page_title: War Artists' Advisory Committee
section_title: Operations
hierarchical_section_title: War Artists' Advisory Committee / Operations
caption_attribution_description: English: A corridor lit by electric light with numbers and symbols marking the walls and floor.
context_page_description: The War Artists Advisory Committee, was a British government agency established within the Ministry of Information at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and headed by Sir Kenneth Clark. Its aim was to compile a comprehensive artistic record of Britain throughout the war. This was achieved by appointing official war artists who were sent to specific locations to capture how the war affected the area.
  When the committee was dissolved in December 1945 its collection consisted of 5,570 works of art produced by over four hundred artists. This collection was then distributed to museums and institutions in Britain and around the world, with over half of the collection, some 3,000 works, going to the Imperial War Museum.
context_section_description: The Committee operated by employing artists on full-time contracts, offering short-term commissions to artists on individual subjects and by purchasing finished works offered to it. In total WAAC acquired artworks from some four hundred artists. It also issued permits allowing artists access to otherwise restricted areas and rationed materials. Wartime rationing restricted good quality paper for printmaking and materials for sculpture so such works were under-represented in the WAAC collection. In June 1941, WAAC established a scheme to obtain artworks by artists from Britain's overseas colonies. Although four artists were sent to record the activities of the British Expeditionary Force in France, at the start of the war the majority of WAAC commissions were for subjects on the British home front, but as the conflict progressed twenty-six men were given overseas commissions. Among these were Edward Ardizzone, Henry Carr, and Edward Bawden who each went to the Middle East, Leslie Cole was sent to Malta, France and South-East Asia, Vivian Pitchforth went to Burma, and Anthony Gross went to the Middle East and Burma before joining the Normandy landings. Two women, Mary Kessell and Laura Knight, were also, towards the end of the war, given overseas commissions. Other artists serving overseas but working without a WAAC commission or contract, submitted work which was then purchased by the Committee. These included Doris Zinkeisen and Stella Schmolle serving with the Red Cross and the Auxiliary Territorial Service respectively. Three artists, Thomas Hennell, Eric Ravilious and Albert Richards, were killed during the Second World War whilst working on WAAC commissions.
caption: The Passage to the Control-room at South West Regional Headquarters, Bristol, (Art. IWM ART LD 170), by John Piper
exif: {"Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "Imperial War Museums"}