The Landscape of War: Battle Dioramas at the London Imperial War Museum, 1920-1924

The Imperial War Museum opened at London’s Crystal Palace in June 1920, a year and a half after Britain’s victory in the First World War. Among the decommissioned weapons and regimental banners, there were two modes of artistic representation that valorized, memorialized, and historicized the recent conflict: paintings and diorama models. This project explores the role of battlefield dioramas in defining the national memory of the landscape of modern warfare. The violence of these miniature realms was painstakingly rendered, standing in contrast to the aestheticized versions of trenches and fields created by war artists building on the eighteenth and nineteenth century British landscape tradition. The non-combatant museum visitors, who had been removed from the physical experience of war, approached the front as a horrific fantasy. These dioramas, inextricably linked by their size and craftsmanship with the fastidiousness of dollhouses and children’s toys, functioned in this illusory realm, creating a digestible version of trench warfare’s scarred landscapes. The artistry of the detailed scenes removed the objects from the mechanized modernity of twentieth century war, thereby turning the dead bodies, rifles, and barren trees littering the muddy ground into an expression of individualistic and artistic craft. Despite their association with military functionalism, from war games to planning battle strategy in miniature, I contend that the dioramas performed as artistic objects, and their exhibition in the newly conceived war museum produced a tension between the rich British history of landscape representation and an increasingly dystopian view of twentieth-century experience.