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.

Non-appearances can be deceptive, too!

The Royal British Legion is the UK’s leading charity in support of serving and former members of the armed forces and their families. It was founded in 1921 when Earl Haig became its first president. His direction of British forces in France from 1915 to 1918 continues to be a subject of controversy among historians. However, the Legion is famous now for its major fund-raising activity, the Poppy Appeal. British politicians rarely appear in public from late October to 11 November not wearing a poppy. So it was surprising when Paul Staines and Harry Cole reported in their Guido Fawkes column in 14 October’s Daily Star on Sunday that:

DURING his leader’s speech at the Tory Conference last week, David Cameron emotively led the hall in a standing ovation for our troops to “show how profoundly grateful we are for everything they do”. Yet this year was the first time ever that a Tory party leader has failed to put in an appearance at the Royal British Legion’s reception at the Conservative Party Conference. Downing Street tells Guido that while “the Prime Minister is very supportive of the Royal British Legion and the excellent work they do…unfortunately he is unable to attend more than a tiny number” of receptions at conference. An event for property developers Canary Wharf Group was one of the tiny number he did manage to attend. It was held at the same time as the Legion’s reception, in the room next door. Seems our wartime leader misplaced his gratitude.

However, immediately after his party’s Conference on 11 October the PM had announced in a speech at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) the government’s plans to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War in 2014, mentioning the Legion twice. A possible explanation for Cameron’s non-appearance at the Legion event in Birmingham may be a story in the Sunday Times (£) also on 14 October. This was an exposé of former senior military officers who were claiming to be able to lobby Whitehall on behalf of defence firms. It stated that:

The Royal British Legion began an investigation after Lieutenant-General Sir John Kiszely, its president, was named as one of six former commanders recorded by undercover reporters, who claimed they represented a South Korean arms firm looking for business. Sir John was quoted by The Sunday Times as saying that he could use his role at the charity to promote the company’s agenda with the Prime Minister and other figures at Remembrance Day events.  

… Sir John described how his role at the Legion exposed him to various senior figures. “It sounds totally grand: you’re standing there waiting for the Queen with nothing else to talk about to Philip Hammond than whatever,” he said. The Falklands veteran also claimed that the Festival of Remembrance for Britain’s war dead was a “tremendous networking opportunity”. Contacted by The Sunday Times after the sting, the Sir John said that he had always kept his commercial interests “entirely separate” from his role with the Legion and had never used access gained through it to discuss any business interests.

On 15 October, Kiszely resigned as Legion president. And possibly the Number 10 press team in the days before the story broke had been living up to their reputation for competence.

In his speech Cameron made the point that:

However frustrating and however difficult the debates in Europe, 100 years on we sort out our differences through dialogue and meetings around conference tables, not through the battles on the fields of Flanders or the frozen lakes of western Russia.

The Menin Road by Paul Nash

(next to the PM at the IWM on 11 October)

Libby Purves in The Times on 15 October, writing in support of the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU, put it more pointedly:

Maybe our present justifiable disgruntlement with the EU (I see even Michael Gove is joining in) will actually be tempered a little by the coming year of remembrance of the 1914-1918 war. We will be made to see the horror of that period more clearly than we ever do through the fuzzy sentimentality of Downton or the poppy-wreath dignity of the Cenotaph.  

… The EU is, very often, a pain in the neck. But it is part of an attempt never to do it again: to create what Churchill called a “richer, freer, more contented European commonality”. OK, Churchill didn’t think Britain should be actually inside it (“We are linked but not compromised, interested and associated but not absorbed”) but he spoke for his own proud, bruised times. Whether or not Britain should stay within its sticky and often mismanaged embrace, I do not know. But looking across the Channel, and remembering worse times, it would be wrong to begrudge the EU its prize.

A post here earlier this year contained a quote from Cameron:

If your vision of Britain was that we should just withdraw [from the EU] and become a sort of greater Switzerland, I think that would be a complete denial of our national interests.

It will be interesting to see what line (if any) the WW1 centenary activities will take about the UK’s relationship with a historically belligerent Europe. I would be surprised if it were one to help UKIP.