The art of war
Published Saturday November 8th, 2008
Work made during the Second World War by Bruno and Molly Lamb Bobak, two of Canada's last few living war artists, is as relevant today as it was more than 60 years ago. As Remembrance Day approaches, Marty Klinkenberg reveals that the long-married painters who live in Fredericton, now in their 80s and in the twilight of their careers, had vastly different experiences of war.
Sun streams into the living room through picture windows that reveal an artist's canvas in the backyard. It is a crisp, autumn day in New Brunswick, and the ground is carpeted with maple leaves in a patchwork of colours. Branches, all yellow and orange, sag beneath the fall foliage.
Inside, two of Canada's most famous painters sit, surrounded by timeless masterpieces. There is a painting of Oslo Harbor that Bruno Bobak completed decades ago, along with portraits of his son, Alex, daughter, Anny, and his raven-haired wife, Molly Lamb Bobak. There is a painting she did of a snowy street scene in Fredericton, and another, a still life of this same room with the same pretty view.
She is 88 now and her hair is silver and her vision is failing, so she sits with her back to the windows, away from the glare. Rooted in a pot beside her is a bay tree, the same type of aromatic evergreen the Romans used to pluck to create gilded crowns.
He is 85 and soft-spoken, his eyes a pool of bottled emotion. He sits a few feet away and thumbs through a box of prints, pencil drawings by her that are almost whimsical, paintings by him that are tortured, foreboding and dark.
"When I look at my paintings, my impression is that I can't believe I did them,'' Bobak says. "It's almost like they were done by someone else.
"Often, I look through them and think, 'I did that?' And then, 'God, I wish I could paint like that today.' "
Two of the last living war artists that Canada enlisted to detail its efforts in the Second World War, the Bobaks are national treasures, as irreplaceable as the brilliant works they produced. As a child, she rubbed elbows with the Group of Seven, and in 1945 became the country's first and only official female war artist. He was 20 and a year out of art school in Toronto, a former student of Group of Seven founding father Arthur Lismer, when he was appointed Canada's youngest war artist in 1944.
"I passed a course at blowing up bridges, but before I got a chance to use those skills I was made into a war artist,'' says Bobak, who immigrated to Canada from Poland with his parents when he was three years old. "I would have just as soon carried a palette and a paint brush than a machine gun, so it suited me well.
"And when I look back now, it probably saved my life."
Underweight when he enlisted and described by a recruiting officer as being too sensitive to become a combat soldier, Bobak was nearly killed by bombs in England and Holland, and was almost taken prisoner once when he got lost behind enemy lines.
And before all that, he was convinced by his own government to take part in a "secret mission" that involved him being contaminated with mustard gas.
Six decades later, as a form of apology, the Canadian government sent him a certificate of appreciation.
"I really think all of us, after what we went through, honestly believed there should never be another war after the Second World War,'' says Bobak, who still paints, but only for his own enjoyment, and without much vigour. "But since then, we have really never been without war.
"We are civilized people, yet we are actually extending war. It is unbelievable that we would be dropping clustre bombs on women and children to solve problems that are basically economic."
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Canada owes its rich history of being a promoter and purveyor of war art to Lord Beaverbrook, the New Brunswick-raised press baron who in 1917 established a fund through which artists were hired to document the country's military efforts in the First World War.
A well-connected son of a Presbyterian minister, Beaverbrook offered artists an officer's rank and pay to sketch Canadians in battle, and provided them with studios in London where they could complete their canvases.
More than 800 paintings were generated as a result of the program, including pieces by Fred Varley and A.Y. Jackson, future members of the Group of Seven, the most influential artists in Canadian history.
Bruno Bobak and Molly Lamb were engaged through a similar government initiative three decades later, and most of their works are now part of the collection at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. In all, Canada enlisted 32 official artists in the Second World War, and between them they produced approximately 5,000 drawings.
Together, the Bobaks accounted for 241.
"Their work was very significant because Molly provided the female side of uniformed service, while Bruno's world was very male,'' says Laura Brandon, the museum's curator of war art. "It shows that the experience of the war was dependent on what sex you were. They saw things that were completely different."
Brandon says Lamb, who doggedly pursued a position previously available only to men, especially earned a place in history.
"As the first official female war artist, she was undoubtedly unique,'' Brandon says.
Today, there are only a handful of war paintings in the Bobaks' two-storey home near the university campus in Fredericton, including a drawing by Lamb of a building destroyed by a bomb across from the quarters they once shared in England, and a watercolour by Bobak of the helmet, gas mask and water bottle he was handed in 1942 on the day he joined the army as a draughtsman.
"There is not much to say,'' Bobak says, hesitating, when asked to talk about the hardships of war. "It is all there, in the pictures."
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One of the first Canadian women to earn a living as an artist, Molly Lamb grew up on the Georgia Strait, the daughter of an art collector, critic and amateur painter on Galiano Island, B.C. Her father was acquainted with the artists who became the Group of Seven, and occasionally held court with them in his living room.
"It wasn't unusual for them to come to the house, so I knew them all, but they were just people to me," Lamb says as she sits, her back to windows through which purple and white morning glories can be seen stretching toward the sun. "I was always surrounded by art, and that and genes, I suppose, led me to become an artist."
Eventually, she enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art, and in 1942, not long after graduating, she enlisted in the Canadian Women's Army Corps , also as a draughtsman.
"You joined the navy if you wanted to be chic because they had the nicest uniforms, but I preferred the army,'' she says. "My mother drove me to the old Vancouver Hotel at the intersection of Georgia and Granville, and waited outside while I signed up.
"When I tried to leave, the military wouldn't let me right away, and that frightened me, so I told my mother I hated it when they finally let me come out."
Her mother began writing to Mackenzie King, asking the prime minister to release his daughter from her commitment, but the letter was never sent.
Molly quickly discovered she enjoyed military life and was sold on it by the time she arrived for basic training in Vermillion, Alta., a month later, wearing a tartan skirt, saddle shoes and bobby sox on a day the temperature was nearly 50 below zero.
"I loved being in the Canadian army,'' Lamb says. "I met every type of woman imaginable. We were all thrown together, girls from the prairies and every province, completely dislodged from our lives, and we really did a lot for our country and got to know a lot about Canada.
"Looking back, it was an extraordinary time for young people, and in some ways it really opened your eyes as a Canadian.
"I am damn glad I joined."
As plain-spoken a woman as she is elegant a painter, Lamb joined the military with the hope of becoming a war artist, but wasn't considered because of her gender. For three years, she washed dishes and performed other chores assigned to the Canadian Women's Army Corps - and lobbied to become an artist the entire time.
At one point, she even hitchhiked to Ottawa with her sketchbook, and begged Harry McCurry, the director of the National Gallery and one of the officials administering the war art program, to promote her.
"I was an optimist more than a feminist, and I had to work very hard to become a war artist, to the point of making a damn nuisance of myself,'' she says.
With support from A.Y. Jackson, the family friend and confidant she knew as "Uncle Alex," Lamb was appointed the country's first official female war artist in May of 1945. Primarily, she drew fellow soldiers in the Canadian Women's Army Corps as they sorted mail, worked in the kitchen, folded laundry and marched in parades, and once sketched scenes from an army show in Quebec City that was attended by Winston and Clementine Churchill and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Sent to Europe after the cease-fire was declared, she earned praise with her paintings of the ravaged countryside in Holland.
"Everything was devastated and the people were poor, but their spirit and their generosity was wonderful,'' Lamb says. "They loved the Canadians. They felt as if we were the ones who had liberated their country."
Provided a vehicle and assigned a driver, she enjoyed perks that had previously been a man's domain.
"It was a tremendous thing back then for a young woman to have all that freedom,'' she says. "I had access to lots of booze. When I was going to Holland for the first time, somebody told me you could swap cigarettes for barrels of beer, and the thought of that really excited me.
"I was so terribly gullible at that time."
To complete the sketches she did in the field, Lamb was directed to the same studio in London as Bruno Bobak.
"She was forced on me and I was mad, and I didn't want to share my space with her,'' Bobak says. "I piled up a bunch of crates down the middle of the studio and told her, 'This is your half, and this is mine.'
"But it wasn't long before we were sharing a pint at the local pub, and it wasn't long after that the barrier came down."
After seeking permission to get married from their senior officer, the couple was wed in December of 1945.
"When I look back, I feel very comfortable with the past, and very lucky,'' Lamb says. "I really had a pretty easy war. I loved every minute of it. I never even saw a bomb go off."
Her husband wasn't quite as fortunate. He was used as a guinea pig in an experiment with mustard gas at home, and painted fierce battles in Belgium, Holland and France, including Normandy.
There, only hours after landing on D-Day, most of the members of his former unit were dead.
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Fresh out of studies at the Central Technical School in Toronto, Bruno Bobak joined the Royal Canadian Engineers in 1942. First trained as a driver, and then in demolition, he was appointed Canada's youngest war artist after winning first prize in a Canadian army art competition in 1944. The irrepressible Molly Lamb, the woman with whom his life has now been linked for 63 years, won second place.
"Whatever art I did in the military was really an extension of my becoming an artist,'' Bobak says in his living room in Fredericton. "We were straight out of art school when we went in, and we were established when we came out. It was like having three extra years of art training.
"With the exception of the danger, it was an extension of what we already wanted to do."
Bobak travelled to Europe on the troop ship Joseph Pasteur, sleeping in a hammock at the front of the vessel.
Soon, he was experiencing, and painting, the pathos and pain of war.
Death came so swiftly and so routinely, Bobak says, that there was little sense of danger.
"The difference between the First World War and the Second World War was that life in the Second World War was pleasant for soldiers until they got killed,'' he says. "You could be drinking champagne in your tent and be dead 10 minutes later.
"In the First World War, soldiers were living in trenches or mud. Life was gruesome all the time."
Death stalked soldiers in the Second World War, seemingly no matter where they were. London was particularly dangerous, Bobak says, because of the random nature of the bombing.
He still remembers the day a V1 bomb landed only a few feet from him in Battersea Park.
"The V1s were fuel-propelled, so you could hear them as they flew overhead,'' he says. "When you heard the motor stop, you knew they were about to come down.
"That was part of the mental torture. They made a big noise until they stopped, and then you knew it was only a matter of seconds."
The day Bobak barely escaped with his life, he heard a bomb's engine stop and sought cover by crouching beside the trunk of a tree. Almost immediately, he was rocked by a tremendous explosion.
"I looked up, and every leaf had been blown off,'' he says. "The bomb landed directly on the other side of the tree."
Another time, while searching for a good vantage point from which to paint, Bobak and his driver, a fellow named Swanson, got lost behind enemy lines.
"We found what we thought would be a good spot and stopped, and then I noticed German soldiers in the field beside us," Bobak says. "I told Swanson, 'I think we drove too far' and he hit the gas and we got the hell out of there.
"The Germans saw us, but they didn't shoot or come after us. I think they were as surprised as we were.
"Still, that's how close I came to becoming a prisoner of war."
A man who considers himself a pacifist and abhors war, Bobak once dived into a trench to escape bombing while sketching a battle scene in Holland.
"I landed on top of a dead German soldier,'' he says, shaken by the memory, six decades later. "I don't know how long he had been there, but it was horrifying.
"His face was contorted like something in a (Francisco) Goya painting."
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On the day the war ended, Bruno Bobak was in a city in the rolling countryside of eastern Holland. The emotional scene he witnessed inspired one of his favourite paintings, Liberation of Almelo.
He fetches a copy of the drawing from a box of prints on his lap, studies it, and begins to reminisce.
"It was pouring rain and freezing, a wet, wet day in May,'' he says. "Soldiers were driving down the main street, a street saturated with orange ribbons, and people were running out and embracing the soldiers.
"It was such a miserable day, and such a cheerful occasion."
That night, he was invited to dinner by grateful family.
"We had a four-course meal, but every course was potato,'' he says. "We had potato soup, potatoes with gravy, potatoes with brown sugar "¦
"They had almost no food left."
After finishing their final war paintings in London, the Bobaks returned to Toronto, and lived in an apartment building at the corner of Bloor and Yonge that was owned by Lawren Harris, another of the members of the Group of Seven. The studio where they worked was owned by A.Y. Jackson, after whom they named their first child, Alex, in 1946.
From there, the couple moved to Ottawa and Vancouver and eventually, Fredericton, where both became teachers after Bobak accepted an offer in 1960 to become artist-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick.
"They asked if I'd mind doing it for one year, and I thought that would be fine,'' he says. "They ended up getting two artists for the price of one, and then asked if we would stay on.
"We had to go to Europe for about a year but we came back and now here we still are, more than 40 years later."
Soon after arriving in New Brunswick, the couple met Lord Beaverbrook, who had recently opened the gallery on the banks of the St. John River that still bears his name. Neither recalls Beaverbrook, who had served in England's war cabinet and was once called a "loathsome little man" by Clementine Churchill, very fondly.
Bobak met Beaverbrook while hanging paintings for an exhibit and lecture about the work he had done while serving as the local university's artist-in-residence. Beaverbrook didn't recognize him, and berated him for being shabbily dressed.
"When I told him who I was and explained what I was doing, he said, 'Well, I guess the clothes make the man,' " Bobak says. "He was wearing red flannel slippers. I think he had a case of gout at the time."
Lamb met Lord Beaverbrook as she was coming up the stairs after viewing an exhibit by Jack Shadbolt, a fellow war artist and her former instructor at the Vancouver School of Art.
Beaverbrook was accompanied by Edwy Cooke, the gallery's first curator, and was annoyed that she had been looking at a display by a Canadian painter.
"I curtsied and everything when I met him, but he was very rude,'' she says. "When I told him what I had come to see, he said, 'Aren't my English paintings good enough for you?'
"But I didn't take it very personally."
Bobak and Lamb both continued to paint, often using New Brunswick's landscape as a subject, and are listed now among Canada's most important artists. They received the Order of Canada simultaneously in 1996.
"In New Brunswick circles, they are considered royalty, and artistically, they are in the big league of Canadian artists,'' says Bernard Riordon, the chief executive officer and director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, which has the most extensive collection of paintings by Bobak in the country. "Their role has been visionary, and their artwork in many ways is universal and timeless.
"They are national treasures. They both created compelling and powerful works that have inspired artists all across Canada."
Riordon is currently helping organize a Bobak retrospective that is being planned for next year at the McMichael Gallery, in Kleinburg, north of Toronto. The show will include a variety of Bobak's work, including war paintings.
"People ask, 'What can an artist do that a camera can't?' " Bobak says. "Cameras are instant, but a painting is an interpretation of a moment. It's the difference between reading a book and seeing a movie.
"You are looking at something that is physical and permanent. There is a difference, like there is between people who write letters and those who just send emails.
"It is a physical thing."
Among the last of a dying breed, Bobak and Lamb still cherish the relationships they had with Canada's other official war artists. Of the group of 32, only seven - the Bobaks, Donald Anderson, Leonard Brooks, Alex Colville, Robert Hyndman and Jack Nichols - are still alive.
"There are very few of us left,'' says Bobak, the youngest of the seven remaining living artists. "I'm so old that when somebody says turn of the century, I'm not sure what century they are talking about."
Among the war artists, Bobak was closest to Colville, whose paintings can now be found in acclaimed galleries in London, Paris and New York.
"To be a witness to war is a sobering experience,'' says Colville, 88, who lives in Wolfville, N.S., and is most famous for painting troops landing on Juno Beach and horrifying conditions in a Nazi death camp. "I think Bruno and I probably looked at it the same way.
"It was a compliment to be chosen, and also a wonderful opportunity. To be just out of school and get asked to do something so serious and so dangerous was quite remarkable. To be given so much responsibility and a totally free hand, you couldn't help but think you were fortunate."
Colville, who served in the German, Dutch and Belgian countryside, considered the job an honour, even if the material was, at times, quite difficult.
"I think it affected each of us, if maybe not in the same way,'' he says.
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On Tuesday, the Bobaks will attend Remembrance Day services around Fredericton, and like during the war, their experiences will be quite different.
Molly will be a spectator, Bruno a participant.
"I go every single year,'' she says. "It's quite sweet to see all of the old vets. They come in a bus and it is hard now for some of them to stand, but I enjoy seeing those old fellas nonetheless."
Bruno says he doesn't sing very well, but that hasn't stopped him from becoming a member of the Canadian Legion men's chorus.
"Most of the people we sing for are in old-age homes or places like that, and are pretty deaf anyway,'' he says.
On Remembrance Day, he will march and join other members of the chorus in several concerts, and will also sing at a ceremony at the cenotaph in Fredericton.
So many years have past, but still the memories linger.
"I think about the people I knew and I think about the people who have died or were killed, and I think about the enormous sacrifice that was involved,'' he says. "And I think to myself how unnecessary wars are. I'm not sure that most of the problems can't be resolved without violence.
"I am speaking as veteran now, but I believe we have come to the age when wars should be settled peacefully."
After the ceremony, the Bobaks will return to their home in Fredericton, where a papier mâché angel he fashioned hangs above the front door. They'll think about lives lost, and the legacy they have created with a palette and a brush.
"I think almost everything seemed to work out for us,'' Bobak says. "I guess, somehow or other, we were born at the right period in time.
"We came about at a time when the country was recovering from a great stagnation, from the Great Depression, and there was a thirst for knowledge and culture and education, and for me, being a war artist was part of that education.
"It was the first time I was ever able to visit a continental museum. A lot of the major works had been put away for safe keeping, but there were still enough for a young art student like myself to be inspired.
"I just hope that whatever I produced over my lifetime has made someone else's life a little richer."
Throughout the war, Bobak lined his pockets by drawing charcoal portraits of fellow soldiers for $5 apiece.
"I did hundreds and hundreds, more for fun and exercise than anything else,'' he says. "The guys loved for you to draw them, and they'd send them back home.
"To this day, I have never heard of one of those portraits surfacing, and I really don't understand it. I did three or four a day for two or three years. There must be hundreds out there.
"You would think that, after 60 years, somebody would be cleaning out an attic and come across one and say, 'Holy cow! This is another Bobak!' "
Marty Klinkenberg is contributing editor at the Telegraph-Journal. He can be reached at martyklinkenberg@hotmail.com.
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