The First World War has an enduring resonance within the visual arts. In the case of Britain, it was Britain’s war artists whose work played a decisive role in the representation of the conflict. They produced a formidable array of powerful images that prompted John Rothenstein in his autobiography ‘Summers Lease’, he was director of the Tate Gallery from 1938 to 1964, to write that they were ‘barely escapable’ during and after the war. Their work was commissioned by the British government during the First World War in what was an unprecedented act of government sponsorship of the arts. The first scheme was started by Charles Masterson, he was head of the governments propaganda unit which was then based at Wellington House in London. The intention was to produce images for publication in books and other publications and this was later expanded to include social history and commemoration. The aim was to show Britain as a bastion of liberal, social inclusion and not to show nationalist, bombastic images that glorified war. Establishment artists included Orpen, Singer Sargent, and Lavery and they were joined by artists who brought their experience of front-line service such as Nevinson, Nash and Kennington. Many commissions continued long after the war had ended and by 1920 some 3,500 works had been acquired under the scheme.
Featured are several generations of British artists, ranging from the Scottish printmaker Muirhead Bone who took part in the first scheme. His work was so popular with the public that the government commissioned a second scheme. Amongst those taking part were C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, David Bamberg, William Open, and others. On the German side, works by Otto Dix, who left art school to enlist in the German army, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann. Käthe Kollwitz, so affected by the death of her son Peter in October 1914. The ‘Mother and Father’ sculpture, life size figures of herself and her husband, at the Vladslo German Cemetery, Diksmuide represent her sense of personal loss. Her 1919 lithograph ‘The Mothers’ another echo of the war years, is a powerful message and the voice of Käthe Kollwitz still speaks to us with wisdom and compassion in these troubled times.
British War Memorials Committee
In February 1918, the British War Memorials Committee commissioned a series of work to feature in a planned Hall of Remembrance. The committee was headed by Lord Beaverbrook who was Minister with responsibility for the Ministry of Information which had replaced the Department of Information. Beaverbrook had been running, from London, the Canadian Government's scheme to commission contemporary art during the First World War and believed Britain would benefit from a similar project. Beaverbrook wanted the British War Memorials Committee to change the direction of Government-sponsored art away from propaganda of short-term value only during the conflict to a collection with a much longer lasting national value. Arnold Bennett, alongside Beaverbrook, was the driving force behind the BWMC and was instrumental in ensuring young artists, including those seen as modernist or avant-garde, were commissioned by the Committee over older British artists, many of whom were associated with the Royal Academy. The scheme was ultimately abandoned and the art work was brought under the control of the Pictorial Propaganda Committee within the Ministry. This Committee first met in July 1918 and quickly decided to abandon the sculpture commissions as we as the proposed Hall of Remembrance and they designated the Imperial War Museum as the future, permanent, home of the collection.
Like their countrymen, many artists, writers, and intellectuals initially welcomed the war for a range of reasons: some because of nationalist sentiments or a sense of patriotic duty; others had a desire to experience an "adventure" they assumed would be over in a few months, if not weeks; and still others because of a mistaken belief that, after what they viewed as a final and necessary conflict ended, oppressive political systems (often dynasties whose various rulers were related by blood or marriage) would disappear and a more peaceful, spiritual, and anti-materialist era would begin.
German Artists
In Germany, while some artists, such as George Grosz, who had long rejected militarism and nationalist sentiment, rejected the war from the beginning yet volunteered in November 1914 to avoid being conscripted into the army. He was discharged on health grounds in 1916 on the understanding that he might be recalled. He was conscripted again in 1917 however, he was permanently discharged after a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum for the remainder of the war. ‘Fit for Active Service’ depicts a bare skeleton being judged as physically fit for conscription. This is a comment on the recruitment of men who barely passed medical fitness. Something that was prevalent on both sides of the conflict.
Others, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "involuntarily voluntarily" enlisted. He was reluctant soldier, his painting ‘Self Portrait as a Soldier’ from 1915, examines the psychological distress experienced by Kirschner during his service in the army. He became preoccupied with avoiding service and following a self-induced psychosis, aided by his use of alcohol and drugs, he was discharged. Other figures, including Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, enthusiastically enlisted. Max Beckman volunteered as a medical orderly and saw service in Belgium and was medically discharged in 1915 following a breakdown.
May It Burn Their Lousy Souls
Because there were a large number of artists on both sides who experienced the fighting first hand, either as soldiers, medical personnel, or war artists documenting life at the front (with many suffering severe injuries or death), several figures produced work either at the front or based on their experiences engaging in or witnessing the fighting. Artists searched for an appropriate language to express the chaos and carnage that resulted from modern industrial warfare, re-evaluating subject matter, techniques, materials, and styles, as well as their positions and responsibilities as cultural producers. While some figures employed a modernist approach that drew from avant-garde experimentation begun before the war or was born in reaction to its carnage, others embraced a more traditional, figurative style; still others drew elements from both approaches or moved between styles for a variety of reasons.
Paul Nash joined the army and saw active service in the Ypres Salient until he was invalided out in 1917 returning to the Western Front in late 1917 as an official war artist. He wrote to his wife Margaret : ‘I am no longer an artist...I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever... Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls’ In early 1918, he was commissioned to paint a Flanders battlefield scene for the proposed Hall of Remembrance. He painted a scene from the battlefield at a location near Gheluvelt known to the British as Tower Hamlets. He titled his work ‘The Menin Road’ and he painted it in his studio at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire he wrote: ‘… to put the luxuriant green country aside and brood on those wasted in Flanders, the torments, the cruelty & terror of this war… if I can rob the war of the last shred of glory, the last shine of glamour.’ In the portrait the Menin Road itself is devastated and unrecognisable in a landscape that is maze like and with erratic patterns of flooded trenches, craters, and a sense of chaos.
In his painting ‘The Ypres Salient at Night’, Nash captures a night scene showing three soldiers on the fire step of a trench surprised by a brilliant star shell lighting up the view over the battlefield. On the left there is a flooded shell-hole, beyond which stand three other soldiers, overlooked by a woodland of tree stumps. His work ‘We are Making a New World’ painted in 1918, is one of the most memorable pieces of art work of the 20th Century and has been compared to Picasso’s Guernica. It first appeared untitled as a front cover of an issue of ‘British War Artists at the Front’ published by Country Life. In it, Nash shows a setting at Inverness Copse, actually located on the other side of the Menin Road from Tower Hamlets and was a place of ferocious fighting during Third Ypres in 1917. He captures a scene of total destruction and devastation as the sun rises with the landscape unrecognisable, utterly barren and the mounds of earth are depicted as graves. The title of this work is mocking like a slogan taken from an advert. This is a political portrait with a difference.
Those working in applied and commercial arts also revealed a variety of approaches; some work was commissioned by the government or other organizations to support the war effort and charities, while other propaganda - sometimes the most inflammatory - was independently produced and distributed as periodicals, postcards, and posters in order to boost morale and demean the enemy.
Bernard Meninsky in his painting ‘The Arrival of a Leave Train, Victoria Station, 1918', commissioned by the Ministry of Information as part of a series entitled ‘Victoria Station, District Railway', Bernard Meninsky, who had previously served as a private in the Royal Fusiliers, painted scenes during and after the arrival of leave trains. In his painting the soldiers pass from light into darkness as they say farewell on their way to the platform and their train.
One of the most avant-garde artists that were commissioned was Percy Wyndham Lewis. He served as an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery. His painting ‘A Battery Shelled’ painted in 1919 reflects his experience of counter-battery fire and the figures of British gunners performing a frenzied routine as they move shells to their guns with the three gunners in the foreground appearing as spectators. In another Lewis painting ‘Officers and Signallers’ he recalls a scene which he would have participated in. Writing in his autobiography ‘Blasting and Bombardiering’ he recalled: ‘As a battery officer at the Front my main duties were to mooch about the battery, and to go up before daybreak with a party of signallers to an observation post. This was usually just behind the Front-Line trench - in No Man’s Land just behind it.’ The painting depicts an officer striding out purposefully with a walking stick in hand while the signallers follow on behind encumbered by their equipment and crouching from the incoming shells.
David Bamberg, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, was commissioned by the Canadian government to capture the work of the Canadian sappers of the tunnelling company as they worked on the largest of the mines blown on 7 June 1917. His painting ‘Sappers at Work: Canadian Tunnelling Company, R14, St Eloi’ the first study was initially rejected as being to futuristic.
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson ‘Tunnellers’, 1916, captures a tunneller wearing anti-gas breathing apparatus and carrying a caged canary which was sensitive to gas and were known as a miners friends. CRW Nevinson enlisted despite poor health and he served with the Friends Ambulance Unit in northern France and Flanders in 1914. In one of Nevinson’s most famous paintings ‘Paths of Glory’, we see the bodies of two dead British soldiers behind the Western Front. The tile is a quote from ‘Elegy Written In A country Church-Yard’ by Thomas Gray. ‘The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike th’inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. ‘Whereas the poet reflects on bodies dead and buried in a church-yard, the so-called ‘Paths of Glory’ have led these soldiers to death in a wasteland.’ Nevinson chose to exhibit ‘Paths of Glory in London and when the Ministry of Information heard of this, they told him ‘You can’t exhibit this...’ In reply, Nevinson put it up in the gallery and covered the whole painting in a large sign, that read in capital letters: ‘CENSORED.’
Society painter William Orpen known for his swagger portraits of officers hit the self-destruct button with his painting of ‘To the Unknown British soldier in France’. The Imperial War Museum asked Orpen to make two large official paintings of the Peace Conference at Versailles. These were officially deemed to be ‘unsatisfactory'. Having completed those, Orpen embarked on a third panorama of the statesmen gathered in the gilded surroundings of the Hall of Peace at Versailles. Then, without warning the museum, he painted them all out. Methodically, he obliterated thirty-six figures, painting in their place a coffin covered by the Union Jack, two semi-nude soldiers guarding it and two cherubs in the air. Orpen told the Evening Standard: ‘It all seemed so unimportant somehow; I kept thinking of the soldiers who remain in France forever’. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1923, with the title ‘To the Unknown British Soldier in France’, it was voted picture of the year by public ballot. However, the posture of the soldiers, the nudity, and the bitter irony of the symbols gave rise to contrasting reactions in the press, with right-wing papers attacking it as ‘a bad joke’ that lacked dignity and good taste. The left-wing press praised the painting: the Daily Herald calling it ‘a magnificent allegorical tribute to the men who won the war’. The Imperial War Museum rejected the painting and withheld the final instalment of Orpen’s fee, although he did donate the picture to the museum in memory of his friend Earl Haig.
Eric Kennington had served with the 13th (Kensington) Battalion The London Regiment known as ‘The Kensingtons’, from 6 August 1914 to June 1915. He was wounded in January 1915; he was attempting to clear a friend’s jammed rifle when he shot himself in the foot losing a toe. He spent four months in hospital before being discharged as unfit in June 1915. While convalescing he painted ‘The Kensingtons at Laventie’ which depicts the men of No.7 Platoon, ‘C’ Company and Kennington features third from the left wearing the balaclava. The painting shows the platoon, exhausted from four days and nights without sleep, having made their way to the comparative safety of the village of Laventie and are waiting on their corporal giving orders to move on to the rear area.
Kennington was appointed an official war artist in May 1917 and spent his time with the Third Army and was not offered anything like the status of the others such as Muirhead Bone and William Orpen complaining bitterly that he was the cheapest artist employed in the government scheme and that: ‘Bone had a commission and Orpen had a damned good time.’ He completed 170 charcoal, pastel, and watercolours before returning to London in March 1918. While in France he was admitted to a Casualty Clearing station suffering from trench fever. In November 1918 he was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Scheme to depict Canadian troops in Europe and joined the 16th Battalion (Canadian) Scottish, CEF as a temporary first lieutenant. In the eight months he spent with the Canadians he made some seventy drawings. There are three excellent charcoal sketches of Canadian troops on display at Talbot House, Poperinge. They were gifted by the artist to the house.
Gilbert Rogers enlisted as a Private in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) on 5th November 1915 aged 34 and was immediately sent to the RAMC Training Camp in Eastbourne. He then completed pre-deployment training in Codford, Wiltshire and joined ‘N’ Company, 35 Coy RAMC. In 1918 he was tasked with managing a group of RAMC private soldiers, all professional artists to document the medical history of the war and the war work of the RAMC. In July 1918 he returned to France in this capacity, to brief artists, choose locations and to make preparatory drawings for his own work. On their return from the front, the artists worked from studios in Fulham in London and produced approximately six hundred paintings, sculptures and models featuring war work both at home and overseas. Gilbert Rogers was awarded a Military MBE in the Peace Gazette of June 1919 for his work on this art project. After producing his most memorable works during this war period, he ceased to paint for the rest of his life.
German Artists and the War
In Germany, as the war progressed, artists expressed a variety of emotions. Despite initially supporting the war effort by creating works for periodicals such as Kriegszeit (War Time) - the bellicose art journal founded by the publisher and gallery owner Paul Cassirer in the summer of 1914 -by 1916 artists such as Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz had begun making elegiac works about the devastation experienced by families and communities. By the middle of the war Cassirer renounced his nationalist sentiments and became a pacifist, and in April 1916 replaced Kriegszeit with Der Bilderman (The Picture Man), a journal in which artists called attention to war's carnage and advocated for peace.
By contrast, the work of Beckmann, Dix, and Grosz expressed a profound rage at the societies, institutions, and individuals they viewed as promoting and profiting from war. Many of these artists used the same techniques and means initially developed in support of the war, such as propagandistic imagery that could be reproduced in a variety of media and at different price points. Because prints could be distributed more widely and at a lower cost than unique works, they were especially effective at influencing public opinion and could be made available to large audiences. Most importantly, by reproducing the images in periodicals, pamphlets, posters, and other such publications, the art - and the message - could reach even more people.
Many publishers also used art to commemorate the war by producing portfolios, many of which were released on the 10th anniversary of its beginning or end, whose subject was its enduring trauma. Among the most celebrated of these works are Kollwitz's Krieg (War) (1921–1922, published 1923) and Otto Dix's Der Krieg (The War), which was published in 1924, a moment declared as "the year against war." In Käthe Kollwitz's lithograph ‘Mütter (Mothers)’, the women and children - both of whom are shown in different stages of life - huddle together, linking their bodies to form a solid structure that fills the composition. Kollwitz drew herself in the centre, with her eyes closed and her arms wrapped protectively around her two sons. She wrote about the work in a diary entry of February 1919 with great pride and tenderness: "I have drawn the mother who embraces her two children, I am with my own children, born from me, my Hans and my Peterchen." Her younger son, Peter, was enticed by the flurry of patriotic sentiment and war enthusiasm and joined the army with his mother's assistance, as he was underage. He was killed in action on 23 October 1914, age 18, while fighting in Flanders and is buried in Vladslo German Cemetery.
Otto Dix's 'Der Krieg', comprising five suites of ten images that depict horrors unique to trench warfare and its aftermath. Dix painted the triptych between 1929 and 1932 and it is held by the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden. It is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's most powerful artistic statements on war and the artist's greatest graphic work. Dix explores the theme of WW1 in a way that is unparalleled by any other artist with its depiction of images of wounded and fallen soldiers, scarred battlefields, bombed towns, and other nightmarish situations highlight the horrors of modern warfare and man's inhumanity. In addition to his own memories, Dix referred to photographs of dead and disfigured bodies and corpses from the morgue, as well as Goya's Disasters of War series and earlier German works by Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach, in order to capture the raw grisliness and brutality of the war. In 1964 Dix remarked: ‘The painting was made ten years after the First World War. During these years I had conducted many studies in order to deal with the experience of war in artistic terms…. Many books in the Weimar Republic once more blatantly propagated a form of heroism and a concept of the hero that had long been taken to the point of absurdity in the trenches of the First World War. The people were already beginning to forget what unspeakable suffering the war had brought with it. It was this situation that led to the triptych.’
His painting ‘Flanders’ which he painted between 1934 to 1936 when he had been banned by the Nazis was dedicated to Henri Barbusse in whose book ‘La Feu’ in particular the last chapter had inspired the painting: ‘We are awaiting daybreak at the same place where we threw ourselves to the ground at nightfall... Hesitantly it approaches. Icily, gloomily, and eerily stretching out over the fallow earth… Half dozing, half sleeping, staring with wide open eyes again and again, only for them to immediately fall shut again, paralyzed, shattered, and freezing we stare at the unbelievable return of light… With great effort and as unsteadily as if I were severely if I half get up and look around…. The others do not stir in their sleep.’
Other works by Dix such as ‘The Skat Players’ also known as ‘Card-playing Cripples’ portray the war as buffoonery, as a sarcastic farce and provide confirmation of man the beast whose malicious social games provide further confirmation of the theory that man is a wolf to another man.
Reflections
It is now over 100 years since the end of the war. In that time the paintings by Britain’s war artists have penetrated and entrenched themselves in the minds of the country’s imagination in much the same way as the poems of Rupert Brooks, Siegfried Sassoon, or Wilfred Owen. The paintings have been exhibited in many different places, reproduced in books, posters, postcards and have inspired filmmakers and playwrights. They had initially rebutted the lies and myths about the war what Nash called their own ‘bitter truths’ have now themselves become myths. British art historians have claimed that the First World War produced the country’s best war art and that this art represents some of the finest British paintings of the 20th Century and that they are both inventive and uncompromising. What was clear in 1924, was that British art was more conscious of society and British society was more conscious of art than it had been in 1914. This was because before the war although large, the British art world lacked any kind of social influence. Art exhibitions and artists continued to produce classical styles and mythological subjects, the artists and the Academics were self-interested and moved in their own world with art dealers catering only for the wealthiest of clients. They possessed a barely disguised contempt for society and reality. The war and the war artists changed all that. The war had created an insatiable demand from the public for information which led to the work of the war artists filling that information void with paintings and drawings which gave the public an insight into the realities of the front-line. The war years had forged conditions for a different relationship between art and society in the post war period.
In Germany, art in the post war period in the Weimar Republic was a thriving laboratory of art and culture. Berlin was fertile ground for intellectuals, artists, and innovators from many fields during the Weimar Republic years. The Weimar Republic era began in the midst of several major movements in the fine arts that continued into the 1920s. German Expressionism had begun before World War I and continued to have a strong influence throughout the 1920s, although artists were increasingly likely to position themselves in opposition to Expressionist tendencies as the decade went on. Between 1923 and the rise of the Nazis ‘New Objectivity’ replaced Expressionism and became a major undercurrent in all of the arts in Weimar Germany. Broadly speaking, artists linked with New Objectivity include Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Conrad Felixmüller, Christian Schad, and Rudolf Schlichter, who all worked in different styles, but shared many themes: the horrors of war, social hypocrisy and moral decadence, the plight of the poor and the rise of Nazism. With the Nazis in power from 1933 these artists were banned and their work removed from public exhibitions in galleries and museums. In 1937 the Nazis staged their Degenerate Art Exhibition that featured 5,238 works they deemed degenerate. The exhibition ran from 19 July to 30 November 1937 in Munich and 2,009,899 visitors attended, an average of 20,000 per day. It also toured other cities in Germany.
After the exhibit, only the most valuable paintings were sorted out to be included in the auction held by Galerie Theodor Fischer (auctioneer) in Luzern, Switzerland, on 30 June 1939 at the Grand Hotel National. The sale consisted of artworks seized from German public museums; some pieces from the sale were acquired by museums, others by private collectors such as Maurice Wertheim who acquired the 1888 self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh that was seized from the Neue Staatsgalerie in Munich belonging to today's Bavarian State Painting Collections. Nazi officials took many for their private use: for example, Hermann Göring took 14 valuable pieces, including a Van Gogh and a Cézanne. In March 1939, the Berlin Fire Brigade burned 4000 paintings, drawings and prints that had apparently little value on the international market. This was an act of unprecedented vandalism, although the Nazis were well used to book burnings on a large scale.
After the collapse of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Berlin by the Red Army, some artwork from the exhibit was found buried underground. It is unclear how many of these then reappeared in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where they still remain. In 2010, as work began to extend an underground line from Alexanderplatz through the historic city centre to the Brandenburg Gate, a number of sculptures from the degenerate art exhibition were unearthed in the cellar of a private house close to the "Rote Rathaus". These included, for example, the bronze cubist-style statue of a female dancer by the artist Marg Moll and are on display at the Neues (New) Museum on Museum Island in Berlin.