Shared Experience: British Prisoners of War, Italy

Art and War

• Introduction
• Battle
• Work
• Leisure
• Service
• Casualties
• Captivity
• Home
• Artists

The interior of this prisoner-of-war hut is filled with wooden framed bunk beds. Bullard was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. His composition captures a strategy of stubborn coping and restless waiting in a constrained life. The apparently endless machine-like structure of the bunk beds is broken and subverted with draped laundry and flailing arms; the steep perspective offering a vanishing point, an illusion of escape.

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