Drawing Hell
The Life of War Artist – Alan Moore

By John Morthen
Published by Big Sky Publishing
RRP $34.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781923300712

Born in Victoria in 1914, by the time Alan Moore was fifteen he had developed a strong passion for art, graduating from the Gallery Art School in 1932.

It wasn’t however until 1942 that he enlisted in the RAAF. It was to be the end of 1943 before his application to become a war artist was successful.

As an official war artist, Moore was sent deep into the action.

He documented the brutal Japanese counterattack at Los Negros Island, the perilous missions of airmen dodging flak over Eastern Europe, and the harrowing reality inside one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous concentration camps.

His depictions of the Holocaust, especially the Bergen-Belsen series, were met with mixed sentiments. Did people really want to be reminded of the horrors of war?

Eventually, the Australian War Memorial accepted the collection, while expressing doubt the sketches and paintings would ever be displayed, unless there was a specific exhibition that related to the Holocaust. His paintings, raw and unfiltered, serve as powerful reminders of the horrors of war.

Yet despite his remarkable body of work, Alan Moore remains one of Australia’s forgotten artists. 

In producing this biography, author John Morthen has combined his two great loves: art and military history.

Piecing together Moore’s life can’t have been easy. What started as a Covid lockdown project took three years of intensive research, focused mainly on Moore’s wartime work.

Moore lived an extraordinarily long life. He died in 2015, aged 101, leaving a fine body of art work by which he should be remembered. 

With the publication of this book, which has been praised by readers, his fine legacy will become much better known.