In describing the Royal Academy Exhibition, our Art Critic remarked that “it does not owe its artistic interest to the war pictures; nor could we expect it to do so.” This is true; the exhibition owes its artistic interest primarily to the portraits. The artists have seen the people they portray, have studied them face to face, and have learnt to know them; they have only heard about the war. An exception is the one war picture which is really interesting. This is Mr Jack’s “The Return to the Front” — a picture of Victoria Station crowded with khaki-clad warriors. These we may be sure he saw on the spot, and the result is a picture which, though fault may be found with it, has about it something of the real thing.
Now, the question is whether an effort ought not to be made to bring Art into contact with Reality. All that any of us have been doing or thinking of for the last 21 months, is either directly or indirectly the war. And here, on the other hand, are a number of vigorous artists, perhaps more inclined to take their art seriously than was ever before the case in Great Britain. These great events and emotions in the midst of which we are living ought not to be left without being recorded. All schoolboys know that the “brave men who lived before Agamemnon” have vanished from human memory, carent quia vate sacro (since they are without a divine poet). We may hope that there will be no lack of bards to sing the heroes of today. But, as things are at present, there may well be a lack of painted and sculptured records — the work of artists who have seen with their own eyes the grim or noble realities of war.
What reason is there for denying to the most competent of our artists the privilege of making studies of these things? Of course, the men should be carefully chosen; we have in mind eight or ten, within and without the Academy, whom it would perhaps be invidious to name; they should be under military control, and the authorities should be entitled to keep back any studies that they might think it unwise to pass. Then the studies would, in time, become pictures, some of them, no doubt, great pictures. Britain might thus become possessed of worthy memorials, and a true Renaissance of Art might be brought about under the stress of a noble and all-pervading emotion.