Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Before the War Mr Christopher R W Nevinson was only known to the few as a young artist of promise. After studying at the Slade School of Art, he had formed ties of friendship in Paris with the Italian artist Gino Severini, and so had become influenced by Futurism. He was also interested in Cubism, and though he never definitely adhered to ‘Vorticism,’ he exhibited once with Mr Wyndham Lewis, Mr Edward Wadsworth, Mr William Roberts, and other Vorticists. During the early stages of the War Mr Nevinson was driving a motor ambulance behind the Belgian Front, and being invalided with rheumatic fever early in 1915 he was able to resume painting during his convalscence. Thus he was practically the first artist who had the opportunity to exhibit in London pictures of the War based on personal experience of the realities of modern fighting. It was in the spring of 1915 that Mr Nevinson showed his first three war pictures in the exhibition of the London Group at the Goupil Gallery, and though these betrayed Futurist and Cubist influence, they were perfectly intelligible as illustrations of actual incidents.

Dr Johnson maintained that there was some good to be got out of every book, and similarly it may be argued that there is some good to be got out of every artistic theory. It was the peculiar distinction of Mr Nevinson to leave aside all the extravagances of Futurism and Cubism, and snatch from them the two things which helped him to render realistically a new world in a new way. The particlar good thing in the work of the Italian Futurists was their successful suggestion of movement. By a generous use of slanting lines in the composition,Mr Nevinson gave a vivid sense of movement and life to his early painting ‘Returning to the Trenches.’ His French soldiers, with packs on their backs, their bodies and rifles sloping in the direction in which they were marching, were not portrayed as they would be shown in a photograph: the aim here was not to portray a group of individual soldiers, but to express the onward rush of an advancing army, and this impression was vividly and irresistibly conveyed. Further, the use of straight lines and avoidance of curves—characteristics derived from Cubism—suggested that the movement was that of a vast machine rather than of a collection of human beings.

The distinguished art critic, Mr A Clutton Brock, has pointed out in one of his essays that for fifty years or more a belief has been growing on us that man is a machine and ‘should be conscious of the fact that he is one.’ The popular play ‘R.U.R’ was an expression of this consciousness in dramatic form; in painting it was confessed by the Cubist method which, as Mr Clutton Brock has said,

does express, in the most direct way, the sense that in war man behaves like a machine or part of machine, that war is a process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp distinction of planes, expresses this sense of a mechanical process better than any other way of representation.

Familiarity with the working of the ‘war machine’ prepared the mind of the public to accept that vision of the world as a complicated piece of mechanism which is the essence both of Cubism and Futurism. The War offered to the Cubists one of the few subjects which their technique was fitted to express, and the marvel is that this opportunity, missed by the French and Italian inventors of the new method, was seized upon with conspicuous success by a handful of almost unknown British artists.

From the first Mr Nevinson stood out from all previous painters of war by reason of his power in suggesting movement, and the implication in his pictures that modern war was not the affair of human individuals, but the creaking progress of a complicated machine. His remarkable painting of the interior of a hospital, ‘La Patrie’ now the property of Mr Arnold Bennett, is tragical in its intensity, but it is the tragedy of automata crushed and mangled in the revolutions of a pitiless machine. Other artists have painted the interiors of base-hospitals, pictures of men bandaged but smiling, and attended by a bevy of comely nurses, so that the spectator might imagine it was rather pleasant than otherwise to be wounded; but Mr Nevinson permits no falsifying of the facts; he shows us the reality of the thing, the broken débris of the war-machine, the pain and the suffering and, above all, the relative insignificance of the individual pawn in this mighty war game.

Art During The Great War (continued)