Alistair Sooke on the moving new exhibition that will haunt you
Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One Tate Britain
It begins not with an artwork but with a helmet. Three helmets, to be precise: rusted, dented, shattered sheets of metal that can’t have offered much protection to the wretches wearing them on the Western Front.
These are the first objects we encounter in Tate Britain’s stunning and unforgettable new exhibition,
Aftermath, which marks the centenary of the First World War. With plain- speaking eloquence, they evoke the show’s central theme – that, between 1916 and 1932, artists in Britain, Germany and France didn’t engage in pointless aesthetic game-playing but responded, head-on, to a new, dreadful reality, in vital, essential art.
The First World War, of course, blew everything apart: not just bricks and mortar, and flesh and blood, but also minds and spirits. Society was smashed up, too. We think we’ve got it bad, negotiating the benighted labyrinth that is Brexit. Visiting this exhibition of more than 150 works makes the age we live in – an epoch of “snowflakes” and Instagram addicts – seem irredeemably superficial and spoilt.
As its title suggests, Aftermath deals not with the conflict itself, which turned Western Europe into a slaughterhouse, but with its repercussions upon society. The first gallery assembles paintings, photographs and even black-andwhite film footage of obliterated towns and fields: the battle has abated, but the devastation endures. Often, artists painted abandoned helmets as proxies for fallen soldiers; controversially, CRW Nevinson depicted two actual dead soldiers, lying face down in the mud, in Paths of Glory (1917).
Nearby, a fascinating vitrine details the tourism industry that sprung up after the war, as people travelled to Verdun and The Somme, “Michelin Guides to the Battlefields” in hand. Many took home souvenirs fashioned out of shrapnel.
Nevertheless, visiting the site of a massacre was one way of coming to terms with loss. The second gallery examines how governments commissioned monumental memorials. Anyone who has driven past Hyde Park Corner will be familiar with Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial, which imbues rank-and-file “Tommies” with dignity and quiet heroism. By contrast, The Floating One (1927), by the German expressionist sculptor Ernst Barlach, is like no memorial I’ve ever seen. A sombre, levitating angel, with arms crossed and eyes closed, it hangs above the gallery like a sleek missile of black bronze, an unforgettable emissary of death.
More orthodox memorials, such as the Cenotaph, employed a deliberately blank, vaguely classical visual language. Many of the artists in Aftermath, however, refused to whitewash the carnage, and the wounded body emerges as a major theme. Witness Henry Tonks’s devastating pastel portraits of disfigured servicemen, unlucky elephant men with fat tongues ballooning out from missing jaws. These medical studies are savage in their meticulousness. The Germans George Grosz and Otto Dix, meanwhile, deliberately depicted disabled veterans as emblems of a broken society.
Indeed, much of the art in this exhibition has a jerky, distorted quality – a response, no doubt, to all those shell-shocked soldiers returning from the front line with mangled faces and twitching limbs. Here, too, are the origins of Dada and surrealism.
For some artists, however, avant-garde, fractured forms were too close to the bone – and so, during the Twenties, a contrasting tendency emerged: a revival of realism known as the “Return to Order”. Even here, though, the impact of the war is omnipresent. Chopped logs in Paul Nash’s Landscape at Iden (1929) are stand-ins for the dead. A sleeping man in Picasso’s tiny Family by the Seashore (1922) is laid out like a corpse. The scar on the face of the naked woman in the background of Christian Schad’s immaculate Self-portrait (1927) is another reminder of disfigurement.
Dod Procter’s Morning (1926) features a young woman, weary and alone, on a single bed. Seen in this context, the painting becomes a study of grief. Grief as experienced by women is also the subject of German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s portfolio of seven heart-rending woodcuts, War. First-rate female artists are well represented in this show.
Arguably, the exhibition ends too far removed from the battlefields of Belgium and France, with an exploration of artistic responses to the modern city. Moreover, I couldn’t understand why there was no room for Mark Gertler’s Merry-go-round (1916), which belongs to the Tate. An
The war blew everything apart: not just bricks and mortar, and flesh and blood, but also minds and spirits
archetypal vision of the deranged absurdity and futility of the First World War, this nocturnal masterpiece should have been included. I would have loved to have seen it hanging in the penultimate gallery, alongside a brilliant sequence of paintings of nightclubs with a similarly demented, whirligig quality. William Roberts’s Dance Club (1923), for instance, is a dance of death, full of whoops of lamentation.
Still, it’s rare to find so much powerful, moving work, by so many disparate artists, gathered in one place. Aftermath is not an easy exhibition to stomach, especially for those accustomed to quick-fire, social-media-ready entertainment in galleries and museums. But it is excellent, and should come with a warning: this show contains images that will haunt you for the rest of your days.