Conflict has always aroused the creative imagination. From Trajan’s column to the Chinese terracotta army, from the miniature battle scenes of Islamic manuscripts to the mural-sized dramas of Leonardo’s lost fresco, from the sabre-rattling grandeur of the military portrait to the graphic brutality of Goya’s dark etchings, war has inspired art’s most stirring images. It has a barbarity and a beauty, a horror and a humanity that ignite fierce feelings. For the artist whose skill lies in distilling emotion, it presents a powerful arena.
But where such historical masterpieces were mostly created by people who had never been conscripted into action, the artists of the First World War set a precedent. All of them were first-hand witnesses. Many of them saw active service. A few died at the front.
The first to fill the newly created post of official war artist was Muirhead Bone, who, in 1916, was packed off to France with his pencils. As part of Lloyd George’s propaganda campaign he proved a predictably safe choice. Touring the Somme in a chauffeur-driven car, the Scottish etcher overlooked the appalling carnage in his anodyne drawings. But, as a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North makes plain, his successors were neither so diplomatic nor so loftily detached. Witness looks at how the First World War shaped the world of those who lived through it.
This show marks the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a terrible battle of attrition fought by exhausted and suffering men, bogged down in trenches, floundering through quagmires left by torrential rain. It was a scene of sheer carnage, of indiscriminate slaughter. There were 420,000 British casualties and 195,000 French.
Some of the images in this exhibition bear witness to such appalling loss. Paul Nash, the greatest war artist that our nation has produced, dumps the spectator into a wasteland of debris, of rain-filled shell holes, blasted trees and squalid mud. His 1918 We Are Making a New World is one of the most haunting images to come out of the war. The man who relished the lush traditions of mystical English painters, who revelled in the glowing fecundity of Samuel Palmer’s landscapes, presents a scene of utter desolation. The morning sun rises over an abandoned world. This image captures the human cost of battle more bleakly than any figurative painting could.
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And yet Witness is emphatically a show about people — about how the lives of an entire nation were swept up into war. The pictures on show are not necessarily the museum’s greatest — or even hardest — hits. Rather, from a huge government-amassed collection of at least 3,000 images, the curators have selected some 70 pieces that between them present myriad different aspects of wartime experience. The wall texts hung alongside — eyewitness accounts extracted from letters, diaries and memoirs — seem to stress the documentary nature of these artworks, to emphasise that these images are not so much about aesthetics, about styles or movements or painterly experiments, but about something more stubborn: about the brutal reality beneath.
Over the Top by John Nash (the brother of Paul) shows a group of soldiers clambering out of a trench in which their companions are left dead on the duckboards. They stumble out across snowy wastes. Nash painted it, he said, to show how men were forced to obey orders and go on in the face of often fatal commands. The image is accompanied by a passage from the memoir of Private Henry Williams, of the Hampshire Regiment: “You climb into no man’s land and start walking
. . . the shells are bursting in front, in the air above your head, behind, in fact everywhere, the very earth seems to be exploding around you, dirt, mud being flung every way . . . but you keep going, slipping stumbling over shell holes, broken duckboards and sometimes bodies.” The artwork does not need this. But still, the focus of one of the few officially commissioned works to depict a specific action is narrowed down to the life of one man.
In this show war is seen from every facet. Bernard Meninsky paints soldiers on the departure platform at Victoria, Eric Kennington captures the suffering of the field hospital, David Bomberg shows tunnelling sappers, William Orpen depicts dead Germans rotting in a trench.
But Witness is also about life on the home front, about food queues and munitions factories and the women’s war effort. A vast Walter Bayes canvas showing people sheltering in Elephant and Castle Tube station has been unfurled for public display for the first time in 30 years. A painting of the inmates of the Queen’s Hospital for Facial Injuries shows men sitting making teddy-bears, while a toy monkey perched atop their pile of sawdust stuffing seems almost to mock their ruined visages with his leer. Working women are painted by Flora Lion having a break in the canteen. They seem to enjoy their newfound liberation from domestic life. But the women in a John Lavery painting work amid a landscape of war graves.
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The government may at first have seen war artists as a tool for propaganda. But the artists represented in this show seem more concerned with capturing the truth — and not least C. R. W. Nevinson, of course, whose harrowing painting of dead British soldiers, Paths of Glory, was famously banned. He showed it all the same — merely sticking a brown paper strip saying “censored” over the corpses.
Nowadays we are used to images of conflict. Television imports them daily into our sitting rooms. But the news story runs on unpausing. Feelings of shock and pain are aroused, but without space for reflection. Image piles upon image, responses are numbed.
The artwork, by contrast, stills the quintessential moment. It dwells on the detail that bestows a deeper understanding. J. Hodgson Lobley’s vast canvas depicts ambulances bearing the Somme’s casualties back into the bustle of Charing Cross. War’s consequences — its bitter realities — seem suddenly so terribly close. Its death and suffering are carried directly into the heart of the nation. The First World War was not the war to end all wars. But it was a war that first showed us what all wars are like.
Witness: Highlights of First World War Art is at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (0161-836 4000), from Saturday
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Art and the Great War: a surge of furious creativity
Paul Nash “Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth,” declared the artist whose first overseas posting took him to Ypres, where he was “damn near killed”.
C. R. W. Nevinson His bleak vision captured the anguish and pain of life — and death — at the front with a haunting veracity. But his experiences left him traumatised for the rest of his life.
William Orpen He was so embittered by the generals’ betrayal of their men that, commissioned to paint the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he overpainted the officers and statesmen with the coffin of an unknown British soldier.
Anna Airy One of the first women to be officially commissioned to paint war pictures, though sadly several of her works were destroyed.