Almost 100 years separate Sir David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Despatch (Apsley House) and Late News by his fellow Scot George Harcourt, which marks the end of the First World War. Harcourt has grouped his figures absorbing the news of the Armistice in direct reference to Wilkie’s jubilant crowd, but they are numb and silent, and there is not a man among them. This canvas is one of the revelations of War, the show that has just opened at the Fine Art Society in New Bond Street, London, and it is as powerful a war memorial as C. S. Jagger’s crosses and sculptures.
The ancestry of the British official schemes during the two world wars is long and diverse. One strand can be traced from the formulaic depiction of battles in medieval illuminations by way of the anonymous birds-eye view of Pavia in the Ashmolean and celebrations of the triumphs of Louis XIV to the more realistic canvases of Lady Butler. Another is illustrative art journalism, running from 17th-century naval engagements and Napoleonic campaigns to William Simpson in the Crimea. A third, from the reign of Henry VIII to Baden-Powell, is the work of spies, and of soldiers and sailors making records for professional purposes. Propaganda and practicality are constant themes; what was new about the official schemes was the understanding that the best propaganda in art came from the artists themselves, not from government over-direction.
The Fine Art Society show gives us only 29 works from the two world wars, the majority, unsurprisingly, from the first. Some, such as Nevinson, Wadsworth and Nash prints, are well known, others, like the Harcourt, less so. They make a powerful impact. While it was still possible, I used to ask survivors of the trenches which war artists conveyed the experience best. For the artistically aware it was Paul Nash, closely followed by Nevinson; for others it was Kennington.
It is only a little unfair to say that the war made Nash as an artist. Before it he was a charming, if brooding, rural romantic, in the tradition of Samuel Palmer but without Palmer’s passion. Service in the trenches — a broken rib luckily brought him out just before the 1917 Ypres Offensive — followed by a return as an official artist, gave his work the depth and power that it had lacked. He regarded himself as a messenger for the soldiers, attempting to convey something of the horror to those at home who still believed war to be a matter of honour and glory. As he wrote to his wife: “No glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere for such a land.” It is raining in three of his four works in the show, and night in the fourth. In all his postwar work, rain appears only twice.
One reason that artists, especially the younger generation and the avant-garde, reacted so strongly to the war was that it revealed the naivety of their ideals. Rupert Brooke had not been alone in seeing war as a means of cleansing society. In literature as well as art the machine was given near-mystical status: Kipling, Wells and Buchan all wrote of it as a living thing, and for the Italian Futurists and their British cousins, the Vorticists, it, together with movement, was the theme of art.
Advertisement
C. R. W. Nevinson, who proclaimed himself “the only British Futurist”, served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit before becoming an official artist. He realised, as the catalogue puts it, that this was “warfare on an industrial scale fought by men deprived of their individuality”. His columns of marching poilus have fused into machinery, their movement conveyed by Futurist “lines of force”. Later, when he joined the fledgeling Royal Flying Corps, the little aircraft are idealised to convey the idea of flight, but at the same time almost seem alive. There is a wonderful pastel here, Spiral Descent, together with a number of lithographs.
Disillusionment with the purity of machines came to an ironic conclusion in the work of Edward Wadsworth. Having experienced their destructive power, he was set to disguising the mechanical nature of warships with camouflage “dazzle”. Then, in paintings and prints, he turned the abstract patterns back into art. Once again, as in Nevinson’s work, the little figures in Drydocked for Scaling and Painting, Wadsworth’s 1918 woodcut here, become one with the ship and the dock.
Unlike the others, Eric Kennington concentrated on the humanity, and the “heroic truth” of his subjects. Here his signaller deep in exhausted sleep fully endorses Robert Graves’s comment, “My God, Kennington can draw”. Three of the Second World War exhibits are also by Kennington, two portraits and the masterly pastel Coastal Defence Gunners. Because of the nature of the conflict, there was a greater concentration on the Home Front than in 1914-18, especially between late 1940 and 1944. It is a pity that this section could not have been expanded to include at least Moore, Sutherland, Ardizzone, Ravilious and Leonard Rosoman, the last surviving official artist. However, there is a splendid John Piper, an enigmatic John Minton and, to balance two Jagger bronze maquettes from the first war, Raymond Mason’s agonised Belsen Head in marble.
Piper, like Nash, tended to the lugubrious, and it suits the ruins that he painted. His Coventry, November 1940, with smoke still rising from the cathedral shell, is far better without Anna Wickham’s verse that the War Artists’ Advisory Committee wished to append to a postcard of it: “Thank God for war and fire, To burn the silly objects of desire, That from the ruin of a church thrown down, We see God clear and high above the town.”
War is at the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London W1, until December 3