Shared Experience: Bodies in a Grave, Belsen
Alex Colville
Bodies in a Grave, Belsen
oil on canvas
76.3 x 101.6cm
CWM 19710261-2033
The gentle, dreamlike quality of this scene of emaciated corpses in a pit at Belsen belies the horror that was the more than 10,000 unburied bodies found there after its liberation by the British in 1945. Colville’s war art has been criticised for its “emotional sterility”. “In such situations,” he himself commented of his experiences at the concentration camp, “the body seems to have its own defence mechanism. My experience was voyeuristic. I was like someone who watches a sex film, but doesn’t have sex.”
Paintings
- British Prisoners of War, Italy
Paul Bullard - Blind man in Belsen
Alan Moore - Roberts Hospital, Changi
Murray Griffin - Bodies in a Grave, Belsen
Alex Colville - Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945
Doris Zinkeisen - Refugees in Udine, 1945
Edward Bawden - British Women and Children Interned in a Japanese Prison Camp, Syme Road, Singapore
Leslie Cole - Yes Sir
Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack