Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
AFTERMATH: ART IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR ONE
Tate Britain to 23rd September
Almost every development in European art was arguably prefigured, if not achieved, between 1908 and 1916. The First World War stood as a massive caesura, halting for a time the charge of ‘Isms’ that had tumbled over each other, in a riotous rush to be newest.
In its aftermath, as noted by the Sunday Telegraph in June 1919, ‘Futurism and Vorticism have all gone under, and we are in the full swing of a classical revolution.’ Similarly, in a letter to Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain wrote, ‘I don’t count the horrors I have seen as memories. I want to do nothing but portraits, real portraits with hands and hair; that’s real life.’
It would be easy to think that the fight had literally been beaten out of the pre-war rebels. But, as this fascinating exhibition demonstrates, while they had of necessity grown up, for a time they converged with the more enlightened traditionalists hoping to create art for a better world.
The show is the Tate’s contribution to the celebrations marking the centenary of the war’s end, and it covers the years 1916-32 in Britain, France and Germany, before Hitler’s imposition of state control. It presents a shared European history, in the words of Tate Britain’s director, Alex Farquharson, examining ‘the synergies and differences in approaches to remembering the war through the visual arts in the three countries’. It is also an admirable example of present-day cooperation between the countries’ major institutions.
Among the differences of approach were attitudes to maimed survivors and war memorials. On British streets, wounded soldiers were as visible as everywhere else, but not in official commemorations nor in art.
In France, they were highly visible in both – with des gueules cassées, ‘broken faces’, on the delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. In Germany, graphic images were widely circulated in anti-war literature and art by Grosz, Dix and others.
France and Britain marched together in erecting national memorials; defeated Germany took until 1932, and then it was Prussian rather than national.
I had not previously realised that, in 1916, it was Epstein himself who removed the actual rock drill and cut off the limbs of his aggressively visored Vorticist figure, making it a wounded insect rather than a powerful, menacing robot.
The Vorticists’ worship of machines had indeed been overwhelmed by the reality of mechanical warfare. But a gentler, post-war fascination did re-emerge in France; and artists from all three countries celebrated American modernity, especially from New York.
The New Woman who emerged from the war was perfectly expressed in the new realism. Return to order did not mean a return to the past, but rather took realism in novel directions. In France, the rediscovery of classicism represented civilisation and tradition. Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters focused on the materiality of everyday life with precision and clarity, seeking to regain control amid a chaotic economic and political climate.
A fascinating theme, also new to me, is that Dadaism was as much a product of the war as the neoclassicism; and so, more obviously, was Surrealism. In 1914, the Futurists and Vorticists had been the drummers of war; the Dadaists were anarchists but with a serious purpose.
As Kurt Schwitters, who was associated with them, wrote in 1923, ‘This is the time, just as we are in the midst of deepest peace, to prevent a war.’
If only politicians had listened to that wisdom, either then or in the wake of the Cold War.