01 Painting, The art of War, Clive Branson's Blitz: Plane Flying, with footnotes

Clive Branson

Blitz: Plane Flying, c. 1940

Oil paint on canvas

610 × 509 × 20 mm

Tate

Blitz: Plane Flying is a surreal depiction of a working-class London street during the devastating air raids which lasted from September 1940 until January 1941. Branson was then living in Battersea which was affected by the nightly raids. The air raid shelter positioned in front of one of the houses is an indication of the imminent threat, as is the enormous plane flying low above a recently bombed building, its wings casting a shadow over the street in which people are going about their everyday business. Although the plane displays the Nazi insignia, it also bears the three-colour emblem of the Royal Air Force, indicating emphatically that working class people, both German and British, are the actual victims of war. The propeller cuts vertically through the moon which glows against the acid greens and blues in the winter sky. A woman stands in the foreground holding a pram, her figure out of proportion with the men carting goods and walking along the quiet street of terraced houses. The surrealistic juxtapositions, for example the large cracked egg shell in the foreground and unusual perspectives imbue the painting with a startling visual intensity and a sense of the uncanny. More on this painting

Clive Ali Chimmo Branson (1907 – 25 February 1944) was an English artist and poet, and an active communist in the 1930s. A number of his paintings are in the Tate Gallery. His wife was Noreen Branson (16 May 1910 – 25 October 2003). Their daughter is the artist Rosa Branson (born 1933).

He was an active recruiter for the International Brigade, and himself fought in the Spanish Civil War from January 1938, being captured at Calaceite on 31 March 1938. As a prisoner of war at the Nationalist camp of San Pedro de Cardeña, he painted and sketched the camp and many of its inmates, at the request of the authorities; some of this work survives in the Marx Memorial Library in London.

He married Noreen Browne in 1931. Their daughter Rosa Branson was born in 1933. He died in action in Burma on 25 February 1944, where he was serving as a Sergeant in the British Army, as part of the 54th Training Regiment of the Royal Armoured Corps.

Branson was killed commanding an M3 Lee tank of B Squadron, 25th Dragoons. He was hit a glancing but fatal blow on the back of the head by a Japanese anti-tank shell near Point 315 at the end of the Battle of the Admin Box. Branson was a popular man in the unit and his crew "were inconsolable". His friend, the composer Bernard Stevens, dedicated his 1945 Symphony of Liberation to the memory of Branson. More on Clive Ali Chimmo Branson








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