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In April 1945, Doris Zinkeisen became the first female artist to enter the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, just as the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby was making his historic broadcast about the horrors that went on inside its walls.
Zinkeisen was working as a nurse for the British Red Cross, which had also commissioned her to paint Belsen. It was where the Royal Academy graduate did her most famous painting, Human Laundry, showing nurses cleaning emaciated men.
In early May, some of Zinkeisen’s second world war work will be exhibited for the first time in a public gallery to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day. “Doris was a trailblazer for women,” says Mehzebin Adam-Suter, the British Red Cross museum curator who is staging the show in the Oxo Tower in Southwark, central London. Included will be some of her Red Cross paintings, like the burning down of Belsen in May 1945 and military hospitals in France and Belgium, plus her war works owned by the Museum of the Order of St John.
Her granddaughter, Charlotte Johnstone, said: “The family story is her being driven into Belsen in Himmler’s requisitioned car. True or not, she never forgot the sight and smell of the place. She wrote to her husband of ‘the ghastly scene of skeletal bodies being flung out of huts and the empty eyes of survivors’.”
Zinkeisen is also one of a handful of largely unrecognised British female second world war artists featured in War Paint – Women At War, a film released in cinemas on 28 March. “Most have been historically undervalued because of their gender,” says director Margy Kinmonth, whose documentary also covers female artists depicting more recent conflicts in their home countries of Iran, Iraq, Ukraine and Sudan.
The official British War Artists’ Advisory Committee, run between 1939 and 1945, favoured men over women, who were effectively confined to portraying war damage at home or the injured in UK hospitals.
In the film, novelist Penelope Lively remembers her artist aunt, Rachel Reckitt. “Once the Blitz started, she was driving through the East End with her sketch book. She mainly did wood engravings of the facades of bombed houses. The war stimulated her. However she was very aware of the horror, which had a profound effect on her and her outlook on life.”
Another artist in the film is Gladys Hynes, whose best known work, Crucifixion, shows an airman lying on a plane’s fuselage. Julia Beaumont-Jones, curator of the RAF Museum, which owns the painting, said it is “Hynes’s very clear anti-war statement”.
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Priscilla Thorneycroft had painted anti-fascist posters for the International Brigade during the Spanish civil war. Back in Britain during the second world war, she painted surreptitiously because, like many female artists, she never received an official permit. Her Runaway Horse, depicting a horse, terrified by bombs and bolting along a road, owned by the Imperial War Museum, was painted from memory.
Painter and muralist Olga Lehmann’s life changed when her north London home and studio were destroyed on her first wedding anniversary in October 1940. “That motivated her to become a war artist,” her son, Paul Huson, a TV drama writer, told the Observer. Towards the end of Lehmann’s life, she wrote memoirs, which Huson published privately for a few friends and family. Recalling the Blitz, she wrote of “returning home one evening with an ominous chill before realising it had taken a direct hit and lay in rubble. In my daze, I rescued a few pictures, carrying them out under my arm.”
Lehmann sketched war-torn London and air-raid shelters before being commissioned in 1943 to paint murals in the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s secret factory in Corsham, Wiltshire. Post-war, Lehmann became a scenic artist on top British films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Around The World in 80 Days, did portraits of stars including Dirk Bogarde and Peter Sellers, was nominated four times for an Emmy for costume design, and became art director for two advertising agencies.
