@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00031048,
 author = {河野, 哲子 and Kono, Tetsuko},
 journal = {IVY},
 month = {Dec},
 note = {Between November 1945 and October1946 the International Military Tribunals were held at Nuremberg. Dame Laura Knight visited the ruined city to work on several sketches and oil paintings, among which The Dock, Nuremberg1946 (hereafter, Dock) is the main work and is to be shown in the summer exhibition soon held at the Royal Academy. This essay examines Dock with special reference to the manuscripts of her diary, originally written as letters to Harold Knight, her husband, now kept in Nottinghamshire Archives. First the foreground and the background of Dock are discussed separately according to their generic, compositional, or thematic characteristics. After Knight’s idea of the Holocaust and Jewish people briefly surveyed, what is visualised about Nuremberg Military Tribunals by Dock is defined in my conclusion.<br/>The foreground of Dock, mainly composed of the sitting figures of the Nazi leaders, has some similarities to “courtroom sketch” as a genre of drawing. As courtroom artists have to draw sketches outside the courtroom in the criminal courts in England, they draw “impressions” of what they witnessed from memory. Likewise, Knight did not draw while observing the trials because she shut herself up in the press box room with its window always closed. This was because she needed psychological distance from what was progressing in the court as it was so distressful. Consequently, she made her drawing “impressions”, as courtroom artists do, resulting in a work different from her usual lifelike or realistic ones she was acclaimed for. As for their effects, courtroom sketches and Knight’s rendering of the Dock are evocative - stimulating the memory and imagination of their audience. The image in Dock, in particular, of defendants with headsets on their ears reminds us of the other major historical military tribunals in Tokyo and Jerusalem.<br/>The background in Dock is a rendering of “a mirage”, as Knight calls it, that is composed of devastated city still alight from bombing and a heap of dead bodies. As for the landscape of a ruined city, Knight sought its image source in Nuremberg, which had been destroyed by the Allies’ carpet bombings the previous year. Among other image sources for the background, Stanly Spencer’s The Resurrection of the Soldiers should be referred to for its compositional and thematic similarities to the visionary part in Dock, though she only mentioned Spencer’s name in her diary. As Spencer’s work is the commemoration for his dead comrades and the testimony of what he experienced as a soldier in the Great War, Knight’s visionary details were contrived to commemorate the dead citizens during the raid and to testify to what she saw in the ruins at Nuremberg. With regard to the depicted heap of bodies in the middle, therefore, Knight could have originally intended them to be the Nuremberg citizens - still buried under the rubble. At the same time, she expected that some audience members would interpret them otherwise, possibly as victims in Nazi concentration camps, thanks to the images offered by “liberation films” in which heaps of naked bodies are a strong element or iconic. Thus, the background in Dock has three possibilities as its image source: devastated Nuremberg with its suffering citizens, Spencer’s symbolic war painting, and victims depicted in the liberation films.<br/>As for Knight’s idea of the Holocaust and Jewish people as its victims, a few pieces of evidence are to be found in her writings. When Kristallnacht happened in Germany in 1938, the Knights joined other British artists and writers to publish a brief protest in The Times. In her diary the term “holocaust”, used once, means complete destruction, not “the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis”. Her only reference to “a Jew” in her diary was intended to caricaturise Funk, the former president of the Reichsbank, and was later deleted in the corresponding sentence in her autobiography. This editing could be attributed to the general change in the trend of British popular response to the Holocaust. When she worked on Dock, therefore, the suffering of Jewish people seems to have been insignificant to her.<br/>Like British courtroom artists, Laura Knight gained the privilege of entering the courtroom to observe important historical trials and created a figurative and symbolic rendering of Nuremberg Tribunals, whose focus was actually on crimes against peace, not on crimes against humanity. This means that the plight of the Jewish people during the Holocaust was regarded as “peripheral” and remained obscure in court. This obscurity is epitomised in the composition adopted in Dock, with naked bodies indiscreetly inserted between unconcerned or indifferent crowds in the court and the devastated cityscape. Those bodies, if they were concentration camp victims at all, cannot have been lying near the milieu of citizenry. The victims in the middle have nowhere to belong to, without anyone seeking their identity and voice. Laura Knight’s Dock reiterates and reminds us that the Nuremberg trials stood at the preliminary stages in the long process of the prosecution of Nazi Germany for its Final Solution.},
 pages = {1--27},
 title = {ニュルンベルクの幻影 : ローラ・ナイトは何を描いたのか},
 volume = {53},
 year = {2020}
}