Stella Bowen at Australian War Memorial

Sept. 11 elicited a renewed awareness of heroism that has yet to be captured in contemporary art. The extraordinary 1940s paintings of World War II bomber pilots executed in England by Australian expatriate Stella Bowen (1895-1947) might serve as models for how art can commemorate heroic action without aggrandizement or histrionics. Her most impressive painting, the Renaissance-inspired Bomber Crew (1944), depicts seven martyred pilots in close-up, standing under the ominous specter of the plane in which their lives ended. Bowen presents the men in a tight cluster, yet all are individually characterized with varying expressions of determination. Their insignias and signatures appear at the bottom of the composition, as if in flight along a twisting pink ribbon.

Curated by Lola Wilkins, "Stella Bowen: Art, Love and War" represents the first attempt to survey the oeuvre of this fascinating artist and includes 70 of her largely unknown works. After escaping a conventional girlhood in Adelaide, Bowen encountered the 1920s European avant-garde in London and Paris, befriending figures such as Ezra Pound, Mary Butts, James Joyce and Pavel Tchelitchew while trying to make her way as a painter. At 23 she took up with the writer Ford Madox Ford; they lived together for 10 years. Her life with Ford--chronicled in the engrossing memoir Drawn from Life (1941)--was a constant financial struggle; during their years together, Bowen often sacrificed her painting for the sake of creating domestic environments where Ford could write in peace.

After Ford's infidelities (with the writer Jean Rhys and others) made the relationship untenable, Bowen returned to painting, taking portrait commissions in London and the United States. Portraits of her daughter Julia (ca. 1928) and soon-to-be friend Edith Sitwell (ca. 1927), as well as several self-portraits, are sensitively composed yet remarkable for their directness. Provenqal Conversation (1936), showing a lazy afternoon garden party, reveals her penchant for group depictions.

But Bowen's most important work consists of the 46 paintings and drawings made while an "official war artist" for the Australian War Memorial. Assigned to record the activities of the Royal Australian Air Force in Britain, which was engaged in bombing raids across Europe, Bowen tracked both hostilities and base procedures. In Bombing Up a Lancaster for Wing Commander Douglas (1944), the belly of a wraithlike plane is loaded with huge bombs while a small, pink-faced commander stands nearby. Repatriated Prisoner of War Is Processed (1945) presents incidents in the bureaucracy of repatriation as small bubblelike scenes surrounding a central figure, in the manner of Fra Angelico's San Marco frescos. Like a scene out of a Michael Powell film, At the Churchill Club, Large and Small Worlds (1945) contrasts an officer's contemplation of a large, pastel-colored world globe with a view through the military club's casement window of a perfect English garden in spring. In a poignant and very personal way, Bowen's paintings reveal how war thwarts our desires for domestic tranquillity.

["Stella Bowen: Art, Love and War" debuted at the Australian War Memorial, Mar. 14-June 9, before embarking on a nine-city tour that will conclude in February 2004. The show is accompanied by a catalogue.]

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