WW1 British Art at the IWM

2014’s being the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War (WW1), was an opportunity with obvious appeal for the Political-Media Complex. The BBC even appointed a “centenary controller” in 2013 to oversee the "biggest and most ambitious pan-BBC project ever commissioned". As might be expected, the warning on an archived BBC History webpage, no doubt relegated early on in this grand projet, that “The war that 'would be over by Christmas' dragged on for four long years of bloody stalemate” went unnoticed. But the BBC’s coverage of WW1, once the “1914 Christmas Truce” was over, has turned out to be minimal, although we are promised a return to the Somme and Jutland in 2016. It is, of course, unfair to single out the BBC because most of the media seem to have lost interest in the centennial, although The Times is continuing to draw a 100 year-old item from its archive every day. The politicians are, of course, focussed on the 2015 election and the media has moved on to the 70th anniversary of the ending of WW2.

Most of the big art-related WW1 guns were fired off early too. The popular installation by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, in the Tower of London moat (above) ended in November 2014, although some of its 888,246 ceramic poppies will go on a UK tour. 888,246 is officially the number of British military fatalities in the war, a number which, by definition, couldn’t have been arrived at before November 1918, so the installation might have been more appropriate for the centennial of the Armistice in 2018. The Great War in Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery ran from 27 February to 15 June, ending well before the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, let alone hostilities. But one exhibition, and probably the most significant art offering of the WW1 centennial, did manage to see out the first winter of the hostilities (a harsh one as shown in Eric Kennington’s oil on glass, The Kensingtons at Laventie, (1915 below), the London Imperial War Museum’s Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War.

The exhibition was part of the reopening of the IWM last year after refurbishment and is the largest show of British First World War art for almost 100 years. Most of the 120 works come from the museum’s own holdings or Tate Britain’s. The division into Truth and Memory - two slippery entities in any context, let alone war art - was certainly expedient given that the two exhibition areas on the third floor of IWM are separated by the landing. On top of this distinction there is another theme: that the initial artistic response to the war may have been expressed in classical and heroic terms but that modernism turned out to be the more appropriate style for the emerging horrors of trench and aerial warfare. An added complexity in curation was the convoluted nature of the government’s sponsorship of war artists. As recorders their images didn’t always suit the government’s wish to maintain wartime morale, and as memorialists their works turned out to be too large for the accommodation post-War governments were prepared to finance. To quote Waldemar Januszczak (his review of Truth and Memory is the best I’ve seen):

No one was sure where to place it [the IWM], or what to do with the art that might go in it. The original idea was to build a new museum commemorating the war in Whitehall, but that proved too expensive. The art was initially put on show in the Crystal Palace, in Sydenham, where the glass walls proved thunderously inappropriate for the showing of pictures. Next, they took it to South Kensington, to galleries adjoining the Imperial Institute, which stood where Imperial College stands now. Finally, after a further decade of muddling, the Imperial War Museum and its great collection of First World War art was installed in its present home, in the building that used to house the most notorious madhouse in the world, Bethlem Royal Hospital — “Bedlam”.

Some of the war artists’ works were passed on to the Tate Gallery, for example CRW Nevinson’s La Mitrailleuse (1915 below left) and Bursting Shell (1915 below right):

Works by Nevinson and Orpen, for example his Dead Germans in A Trench (1918 below left) and The Mad Woman of Douai (1918 below right) dominate the Truth side of the exhibition. Most of Orpen’s work here is in marked contrast with his portraits at the NPG. He gifted his WW1 works to the nation (in 2005 the IWM’s William Orpen Politics Sex and Death provided an opportunity to see these works in the context of his whole career).

The Memory section of the IWM show seemed to attract fewer visitors when I was there, oddly given that there are major works on show, exciting to see as large originals. Both Nash brothers are well-represented: John Nash’s Oppy Wood, 1917: Evening (1918) and 'Over The Top'. 1st Artists' Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917 (1918, below):

and Paul Nash’s We Are Making a New World (1918 below top) and The Menin Road (1919 below lower): 

There are also a major works by the Vorticist, Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919, below top) and by Stanley Spencer, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919, below lower):

And there are some interesting pictures of life on the home front in hospitals and munitions production. Anna Airey’s Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, (1918 below) is a remarkable picture of arduous work by women:

Memory concludes with some very large pieces including Charles Sergeant Jagger’s plaster relief of The Battle of Ypres: The Worcesters at Gheluvelt (1919, below top), Orpen’s controversial To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921) and, of course, John Singer Sargent’s 2.3 metre-wide Gassed (1919 below lower):

Truth and Memory ends on 8 March, so the opportunity to see some of the finest British 20th century art will be over by Easter, you might say.

'A Crisis of Brilliance' at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

When an exhibition gets good reviews from professional art critics, even I start to wonder why I bother with my tuppenceworth. So if you want to stop reading here about Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922 (its very full title) and instead find out what Brian Sewell or Andrew Lambirth had to say about it, I really won’t mind.





So what can I add? Having read the book and seen the exhibition, I can opine that if one was of interest, the other will be too. The book, David Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance Five Young British Artists and the Great War, came out in 2010. His five were Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark
Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington; the exhibition which Haycock has now curated includes David Bomberg as well. The notion of this group engendering a “crisis of brilliance” came from Henry Tonks, teacher and professor at the Slade from 1892 to 1930 (apart from war service), who had first applied it to a previous generation of his students there in the 1890s which had included Augustus and Gwen John and Percy Wyndham Lewis. Both his crises were the existence of a superfluity of talent in particular cohorts of students whereas Haycock’s crisis reveals itself as the one inflicted by the First World War on the six contemporaries in the Dulwich exhibition.

In the catalogue Haycock provides a very helpful description of the sequence of art exhibitions and of the groups of artists which were being formed in the years just before the War. The most important of the former were the 1910 Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition and the 1912 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, both organised by Roger Fry. It was the latter show which Tonks advised his students, all about 20 at the time, to avoid – what could have been more guaranteed to ensure their attendance? In1912 London was also introduced to Italian Futurism which would lead to the appearance of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism movement just a few months before the War began.

 

Although visitors encounter Bomberg’s In the Hold (1913-14) (above) juxtaposed with Dulwich’s old masters before entering, the exhibition adopts a chronological approach and starts with works showing the initial impact of exposure to modernism and futurism on a group of students originally preoccupied with early Renaissance Italian art (John Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame Tiscaron (1912) below).

 

Examples are Stanley Spencer’s Apple Gatherers 1912-13 and Paul Nash’s Apple Pickers (1914), both regarded as being influenced by Gauguin (below left and right) and Gertler’s The Fruit Sorters in the exhibition poster.

 

Subsequently the show makes clear how this exposure to modernism conditioned the group’s artistic response to the dislocations and innovations (eg Nevinson’s Futurist Spiral Descent 1916 left) of the First World War and the consequences for their work in the years after 1918. Two major works which were not made available to the exhibition were Gertler’s masterpiece, Merry-Go-Round (1916), which is a highlight of Tate Britain’s recent rehang, and Nash’s The Menin Road (1919) which is owned by the currently closed Imperial War Museum (below left and right). Hopefully the First World War centenary programme the UK government is running from 2014 to 2018 will include a major exhibition of art from the period to put the work of the Dulwich six in a wider context.

Does the Dulwich show work? On the whole exhibitions concentrate on one artist in retrospect or bring together artists who, if only for a period, embraced a similar artistic philosophy, be it Pre-Raphaelite or Bauhaus. Haycock’s book impressed by skilful intertwining of the biographies of his five subjects, but inevitably it is a different proposition for an exhibition to provide six retrospectives in parallel. The individuals concerned had the War in common, but had different experiences with varying effects on their art. Their lives would come to disparate ends, some distinguished, some tragic. Anyone interested in 20th century English art will find the Dulwich exhibition rewarding, but Haycock’s book or the exhibition catalogue are likely to prove very helpful in providing wider context to the works on display. Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922 closes on 22 September.


FOOTNOTE

Bomberg taught in one of London South Bank University ‘s predecessor organisations and its Borough Road Gallery is now providing opportunities to see his work.

Stanley Spencer at Compton Verney

In May I posted about Compton Verney and their Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson exhibition. Compton Verney’s current shows include Stanley Spencer and the English garden which runs until 2 October, and is well worth seeing.

'Wisteria, Cookham'

Spencer (1891-1959) is well-known for his First World War murals for the Memorial Chapel at Sandham (near Burghclere, Hampshire), which belongs to the National Trust, and for his monumental series of Second World War paintings, Shipbuilding on the Clyde. These are owned by the Imperial War Museum and, although recently restored, have no permanent exhibition space. A selection can be seen until 15 January 2012 at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, Spencer’s birthplace.

Spencer was always deeply rooted in Cookham, and even when a student at the Slade before the First World War preferred to commute to London daily. He chose Cookham and its inhabitants as the subjects for his biblical scenes, probably the most famous being The Resurrection, now in the Tate Britain collection. Because of their settings, the religious paintings often include domestic gardens, but, as this exhibition shows, Spencer’s execution of detail comes to the fore in his paintings of flowers, or more prosaically a bunch of onions. Even in the apparently secular scenes, the white picket fences seem to be echoing the crosses at Sandham.