period during the previous year.  The other factor at Ypres was the physical characteristics of this part of Flanders.  The water table in this area is very high and indeed parts of the battlefield were swamp or reclaimed swamp.  So even when the surface appeared dry, it could in places be sodden below the crust and digging into the ground even to a shallow depth would invite water.  Naturally the blanket coverage of shell craters only made the situation worse.

According to Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in Passchendaele: the untold story (p 97), during August 1917, 127 mm of rain fell in Flanders, which was double the normal average for that month.  October also proved another very wet month, with 30 mm of rain falling in just the five-day period 4-9 October (pp 126, 159).  However the month of September was mostly dry and this coincided with the three major pushes that the Australians spearheaded in the Ypres sector (Menin Road 20 Sept, Polygon Wood 26 Sept, and Broodseinde 4 Oct).  During these attacks the troops marvelled at how strong and utterly dominant their supporting artillery fire was. 

But in the afternoon of 4 October, right after the Broodseinde operation had been completed (it was over by noon), the weather broke and the rain set in, quickly turning the devastated battlefield into a quagmire.  In these conditions it was impossible to drag forward enough artillery and ammunition to maintain such strong support.  So the troops that attacked in the wet after 4 October noticed a dramatic drop-off in supporting artillery fire to the point where at times it was barely noticeable.  Another pitiful result was the greatly increased difficulty of evacuating the wounded.  The decision therefore to continue the offensive and capture Passchendaele in the rain and mud was a weighty one.  As C. E. W. Bean later wrote,

‘In these circumstances Haig made the most questioned decision of his career.’ (Bean, Vol IV, p 883).

Interestingly, at this point Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig acknowledged the weather and terrain problems, telling war correspondents on 11 October:

‘It was simply the mud which defeated us on Tuesday [9 October].  The men did splendidly to get through it as they did.  But the Flanders mud, as you know, is not a new invention.  It has a name in history – it has defeated other armies before this one…’ (quoted in Bean, Official History, Vol IV, p 908).

One wonders with this admission of the difficulties presented, why Haig then persisted with the offensive.  However it must be considered that there were real dangers in halting the offensive where they stood.  They were still short of the final ridge at Passchendaele and had they remained short of it, it would have been very difficult and costly in lives to hold such a poor position.  So perhaps it can be argued that the final push to capture Passchendaele through the dreadful mud of October and November was a combination of this tactical necessity, Haig’s perception of an imminent German collapse and his desire to see his grand plan through to a successful conclusion.

For the Germans the onset of rain was a Heaven-sent.  Indeed Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the Field Marshal in command of the entire northern sector of the Western Front (i.e. that principally opposing the British and Commonwealth forces), made a relieved note in his diary;

12 October 1917

‘Witterungsumschlag.  Erfreulicherweise Regen, unser wirksamster bundesgenosse.’

(trans. Sudden change of weather.  Most fortunate rain, our most effective ally).

It should also be remembered that despite these dreadful conditions and the grievous losses, the British Army and its Commonwealth troops did succeed in capturing Passchendaele and part of the final ridge.  It was the Canadian Corps that finally achieved this on 6 November.  The Canadians would by 1918 become past masters at providing massive artillery support for their infantry, but in the mud before Passchendaele in November 1917, these techniques they were trying to perfect must have been greatly frustrated.  With this in mind, their capture of Passchendaele is all the more impressive.

Finally, in one of the war’s ‘what ifs’, it may well be speculated that the offensive at Ypres during 1917 might have succeeded had it gotten underway several weeks earlier, and the final ridge at Passchendaele been captured in early October, before the weather really broke.  One can only wonder…

Thirty Years of an Artist’s Life

12 July 2007 by Janda Gooding. No comments
George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine Landscapes, Exhibition

In 1938 Amy Lambert produced a book titled G.W. Lambert, A.R.A. (Thirty years of an artist’s life). Amy used a lot of personal correspondence from her husband including substantial accounts of his time working as a war artist in the Middle East and Gallipoli. Through these letters we get an insight into Lambert’s working methods, his relationships to officers and troopers of the Light Horse, and his reactions to the landscapes and historic battlefields he visited.

When he first arrived in Egypt in January 1918 he wrote that “I am ridiculously happy. Already I have done three pieces of work and everywhere I look there are glorious pictures, magnificent men and real top-hole Australian horses.” The beauty of the place overwhelmed him and he developed an abiding respect for the men of the Light Horse which eventually found expression in his large commissioned paintings. Towards the end of his second visit in 1919 and as he was packing up to return to London, he wrote to Amy: “Everything is closing up here, and there is a beastly left-over feeling about us all.” The Australian camps were being dismantled and Lambert, like others was returning to a post-war world.

This book is full of information and insights into the character of Lambert and despite Amy virtually erasing herself from the narrative, there are also many clues for the reader about their long lasting and devoted marriage.  First published in 1938 it was reprinted in 1977 by Australian Artist Editions.  Copies of the 1977 edition of the book are also available through the Memorial’s bookshop.

Study for Dead Trooper

02 July 2007 by Ilaria Poli. No comments
George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine Landscapes, Conservation, Exhibition

The majority of conservation treatments on paintings in the George Lambert: Gallipoli & Palestine Landscapes exhibition were relatiavely straightforward. There were a few exceptions to this rule, one being Study for Dead Trooper and detail of Turkish trench, Gallipoli (pro Patria), oil on canvas, 1918. A lot of work was required on the painting and its frame. This included: cleaning the surfaces of the painting and its frame, filling and inpainting the frame, cleaning the canvas edges, strip lining the whole work, attaching the canvas to a new stretcher, flattening some areas of the canvas as well as filling and inpainting the paint layer. The frame had a number of specific issues. The task of removing the old layer of gold coating from the frame was more difficult than usual as there were many layers of gesso between the bronze leaf and the top gold coating that had to be removed. There were also problems with previous repairs to the frame that were falling off during the cleaning process. As the repairs to process the frame’s corners progressed much of the old fill broke away, loosening sections that were previously fixed down. Subsequently, many parts of the corner mouldings had to be re-placed into position and sometimes new sections were moulded to size and shape. Inpainting of the filled areas and all the losses on the bronze leaf original base layer also required hours of work. Difficulty arose as there were many small areas, each of varying tones of gold. It was also one of the larger frames to be included in the exhibition so there was a greater surface area to deal with than the others.This oil on canvas painting was originally stretched onto a stretcher but at some point the canvas was laid onto a wood panel. Possibly this was to make it easier to fit into the frame and there are several examples in the collection of this having been done.

Work on the canvas began by firstly carefully removing it from the wood panel support. The canvas was not adhered very well to the panel so removal was reasonably straightforward. The back of the canvas had a great amount of old adhesive around the edges. This adhesive had to be removed to have the cleanest possible surface for further treatment. Once the old adhesive was removed the edges were slightly dampened and flattened with a heated spatula. The flatness allowed easier manipulation for the procedure of adhering polyester strips. Each strip was adhered to the canvas edge with BEVA® 371 film under heat. These polyester strips became extensions of the canvas and allowed for a greater surface area to staple the canvas to the new stretcher bar. The addition of these strips also gave the weakened canvas edges much needed extra strength. Each edge was carefully aligned and stapled onto a new stretcher. The sides of the canvas were protected by thin strips of card for added protection from the frame rebate. The tension in the canvas was then adjusted by the ‘keys’ in the corners of the stretcher. The next task was flattening four bulges in the canvas. These areas were left under a poultice and flattened with weights. Consolidation of two areas of flaking paint was undertaken using an adhesive combined with heat to attach the fragile areas. The final process was glazing, rehousing and putting a protective backing on the painting. A laminated glass was placed into the rebate edges, the painting slotted in and a backing board sat behind the canvas. The backing board was fixed down with several brackets and hangers were nailed into the frame. Laminated, non-reflective glass was used to provide better viewing and strength as the painting will be travelling as part of the exhibition.

Ilaria Poli, Conservator