Art as War Tool: British Use During Troubles

The book, published by Routledge, explores how the newly-formed Artistic Records Committee (ARC) of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in the UK was established to commission artwork involving British Armed Forces deployed in the North of Ireland.

Dr Clare Carolin, Senior Lecturer in Art and Public Engagement from the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s, argues that this was a form of propaganda by the British government.

Bloody Sunday

On 30 January 1972, British armed forces shot 29 unarmed civilians participating in a protest in Derry, Northern Ireland campaigning for civil rights for Catholics, 14 were killed. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. A long-running inquiry found the British forces actions were “unjustified” and “unjustifiable” and the British Prime Minister at the time of the report findings, David Cameron, apologised.

Criminal proceedings against the alleged killers continued until October 2025 when in his judgement against one of them Judge Patrick Lynch told the Belfast court the former paratroopers had been “serially untruthful”, had intended to kill when they opened fire, and “had lost all sense of military discipline”.

Through investigation of artworks, archival research, and interviews with artists, former IWM staff, and a former British Army psychological operations expert, Dr Carolin argues that the ARC was implicated in the ‘propaganda war’ that the British Government waged to counteract negative public perceptions of British military presence and activity in the North of Ireland after ‘Bloody Sunday’.

During the 1970s progressive artists were experimenting with film, performance and Conceptual art. By contrast the ARC’s army approved art consisted of traditional oil paintings and watercolour sketches. In an era when newspaper ‘colour supplements’ and television were for the first time readily accessible in most British and Irish households the conservative style of the ARC commissioned work meant it could easily be reproduced in print and on TV.

Photographic reporting of the Falklands/Malvinas war of 1982 were severely restricted due to the combined practical constraints of a combat fought some 8,000 miles from Britain and state censorship of media reporting. ARC commissioned art helped to convey to the public a softened picture the realities of brutal combat in the freezing South Atlantic.

Carolin says that understanding this history is equally relevant to the present day.