Artists and the First World War

I read somewhere that a writer has to have a lot of potential projects on the go at one time. I'm certainly always thinking about what's next, and last year after finishing work on the 'Crisis of Brilliance' exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery I spent quite a lot of time fleshing out a proposal for a book on this history of war art. It never came off, but with the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War having just passed, it seems worth sharing this completed draft of what was to have been chapter 5, of a book simply titled, Art and War.

'War and the Twentieth-Century Image'

By 1914 there had not been a war in Western Europe since Prussia defeated France in 1871, and it was almost a century since Napoleon had been vanquished at Waterloo. Though since 1815 there had been major wars, conflicts and revolutions across the globe, none had engulfed a large part of the world or its populations. All this was to change. The twentieth century would be the era of total war.

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape (c.1913), oil on canvas, 80 x 116, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

It appeared that some artists (as well as writers) had a premonition of what might lie ahead. In 1912 the young German Expressionist Ludwig Meidner started painting his extraordinary series of ‘Apocalyptic Landscapes’. In bright colours they depict horrors of unfathomable sorts wrought upon the world: houses and cities are destroyed in a world brooded over by skies of black and blood, beneath which bodies lie bitter and prostrate. It is a cataclysmic prediction of some future apocalypse. 

The conflict in the Balkans inspired a similarly disturbing response from the German painter, Franz Marc, a leading figure in the Expressionist Der Blaue Reiter movement. In his 1913 painting The Wolves (Balkan War), dark, sinister creatures displace the harmonious animals that had populated his earlier landscapes. The art world itself was in tumult, as artists and critics fought with one another over the direction art would take in the new century. The Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin had inspired the Cubist revolution of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. When these artists were first exhibited en masse in England in 1910 and 1912, they produced howls of protest and disgust – or laughter – from the press.

Also courting controversy were the Futurists. The brainchild of the Italian poet and performer F.T. Marinetti, the Futurists were eager to do away with the suffocating past and rebuild art, music, literature upon new foundations. Joined by painters such as Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni, Marinetti wanted to embrace a modern world of technology, machinery and motion. War would be the catalyst for this new utopia. His ‘Founding Manifesto’ published in 1909 declared ‘we will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism … beautiful ideas worth dying for’.[1] The Futurists were not alone in their vision. For in a world strongly influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, it seemed to many commentators (both radical and conservative) that only a great war would bring to an end the degeneration and decay apparently overcoming Western civilization. The ‘dead wood’ had to be removed to make way for a brighter, better future. In the summer of 1914 a new British movement influenced by Futurism and naming themselves the Vorticists launched the first issue of their aptly titled magazine, BLAST. In its pages was reproduced Plan of War, a recent abstract painting by the Vorticists’ leading voice, Percy Wyndham Lewis. Then in August 1914 the world changed irrevocably.

‘Max Ernst died on the 1^st of August 1914,’ the German artist later wrote.[2] He survived the ensuing carnage. Millions of others did not. Significantly for the history of art, unlike previous wars many of the combatants were professional painters, who had either volunteered or were conscripted. Young modernists from Germany and Austria included Max Ernst, George Grosz, Paul Klee, August Macke, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, whilst notable British artists included David Bomberg, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, John and Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. French artist combatants, meanwhile, included the painters Georges Braque, André Derain and Fernand Léger, and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Their respective talents as experimenters of the avant garde meant all of them well positioned to depict a war unlike any other that had gone before – a war that some critics at first considered impossible to paint. This was not a war for the likes of Lady Butler (as she herself admitted); this was a war of machineguns, of long-range artillery, tanks, aeroplanes, U-boats and Zeppelins. It was a Modernist’s war, or a Futurist’s war; a new war that demanded the very latest artistic techniques.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

‘I should hate the slaughter’, Paul Nash wrote shortly after the start of the war. ‘I know I should but I’d like to be among it all it’s no ordinary War.’[3] The extraordinariness of what was happening initially attracted many young men to volunteer. Nash enlisted with the Artists’ Rifles, though it would be two more years before he went to the Front. Another young enthusiast was the Vorticist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He headed home to enlist – Wyndham Lewis later recalled the ‘excited eyes’ of this ‘placid genius’ as he caught the boat train to France.[4] From the trenches the following year Gaudier-Brzeska described his experiences. Published in the second (and final) number of BLAST, his impressions were remarkably affirmative:

THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY.

IN THE INDIVIDUAL IT KILLS ARROGANCE, SELF-ESTEEM, PRIDE.

IT TAKES AWAY FROM THE MASSES NUMBERS UPON NUMBERS OF UNIMPORTANT UNITS, WHOSE ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES BECOME NOXIOUS AS THE RECENT TRADE CRISES HAVE SHOWN US.

MY VIEWS ON SCULPTURE REMAIN ABSOLUTELY THE SAME.

IT IS THE VORTEX OF WILL, OF DECISION, THAT BEGINS.

A notice at the bottom of the essay observed that ‘after months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry’, Gaudier-Brzeska had been killed in action on 5 June 1915.[5] Only two of the Frenchman’s small drawings of the war survived. One of them – a small pencil sketch of a French machine gun in action – would inspire one of the most striking early paintings of the war.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, A Mitrailleuse in Action (1915), pencil on paper, 285 x 220, Musee National d’Art Modern, Paris.

The German artist August Macke, like Franz Marc a member of Der Blaue Reiter, was another early enthusiast. His friend Max Ernst later recalled how Macke’s attitude ‘baffled’ his friends: ‘Influenced by Futurism he accepted the war not merely as the most grandiose expression of contemporary madness but also as a philosophical necessity …’[6] By the time he painted Farewell, however, Macke’s mood appears to have shifted. The painting lacks the bright colours of his previous work: it is sombre, the faceless figures are somehow chilling. Experience changed everything. ‘It is all so ghastly that I don’t want to tell you about it,’ he wrote to his wife from the Front in September 1914: ‘the people in Germany, drunk with ideas of victory, don’t suspect how terrible war is.’[7] He was killed in action the following month. Franz Marc was aghast. ‘With his death a hand has been severed from the arm of the people,’ he wrote in a tribute, ‘an eye blinded. How many terrible mutilations must our future culture suffer in this gruesome war? How many a young spirit will be murdered whom we never knew and who bore our future within him?’[8] Marc himself would be killed in action at Verdun in 1916.

Otto Dix, Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1914), oil on paper, 680 x 555, Stuttgart Municipal Gallery

            Nash, Gaudier-Brzeska and Macke were not alone in their excitement. Otto Dix volunteered for the artillery in 1914, and painted a belligerent Self-Portrait as a Soldier. ‘The war was a horrible thing,’ he later reflected, ‘but there was something tremendous about it, too. I didn’t want to miss it at any price. You have to have seen human beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is.’[9] Portraiture has long proved an important companion to war – a record of its generals, its combatants, its heroes. Like Dix, during the Great War artists including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and William Orpen all painted striking and memorable self-representations of themselves as soldiers. Kirchner’s situates himself as soldier-artist. He stands in his studio, a nude model ready to pose for him: but he holds aloft his arms to reveal that one hand is missing. Kirchner had volunteered in 1914, but after serving in the artillery suffered a nervous breakdown. He had not actually lost his hand: this amputation was metaphorical, a representation of experience, the loss of creativity in the face of so much violence. And was he perhaps thinking of Marc’s tribute to Macke – the hand ‘severed from the arm of the people’? His self-inflicted amputation was a clear statement for what was happening to millions like him. ‘I feel half dead with mental and physical torment,’ Kirchner confessed.[10] He did not go back to the war.

Gino Severini, Canon in Action (1915), Stadelisches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main.

            The Italian Futurists welcomed the conflagration. Italy was initially neutral, and Marinetti rushed home to encourage its participation. Eventually Italy declared war on Austro-Hungary and then on Germany. Marinetti, Boccioni and other Futurists joined up. Severini, who was physically unfit for service, travelled to Paris, and there painted his impressions, including Cannon in Action (1915), which makes good use of the occasional Futurist technique of fusing images with words. The Futurist experience was not all it seemed to have promised, however. Boccioni was killed in a riding accident in 1916, and Severini would soon abandon Futurism.

            The Futurists’ only English convert, C.R.W. Nevinson, reached a similar conclusion. In November 1914 Nevinson and his father, the war reporter Henry Nevinson, volunteered with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. In a railway shed in Dunkirk dubbed ‘The Shambles’ (an old English word meaning meat market), Nevinson and his Quaker companions helped tend 3,000 French, British and German casualties. He later recalled how the men lay ‘on dirty straw, foul with old bandages and filth, those gaunt, bearded men, some white and still with only a faint movement of their chests to distinguish them from the dead by their sides.’[11] After a week, Nevinson’s former life seemed ‘years away’. After a month he felt he had been ‘born in the nightmare. I had seen sights so revolting that man seldom conceives them in his mind’.[12] He returned home, ill and exhausted, in early 1915. He spent the rest of the war on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In this febrile state he painted a number of masterpieces of war art. They included La Patrie, a recreation of his experience in ‘The Shambles’. ‘When war is no more,’ one critic wrote in 1916, ‘this picture will stand, to the astonishment and shame of our descendents, as an example of what civilised man did to civilised man in the first quarter of the 20^th century.’[13]

C.R.W. Nevinson, La Mitrailleuse (1916), oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London

Equally dramatic was Nevinson’s painting of a French machine-gun post, La Mitrailleuse (1916), probably inspired by Gaudier-Brzeska’s earlier drawing. What struck (and even horrified) contemporary observers was the way the men operating Nevinson’s gun appeared to have been turned into automatons: man is fused with machine in a murderous combination. One of the gunners stares out of the picture, his eyes concealed in the shadow of his helmet. His disembodied form calls to mind the amputated robotic figure of Jacob Epstein’s Vorticist sculpture, The Rock Drill (1913-15), whilst his scream would be echoed in the riders on The Merry-Go-Round, painted that same year by the English pacifist, Mark Gertler. ‘Mr Nevinson’s “Mitrailleuse”,’ wrote the distinguished painter Walter Sickert in 1916, ‘will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.’[14]

 It was the machine gun, dealing out blind, mechanised slaughter, which more than anything had changed the nature of warfare. The individual no longer mattered. As Nevinson’s drawings of columns of marching men revealed, he had been subsumed into the war machine, a tiny cog, an expendable element. A major exhibition of Nevinson’s war paintings in 1916 was sensationally received. It made him one of the most famous young painters in the country. The overall impression of the exhibition was summed up by The Manchester Guardian: ‘Mr Nevinson gives you the black gloom, the horror, the feeling of despair that make even death and mutilation seem trivial incidents in an epoch of horror.’[15] When the British Government decided in 1916 to commission a series of artists to record the war, Nevinson would be among the first to be sent to the Western Front. The scheme, which was also taken up by the Canadian Government, would prove to be one of the largest and most successful campaigns of official war art in history.

As Nevinson had witnessed (and as his art now displayed) the old order and old notions of warfare had changed. This was no longer a conflict in which traditional attributes of courage, bravery, chivalry – nor even patriotism – played a part. The German soldier Ernst Jünger expressed it in his record of his experiences on the Western Front:

The obstacle that stops the best of even the bravest heart here is not man in some qualitatively superior capacity – it is the appearance of a new, frightening principle, an apparition of negation. The loneliness in which the fate of each individual runs its course symbolizes the loneliness of mankind in a new, unexplored world, whose rule of iron they feel to be absurd.[16]

The absurdity, the horror, and the loneliness of the individual was made apparent in the French painter George Leroux’s masterpiece, L’Enfer. His French soldiers are overwhelmed in a nightmare of gas and smoke, slipping downwards to drown in oozing mud. It is, indeed, Hell. Leroux captured in paint the description written from the Front in January 1915 by another Frenchman, the writer Barbusse (who had published a novel titled L’Enfer seven years earlier):

This evening we leave the trench. What a life! The mud, the earth, the rain. One is saturated with it, coloured by it, moulded by it. One finds earth everywhere, in one’s pockets, in one’s handkerchief, in one’s clothes, in one’s food. It obsesses one, it is a nightmare of earth and mud …[17]

 It was thus too that the British artist Paul Nash conveyed the horror of the Western Front. Though he told a friend he would rather mend people than kill them, he had volunteered in 1914. He was not sent to the Front until the spring of 1917, as a junior infantry officer. Injured in a fall, he was fortunate to be sent home. He then returned to the Front in November as an official war artist, and described what he saw near Ypres in a powerful letter to his wife:

I have just returned (last night) from a visit … up the line & I shall not forget it as long as I live. I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country ever conceived by Dante or Poe – unspeakable utterly indescribable. In the 15 drawings I made I may give you some vague idea of its horror, but only being in and of it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature & what men in France have to face. We all have a vague notion of the terrors of a battle ... but no pen or drawing can convey this country — the normal setting of the battles taking place day and night, month after month. Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of the ceremonies in this war: no glimmer of God’s hand is seen. Sunset & sunrise are blasphemous mockeries to man; only the black rain out of the bruised & swollen clouds or through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green white water, the roads & tracks are covered in inches of slime. The black dying trees ooze & sweat and the shells never cease. They whine & plunge over head, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses & mules; annihilating, maiming, maddening: they plunge into the grave which is this land, one huge grave and cast up the poor dead. O it is unspeakable, Godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested & curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from men fighting to those who want the war to last for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.[18]

In works such as the cynically titled We Are Making a New World (an allusion, perhaps, to the Futurists’ dream) Nash represented the war through what it had done to nature. Influenced by Nevinson’s Futurist techniques, they immediately appealed to soldiers returning from the Front as the real thing: here was the horror of what they had experienced, laid bare for all to see. Though The Times observed that Nash’s paintings and drawings ‘might be used in the propaganda of a league of peace’ they hardly hastened the end of the war.[19] That did not come until the Armistice of 11 November 1918.

Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World (1918), Imperial War Museum, London

An artist notable by his absence was Picasso. Though he was a long-term resident in Paris, Spain was neutral, so Picasso had no call to enlist. Ironically, whilst Nevinson was able to adopt the techniques of cubism in his war work to great effect, nothing of the Great War exists in the oeuvre of either Picasso (aside from a few portraits of friends such as Apollinaire in uniform), or his collaborator, Braque. Nor does anything survive by Derain, who had, liked Braque, also served in the French army. Oddly, given its position at the forefront of the modern movement in the early twentieth century, France failed to respond to the war with the panache of British and German artists.

All that does survive is Gertrude Stein’s anecdote, related in her 1938 book, Picasso. ‘I well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail’, she recalled, ‘when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.’[20] This relationship was at its most apparent in the ‘dazzle ships’: Allied merchant ships and destroyers painted in jagged patterns in an effort to confuse German submarines. Edward Wadsworth, a Vorticist who had served with the Royal Navy during the war, painted them brilliantly in 1918 in an official commission for the Canadian Government. He successfully merged his interest in abstraction and machinery in a remarkable tour de force.

Félix Vallotton, Verdun, tableau de guerre interprété, projections colorées noires, bleues, terrains dévastés, nuées de gaz (1917), Musée de l’Armée, Paris

It was not simply modern artists who painted this new and utterly novel war, however. Some from the older generation were also drawn to the war as a subject – often as official war artists commissioned by their governments. In France, Pierre Bonnard painted only a single, unfinished work of a ruined village, whilst Félix Vallotton was at his best when he embraced the modernist techniques of Cubism in the striking painting Verdun, tableau de guerre interprété, projections colorées noires, bleues, terrains dévastés, nuées de gaz (1917). Possibly the best interpretation of the war by an artist from this generation was John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918). Like a number of major artists – including Augustus John, William Orpen and Percy Wyndham Lewis, he had been commissioned by the British Government. Sargent’s row of blinded British soldiers being guided to a dressing station is classical in its conception, and bitter without being obvious or sentimental.  In 1919 it was included in an extensive exhibition of official war art held at the Royal Academy in London. The Times described it as ‘Art’s Fresh Start’, for they too saw the Great War as having belonged to youth. ‘These young men have fought for us; now they shall paint for us, what they have seen, as they have felt it.’[21]

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[1] R.W. Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected Writings (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 42.

[2] Quoted in Harvey (1998), 108.

[3] PN to Emily Bottomley, October 1914, Letters,, 76

[4] Percy Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Calder and Boyars, 1937), 108-09.

[5] ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska’, BLAST: War Number, July 1915.

[6] Harvey (1998), 107.

[7] Quoted in Cork (1994), 43.

[8] Quoted in Cork (1994), 43.

[9] Quoted in Cork (1994), 93.

[10] Quoted in Cork (1994), 109.

[11] Nevinson (1937), 71—2; H. Nevinson, Eng. Misc. e.618/3, November 1914.

[12] Nevinson (1937), 74; H. Nevinson, Eng. Misc. e.618/3, 14 November 1914.

[13] C. Lewis Hind, The Daily Chronicle, 30 September 1916.

[14] The Burlington Magazine, April 1916.

[15] The Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1916

[16] Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), quoted in Eberle (1985), 9.

[17] Henri Barbusse, Lettres de Henri Barbusse à sa femme, 1914-1917 (Paris, 1937), quoted in Arthur Marwick ‘The Great War in print and paint: Henri Barbusse and Fernand Léger,’ Journal of Contemporary History 37/4 (2002), 513.

[18] Paul Nash, letter to his wife, November 1917, Tate Gallery Archive.

[19] The Times, 25 May 1918.

[20] Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1938).

[21] The Times, 12 December 1919.