AN ENGLISH CUBIST

WILLIAM ROBERTS:

The Control Room, Civil Defence Headquarters

Copyrighted material on this page is included as 'fair use', for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of the copyright owner. Catalogue information based on the catalogue raisonné by David Cleall. For this and full details of the exhibitions cited, see the links below. Any auction prices quoted may not include all fees and taxes, such as VAT and Artist's Resale Right charges.

The Control Room, Civil Defence Headquarters, 1941

Oil on canvas, 60 cm x 69 cm

PROVENANCE: Imperial War Museum (LD922), commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee, 7 Jan. 1941, delivered 28 Mar. 1941 > Salford Art Gallery (1947)
EXHIBITION HISTORY: British Institute of Adult Education (2) 1941 ('It is useless to compare the symbols of which this picture is composed with strictly natural appearances. To do so is merely to decide with alarm that we are gazing upon a roomful of "robots" or ape-men of a low type. This is a criticism utterly foreign to the intentions of the artist. The aim of the artist here is deliberately to impose upon natural forms a powerful design which shall by the very operation of its own laws symbolise for us the inner force and tension of an air-raid, The figures do not bear human emotions and expressions of their own, and are not intended to do so. Instead they bear the emotions of the artist in the shape of mass, line and colour' – Howard Baird, Montrose Standard, 26 August 1942), Tate Gallery 1965, Whitechapel Gallery 1972, Newcastle 2004
For a discussion of this painting by Tom Lubbock, with particular reference to the use of a detail of it on the cover of the Penguin edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (from 1966 to 1980), click here.