Sir Winston Churchill, Boats at Cannes Harbor, 1937. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30”. The National Churchill Museum.
World War I brought us chemical warfare. It also brought us Modernism: Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. And it was what pushed one shattered middle-aged career military man—one who went on to play a huge role in the next world war—to pick up a paintbrush.
“All of the documentary evidence and letters that we have for Winston Churchill’s early childhood and early career clearly pointed to the fact that he wasn’t interested in art,” says Timothy Riley, paintings curator at the National Churchill Museum, in Fulton. “He never visited museums or galleries or picked up a crayon as a child.”
But at age 40, Churchill was engulfed by a terrible depression. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he’d overseen all of Britain’s naval forces; in a plan to cut short World War I, which he knew would be long and brutal, Churchill sent British, New Zealander, and Australian forces to Gallipoli to invade the Dardanelles—a catastrophic decision that resulted in tens of thousands of British and Allied deaths.
“Churchill took the blame for it and resigned his post. He sunk into what his family and friends called his ‘black dog,’ which today we’d call situational depression,” Riley says.
Though he initially took up painting as therapy, he never stopped, producing more than 500 paintings during the second half of his life. This month, the Kemper Art Museum exhibits a sampling of that body of work, curated by Riley. It includes Churchill’s earliest canvases, from 1915. Some pieces on loan—including paintings from the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Chartwell, Churchill’s estate in Kent—have never been seen in America.
Though he was never formally trained, Churchill did seek out advice from artist friends and sometimes entered his paintings in competitions under a pseudonym. But he always flatly described himself as a “pastime painter,” who stuck to traditional landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, and portraits. As Riley observes, Churchill “approached painting like he approached most anything else in his life: with full gusto, full speed ahead, and with great passion.” That translates to the canvas—the paintings never feel flat, dull, or clichéd.
“Right off the bat, he was pretty good,” Riley says. “He had natural ability and natural talent.” His military career also had fine-tuned his instincts and perceptions, which naturally translated into finely observed canvases.
“He wrote about painting in an essay called ‘Painting as a Pastime,’ in the early 1920s, which was later published as a book,” Riley says. “It’s one of the most eloquent little essays that you’ll ever read from anybody—an artist, art historians, critics—about the art-making process.”
The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill opens November 13 and runs through February 14 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 1 Brookings, 314-935-4523, kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.
And Don’t Miss
The Kemper has organized ancillary programming to the Churchill show to help visitors understand the world he lived (and painted) in. On November 14 at 1 p.m., Riley will give a gallery talk with Churchill’s granddaughter, painter Edwina Sandys. “She remembers as a little girl watching her grandfather sitting behind an easel putting paint to canvas,” Riley says. “It was one of the things that inspired her to be an artist.”
In December, the museum will host a World War I Film Series at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar), which will include the classic war film All Quiet on the Western Front (December 8), Paths of Glory (December 9), and the British film Went the Day Well? (December 10).
Finally, Riley recommends checking out World War I: War of Images, Images of War (though January 4) while you are at the Kemper. It examines how artists influenced the war when they were drafted to create propaganda or how they painted in protest. The exhibit includes works by Max Beckmann, Umberto Boccioni, Georges Braque, Otto Dix, Natalia Goncharova, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Fernand Léger, and Kazimir Malevich, as well as broadsides, posters, and art made in the trenches by soldiers.
