The Art of Remembrance | Lilya Osmani

As we enter Remembrance Week and prepare for our Abbey assembly tomorrow, I thought it

would be nice to take the time to explore an aspect of art that is of significant relevance to this period. In the following article, I take a look at two war artists, Paul Nash and Henry Moore, who both used the artistic medium to help us understand the realities of war in ways that the qualitative or quantitative alone couldn’t express hence I believe the visual is very important in truly understanding significant periods of history. Their work continues to remind us that remembrance isn’t only about soldiers and victories, but also about people, places, and memories forever changed by war.

Paul Nash

Born in 1889 in London, and raised in Buckinghamshire, he attended the Slade School of Art, where he explored the work of the Romantics, like William Blake and Samuel Palmer. He was interested in these artists, and his early works show a deep love for nature, trees, and the English countryside, with a tinge of ethereality. Paul Nash didn’t start off as a war artist, he became one because of what he witnessed.

In 1917 he became an officer on the Western Front in Belgium; however, after being wounded in action, he was sent home and then became an official war artist. After he recovered, he returned to the front, this time as an artist, and he was shocked by the desolated landscapes he came back to. While other war artists focused on the depiction of soldiers or battles, Nash focused his attention on the landscape itself, and how it too had become a victim of war.

We are Making a New World, 1918, oil on canvas

One of his most famous paintings, We Are Making a New World, mocks the ambitions of the

war, as the sun rises over a scene of total desolation. The landscape has become unnavigable, unrecognisable, and utterly barren. The mounds of earth act almost as gravestones. The scene looks hopeful at first (the sun rising), but the trees are reduced to splintered sticks, the earth is muddy and lifeless. The painting has become one of the defining images of WWI, showing how art can express grief and devastation more powerfully than words.

Nash blended realism and symbolism, and although his landscapes were set in real places he had seen, there is a dreamlike element to all his compositions, they look almost like dreamscapes, or things of nightmares. To achieve this look, he used a combination of harsh outlines and strange perspectives to show the unnatural transformation of nature by war.

“I am no longer an artist, I am a messenger to those who want the war to go on forever… and may it burn their lousy souls.”

When WWII began, Nash was once again appointed an official war artist. This time his work

focused on aircraft and the machinery of war, such as Totes Meer (Dead Sea) (1940–41), which shows a field of crashed German planes lying like waves in a metallic sea. He managed to turn modern warfare into something otherworldly and mournful.

He died in 1946, not long after the war ended, but his art left a permanent mark on how Britain remembers war. Most significantly, Paul Nash transformed war art from propaganda into poetry and protest. His paintings remind us that remembrance isn’t just about heroism, it’s about the land, the loss, and the lasting scars of war.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore, the son of a coal miner, was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, in 1898. He studied at the Leeds School of Art and later the Royal College of Art, where he developed his signature sculptural style, rounded, organic forms. Before the Second World War, Moore was already a prominent modernist sculptor and was particularly famous for his sculptures of reclining figures, which explored the human relationship with space and shelter.

When the Second World War broke out, Moore’s Hampstead studio in London was damaged during the Blitz. He and his wife Irina moved to a farmhouse called Hoglands in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, which later became his lifelong home.

Because bronze and stone, the materials he typically used for sculpture, became scarce due to the war, he turned from sculpture to drawing, using pencil, wax, and watercolour to capture the human experience of war.

Shelter Drawing, 1942, pencil, wax crayon, coloured crayon, watercolour wash, pen and ink, gouache

In the 1940s, Moore took shelter in the Underground during an air raid. There, he saw civilians sleeping on platforms and stairways, wrapped in blankets and lying close together. This inspired his next body of work. He began to sketch them, fascinated by their vulnerability and collective endurance. These then became his famous Shelter Drawings, haunting images of Londoners enduring the Blitz.

Like Paul Nash, Moore didn’t depict battle scenes; instead, he focused on the human cost of war, especially among civilians. His figures are often faceless, mummified, and warped, symbolising the anonymity of suffering.

Henry Moore’s war art doesn’t glorify conflict, it honours survival. His Shelter Drawings remind us that remembrance is for everyone who lived through the fear and loss of war.

Examining the lives and art of both Moore and Nash helps us understand that history is not

exclusive to what we read in our history books. I believe that by looking at a piece of art which reflects this period of immense conflict, we can learn much more about human impact and emotion than from any formal account. I urge the reader to look towards art, poetry, and personal writings, in order to thoughtfully understand what it means to remember another human being.