ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on women artists' uses of the representation of space and of the possibilities of directing the viewer's gaze. It analyses how British women's art of World War II offered another, unique, vision of the war. Laura Knight, who applied to be an official artist at the Nuremberg trials and who was the second woman artist to be granted a commission to work overseas to do this, equally expressed horror through a transfiguration of space within the frame. In the visual arts, cinema in Britain during World War II recorded a relative renewal of roles for women: they were shown venturing out of the home and into factory work, into the armed forces or onto the land. If the paintings emanated from a commission which designated the subjects, the artists offered a personal vision in their framing of the subject, in the choice of style and technique and in the directing of the viewer's gaze.
