C R W Nevinson, "A Taube", 1916, oil on canvas, 63.8 cm x 76.6 cm.
The Imperial War Museum (IWM), London. Image courtesy of the IWM.
C R W Nevinson, "La Mitrailleuse", 1915, oil on canvas, 50.8 cm x 61 cm. The Tate Britain
C R W Nevinson, "Paths of Glory", 1915, oil on canvas, 45.7 cm x 60.9 cm. International War Museum, London
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In a world of Zeppelins and tortured bodies, in a landscape of shattered towns, mechanized transport and steel helmets, in nights black as pitch save for the groping beams of searchlights-in a word, in the madness of warfare, the last shackles of Victorian tradition were cast off and painting reflected the mood of the times--original and chaotic, inhuman and metallic, often expressed in symbols that were revolutionary as war itself. Let us consider some of the work most characteristic of the period. Consider first then Nevinsons's painting of A Taube. All the horror of war is contained in this picture of a bit of whitewashed wall, a green shutter, some pave and a tiny French [schoolboy] in a smock. Only the shutter has been wrenched sideways, the pave is scattered and the [young boy] lies stiff and his face downwards for the taube has just passed over. The point about the picture is that it could only have been conceived in wartime. How vividly is the callousness of aerial warfare--expressed in every brushstroke--communicated to the spectator striking him with pity and terror!" --Nevile A.D. Wallis, "Art in Wartime", Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, vol. 88, no. 4559, April 19, 1940. * "The Taube was primarily a reconnaissance plane but carried bombs that could be thrown from the cockpit. The casual violence of the scene marks the increasing vulnerability of the civilian population. In his autobiography, Paint and Prejudice, Nevinson describes the scene: 'Dunkirk was one of the first towns to suffer aerial bombardment, and I was one of the first men to see a child who had been killed by it. There the small boy lay before me, a symbol of all that was to come."--From the website of the Imperial War Museum, London, describing this stunning painting. * * "Set in the poorly lit wooden shed that served as a casualty clearing station in the Dunkirk railyard, La Patrie depicts row upon row of casualties lying on stretchers on a straw covered floor. The clearing station was known as "The Shambles". Nevinson later described the blood, stench, typhoid and agony in which six workers attempted to recovered more than 3000 maimed and dying men"--Charles Doherty Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was among the first British artists to witness the horrors of the First World War. A Volunteer ambulance driver on the Western Front, he observed suffering and carnage resulting from the new trench warfare in the winter of 1914-1915. He returned to the front in 1917 as a member of the British government's official war artist program. For the program Nevinson produced a controversial portrait Paths of Glory, banned from his own one person show in Leicester Galleries, London, in March 1918. The exhibition took place during a time when morale was its lowest and the government censored the work because it portrayed dead soldiers. Yet other contemporaneous paintings were produced at the time showing Allied and enemy war dead and exhibited at London galleries. The censorship of Paths of Glory merits further investigation. Nevinson was the son of two eminent figures in British society: his father, Henry Woodd Nevinson was the war correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and his suffragist mother Margaret Wynne Nevinson. The household became a center for Futurist activity when F. W. Marinetti visited London from Milan and Nevinson, the one and only British Futurist, wrote with the founder of Italian Futurism a manifesto entitled Vital English Art. He was an ambulance driver for the Quaker Friends Society and upon arrival at Dunkirk in November 1914 witnessed death on a daily basis; at one point, his ambulance was blown up. |
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As scholar Julian Freeman notes in his essay for British Art Journal on the occasion of the great Nevinson exhibition at the International War Museum in London in 2000, the critic Walter Sickert once called the painter's seminal work, La Mitrailleuse (1915), "the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war". Freeman goes on to write: "There was nothing to match it in British art at the time", noting that John Lavery's formidable painting The First Wounded, London Hospital of 1915 was "an honorable attempt" at realism, but could not rise to the level of Nevinson's emotional slash-and-burn Cubist-Futurism. The poigant oil on glass work seen here to the right by Eric Kennington (1888-1960), The Kensingtons at Laventie (1915) "was the only painting superior to Nevinson", according to Freeman.
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Eric Kennington, "The Kensingtons at Laventie", 1915, oil on glass, 139.7 cm x 152.4 cm. Imperial War Museum, London
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