BRITISH ART AND THE GREAT WAR

The Great War promoted the breakthrough of modernism in British literature, but it discouraged avant-garde experimentation in the visual arts. These painters found that those who controlled museum space and government commissions detested irony or avant-garde styles:

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957): pioneer of Vorticism

Paul Nash (1889-1946): influenced by Cubism

John Nash (1893-1977): Paul’s younger brother

C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946): Cubist trained in Paris

William Orpen (1878-1931): fashionable portrait painter

“What did YOU do in the Great War?”

(1915):Photographic

realism was the preferred style for

recruitment posters

“Step Into Your Place,” Great Britain, 1915

E. Kealey, “Women of Britain Say – GO!” Great Britain, 1915

Emile Boussu, “Reims Cathedral

in Flames” (1914)

Instructions regarding Field Punishment #1, January 1917(Canadian):

See Graves, p. 176

W.H. Margetson, “The Angels of

Mons”

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925),“Gassed,” 1918/19

(a somber topic, treated intraditional style)

John Singer Sargent, “A Street in Arras” (1918)

Pablo Picasso,“Girl with a Mandolin”

(Paris, 1910):A pioneering work

of“analytical cubism”

Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a

Staircase, #2,”1912:

Described by a U.S. critic of the Armory

Show as “an explosion in a shingle factory”

David Bomberg, “Sappers at Work,” 1918/19 (first version)

David Bomberg, “Sappers at

Work,” final version in the National Gallery of

Canada, 1919

C.R.W. Nevinson,

“Machine-Gun” (1915):

Apollinaire wrote that Nevinson “translates the

mechanical aspect of modern

warfare where man and

machine combine to form a single force of nature.”

C.R.W. Nevinson, “French Troops Resting” (1916)

C.R.W. Nevinson,

“A Bursting Shell” (exhibited in

London, December 1915)

C.R.W. Nevinson, “Paths of Glory” (1917):Banned from exhibition!

Eric Kennington, “The Kensingtons at Laventie” (1915/16)

Eric Kennington, “Gassed and Wounded” (1918)

Wyndham Lewis, “The Crowd”

(1915; example of “Vorticism”)

Wyndham Lewis, “A Canadian Gun-Pit” (1918):Imitating Orpen’s style gained him commissions

Wyndham Lewis, “A Battery Shelled” (1919)

John Nash, “Over the Top” (Cambrai, 1917): Of 80 men in Nash’s company, 68 were killed or wounded in a few minutes

John Nash, “Oppy Wood, 1917: Evening”

Paul Nash, “The Ypres Salient at Night” (undated)

Paul Nash, “Void” (1918)

Paul Nash, “We Are Making a New World” (1918)

William Orpen (1878-1931),

“Ready to Start” (June 1917)

William Orpen, “Dead

Germans in a Trench”

(1918)

William Orpen, “To the

Unknown British Soldier

Killed in France,” 1922/23

(photograph of first version)

William Orpen, “To the

Unknown British Soldier

Killed in France,”

final version of 1927

The Cenotaph,Whitehall, London.

Designed by Sir Edward Lutyens, built

in 1919/20:“The Glorious Dead”