Exhibition of the week Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One

Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk). Until 23 September

The First World War “blew everything apart”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph: “not just bricks and mortar, and flesh and blood (more than ten million killed), but also minds and spirits”. A century on, this “stunning and unforgettable” new exhibition at Tate Britain explores how artists responded to the aftermath of the carnage, addressing not only the War itself, but its impact on culture and society. The show brings together more than 150 paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures created in Britain, France and Germany between 1916 and 1932, taking in everything from horrendous battlefield scenes by the likes of C.R.W. Nevinson to depictions of disfigured soldiers by Otto Dix and George Grosz, and the beginnings of Dada and surrealism. It demonstrates how artists approached the “dreadful reality” of the war-torn continent with “vital, essential” artworks. Rarely will you see so much powerful and moving art grouped together in one place. The show contains dozens of “images that will haunt you for the rest of your days”.

The opening rooms are fantastic, said Eddy Frankel in Time Out. The show starts off with a selection of works addressing the “bloodied, solitary grimness” of the War itself. “Sickening” paintings by Paul Nash, William Orpen and Luc-albert Moreau depict bodies hanging from trees and corpses littering the battlefields, while German artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculpture The Fallen Man (1915-16) gives us a lone figure in bronze, “utterly and overwhelmingly broken”. Henry Tonks’s “grotesque” pastel portraits of soldiers’ facial injuries are every bit as shocking as the work of Francis Bacon. However, the show soon veers offtopic with pictures of workers and scenes of “Parisian debauchery” that have little connection to the War. Some of the pictures here are mediocre, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. You can safely ignore a section devoted to the “New Objectivity” painters of 1920s Germany, who espoused a “mundane return to realism” in reaction to the rise of modernism. Yet the show does contain more than enough “to send you reeling”: Jacob Epstein’s sculpture The Rock Drill (1913-14) is a “menacing man-machine hybrid” – a response to “the horrors of mechanical warfare”; while Ernst Barlach’s “haunting” bronze The Floating One (1927) reflects “German uncertainty” as to how to commemorate defeat. Aftermath suffers from a number of “laborious patches”, but it accurately “captures the confusions” of postwar Europe.