ARTISTS’ EYES THAT FOCUSED ON THE GRIM VISIONS OF WAR
TODAY, IT is the words of the great war poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and, most famously of all, Wilfred Owen, that we have come to associate with “the war to end all wars”.
Yet in the years following the aftermath of the First World War it was paintings and memorials that shaped many people’s perception of this dreadful, colossal conflict.
The 20th century’s greatest artist, Pablo Picasso, didn’t fight in The Great War (Spain remained neutral), but numerous others did, including Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Georges Braque and Otto Dix.
Many of those artists that survived the war were left with a survivor’s guilt that darkly permeated their future work. There were others, too, that became official artists like William Orpen and Augustus John who were sent to paint the Versailles conference.
They are among the artists featured in a new book
by Maltonbased author John Fairley, which explores how artists captured the pivotal moments of the conflict.
“I’ve been interested in the First World War going back to my grandfather who was lost on the
though I never knew him,” says Fairley, who has written books about the war previously and co-wrote
with William Allison which was later turned into a popular BBC TV drama.
“The Armistice was one of the most joyous days of the 20th century and paintings were the main way of conveying that. There were newspapers and bits of newsreel but nothing matches those paintings from the time.”
He says the seismic impact of the war took a long time to be fully felt. “It took several years before many artists were able to get their heads round what had happened, and it was the late 1920s before they produced some of the most harrowing paintings of the war.”
Official war artists were appointed by what became the Imperial War Museum including two brothers, Richard and Sydney Carline. “They were both pilots and one was actually shot down but survived. They sometimes actually sketched while they were flying and painted when they got back down, which is extraordinary.”
Fairley examines how the Armistice was depicted around the world and points out how in New York they celebrated prematurely. “They had fake news back in those days too, and a rumour went round a week before the Armistice that the war had ended and there were huge celebrations, until the news got round that this wasn’t the case.”
One of the most famous paintings depicting the war’s denouement is William Orpen’s
which shows shattered-looking, but ecstatic, soldiers being embraced by women in various states of undress.
The war’s end brought a gamut of emotions. “Orpen in particular painted some pretty grim pictures, but when the war ended a lot of them didn’t know what to do,” says Fairley. “Paul Nash said, ‘what does a war artist without a war do?’ And a number of them did fade away.”
In Stanley Spencer’s case, the war was part of his life for many more years. “After the war he was commissioned to build a chapel in Berkshire by a woman called Mary Behrend, whose brother had come home and practically died in her arms. The chapel is still there and it’s got about a dozen huge paintings but this took him till 1932 to complete.”
Spencer was among the key British war artists. “So, too, was William Orpen because not only did he create that wonderful painting of Armistice Day in Amiens, he also did an array of terrifying pictures of the battlefields. There’s a skeleton in a trench in one painting, so he was an important figure, along with the Nash brothers, Paul and John. Their works have stood the test of time.”
It wasn’t just paintings that had the power to shock. Eric Gill’s war memorial housed at the University of Leeds, caused controversy, too. “It shows the money changers being driven out of the temple which you might think is an odd theme for a war memorial, but the implications are quite clear that the businessmen and the capitalists were at least partly responsible for the war in the first place.”
While the fighting was still raging, art became a potent form of propaganda. “It was crucial because this was before the era of war photography and the Spanish Civil War, and though there were newsreels they never got very close to the action. But painting and reproductions of these paintings in newspapers and journals of the day were regarded by the establishment as tremendously important in conveying the right message to the British people.
“It was a way of keeping spirits up in the face of the mounting casualty lists and that’s what some of these paintings tried to do and I think they often succeeded in doing this,” he says.
“Though some of this art was intended as propaganda, a lot of it is so intensely emotional when you see it that I think it does endure as great work in its own right. You see cities on Armistice Day in total delight and joy and it conveys what people felt then and after the war that is beyond propaganda.”
Equally, many of those artists that survived didn’t attempt to varnish the reality of what they had witnessed.
“There was a whole movement in Germany after the war to paint the war in all its terror. Otto Dix had been in the war and he did these terrifying paintings with skulls. It was part of an attempt to demilitarise German minds and probably worked for a time, though as we know it didn’t last very long.”
In Britain, Fairley thinks a different mood prevailed. “There was greater