Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Some two months after these last appointments, a small collection of water colors of ‘The Ypres Salient’ was exhibited at the Goupil Gallery. They were the work of a young soldier, Mr Paul Nash, who then was practically unknown, though he and his brother John Nash had already exhibited at the New English Art Club water colors which had attracted attention among connoisseurs by reason of their unsophisticated simplicity and naive charm. Though enthusiastically welcomed by some of the leading art critics, Mr Nash’s first exhibition passed almost unnoticed by the public, but a second exhibition of his war drawings, held later at the Leicester Galleries, aroused widespread interest, and the publication by Country Life of a book of his water colors established his reputation as an original artist who had and could express poignantly his own vision of the War. In the introduction to this volume of reproductions, Capt C E Montague wrote:

In drawing strange places so strangely Mr Nash contrives to bring back to the mind the strange things felt by men who were there at moments of stress. One does not see with the eyes alone, but with brain and nerves too, and if these are worked upon in unusual ways, then the messages brought in by the little waves of light that break on delicate shores in the eye are changed—some may say disturned or blurred; others may say refined into an uncommon rightness, not to be had at other times. If an artist succeeds in expressing effects of such changes, his works may well delight some of those who have felt the changes go on in themselves.

A picture like ‘Sunrise: Inverness Copse’, may not be ‘true’ as the camera sees truth; but it is true to the memory of a nerve-racked fighting man. Granted that it contain exaggerations, they are exaggerations of significant elements in the scene. The lumps and holes in the foreground are a pointed commentary on the deeply pit-marked earth exposed to constant shelling. Mr Paul Nash paints his subjects as seen by the mind’s eye, and the mind of man ever enlarges that which it has cause to fear. A sensitive and emotional artist, Mr Nash paints in these water colors not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. As a landscape painter, what he felt most deeply was the abomination of desolation caused by war. Whereas Nevinson showed us soldiers as cogs in the war machine, Nash presented the Earth as a tortured and violated entity. These two painters, the first realist, the second imaginative, each formed and inspired by the War, were the complement of each other. Nevinson showed the complicated, man-driven machinery of war; Nash its devastating effects. Many other artists of great skill and talent painted pictures of the War which were perhaps more pleasant to look upon; but none exhibited its inner ghastliness with more power, originality, and intensity of feeling. By midsummer 1917 the best judges of modern painting were convinced that the two men who had most to say about the War in paint were C R W Nevinson and Paul Nash. Representations were made to the proper authorities, with the result that during the next few months a new batch of ‘Official Artists’ included Messers C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, and Sir John Lavery. As became his age and position, Sir John Lavery—who was born at Belfast in 1857—was enlisted, so to speak, for ‘home service’. ‘The Royal Naval Division, Crystal Palace, 1916’ is an excellent example of the war pictures—charming in their delicate color and atmosphere—which Sir John was able to paint without crossing the seas. Happy in its Whistlerian impressionism, in which Sir John is an adept, this picture is entirely worthy of the reputation of one of our leading portrait painters, but it is no new revelation either of the spirit of the times or of the significance of war.

Art During The Great War (continued)