C.R.W. Nevinson: the modern artist of modern war: during Nevinson's career as a war artist in 1914-18, his paintings changed dramatically in style. As Michael Walsh explains, his Futurist canvases of the early part of World War 1 were much admired. It was his later, more realistic, paintings which were attacked��and in one case censored��by the authorities

C.R.W. Nevinson's place in the history of art as the leading British artist of the Great War is assured. Throughout the period 1914-18 his work came to symbolise, then epitomise, the evolving nature of society's attitudes towards the destructive vortex of the first industrial conflict. Initially--from 1914 to 1916--Nevinson's perspective was that of the ex-rebel, speaking on behalf of enlightened modern thought and of the generation who had 'marched away'. (1) Later, as an official government propagandist (1917-18), his painting gravitated towards a penetrating realism, and increasingly embodied protest against a war that had robbed his generation of much of its brilliance. By the Armistice, he had come to loathe passionately the carnage of the Western Front and was not afraid to speak out against it--his youthful exuberance about the modernity of the global conflict extinguished by the reality of the great bloodletting.

August 1914

C.R.W. Nevmson was an unlikely war hero. (2) In 1912 he had left his irrepressible student days at the Slade School of Fine Art in London behind him in order to live the bohemian life in Paris at the height of its pre-war triumphal flow. (3) When he returned to London in 1913 it was to lead the Futurist 'conquest of England' with the bombastic Italians F.T. Marinetti and G. Severini, as they denounced king and country, and all elitist passeism--their word for everything which was, in their opinion, smothering art (Fig. 4). (4) As such, by the outbreak of war, in August 1914, Nevinson was one of London's most infamous rebels and prominent avant-garde artists--and therefore, most unlikely to answer Kitchener's call. But the dilettante, anti-establishment agitator and debauched icon of the pre-war era did embrace the conflict and took with him an art that he believed ready for the challenge. The pre-war years, he believed, had merely been a homo-social apprenticeship in a mechanised chaos which had catalysed art, and sensitised artists, to the modern age, preparing them for the visual and iconographic potentials of the modern war to come.

Not everyone shared his optimism, however. In fact, the war brought with it an extremely hostile environment for the modernist experiment. It was hoped that England might be purged of these 'spectres of national decay' which had characterised the pre-war era). (5) If this did not happen, J.D. Symon warned, 'Future historians will say that the age went dancing to its doom'. (6) St John Ervine, in the North American Review, could scarcely contain his excitement at the prospect:

   The Vorticists and the Imagists and
   the Futurists and the rest of the
   rabble of literary and artistic
   lunatics provided slender
   entertainment for empty days; but
   our minds are empty no longer. (7)

On a more practical note for the artist, the subject matter of modern, industrial war itself defied precedent. The conflict of the machine gun, U-Boat, aeroplane and poison gas had denuded the canvas of the picturesque elements of previous conflicts. Colourful uniforms had been replaced by khaki; heroic charges and defences by long-range shelling; and sweeping military manoeuvres by trench warfare. The resultant vacant picture space demanded an appropriate visual vocabulary to replace the now irrelevant high diction of the style historique. Even The Times, in an article entitled 'The Passing of the Battle Painter', declared that 'The trench is the enemy of military art'. (8)

Artistically, politically and militarily, therefore, this was uncharted and extremely volatile terrain, through which Nevinson had to steer a tolerable course. How would he balance his output between the mimetic and the iconic; the mythical and the realistic; and the innovative and traditional? How would he differentiate between patriotism and jingoism; internationalism and xenophobia? And how would he deal with the conflicting demands of the nationally advocated anti-militarist myth, the modernity of the conflict and the status and legibility of high, yet modern, art?

Nevinson takes Modernism to war

By November 1914 Nevinson, unlike most of his artistic peers, was uniformed and at the Front, as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Ypres Salient (Fig. 3). On his return to London in early 1915, he proclaimed publicly:

   I am firmly convinced that all artists
   should enlist and go to the front, no
   matter how little they owe England
   for her contempt of modern art, but
   to strengthen their art of physical
   and moral courage and a fearless
   desire of adventure, risk and daring. (9)

[FIGURE 3 OMMITED]

In Nevinson's opinion, the undaunted artist, and his continuation of the modernist experiment, stood as a national symbol of the intact and progressive condition of contemporary English culture--unthreatened by the kultur of the central powers. Avant-garde art was not synonymous with avant-guerre, and modernist art could co-exist very comfortably with the modernity of modern warfare. That said, Nevinson also understood that the war was still about the common man, and did not want this fact eclipsed by the marvels of modern technology, illegible modern art or a deceptive proliferation of the patriotic myth. The way that Nevinson depicted the war is what gave his art its intellectual and popular worth.

In Returning to the trenches (Figs. 1 and 2), for example, the mode of depiction epitomises the mood of the subject matter, where the assault on humanity is paralleled by the uncomprmnising method of execution. The modernist impulse to record momentum and force are obvious and the figures in the composition are harnessed to its formal, rigid discipline, which moulded them together into one semiabstract unit. Humanity, however, is reduced to a facet of the military machine, devoid of sentiment and grinding towards the murderous task ahead. The public would have been familiar from recruitment posters with thematically similar, though sanitised, images of lines of marching men. In these, immaculately dressed youth march into a sunrise, and by implication, a better dawn for civilisation. This was not the destination of Nevinson's poilus--over 1,000,000 of whom would become casualties in the first five months of the war alone. The fact that Nevinson chose Frenchmen instead of Tommies for exhibition in London was instrumental in sidestepping the personal or nationalistic narrative implications associated with 'British-ness' that would re-emerge later in the war in Paths of glory.

Nevinson continued to explore the relationship between this dehumanisation of mankind and the machinery and technology of misapplied industrial 'progress' in La Mitrailleuse (Fig. 5). Here the artist depicted the triumph of machine over man, in a scene where the French gunners, in metallic colours and geometric form, are barely distinguishable from the weapon they depend upon for their survival. Nevinson's machine gun has created man in its own machinomorphic image, stripping the individual of the conscience which, in happier days, would have precluded him from his abhorrent pursuit, but which the paralysis of stalemate now demanded. Now man and machine were inextricably aligned, alike and remorseless in their goal of destruction, in what Paul Leautaud described as 'the legal return to a state of savagery'. (10) The idea was elaborated upon by a London critic who observed:

  And the gunners? Are they men?
  No! They have become machines.
  They are as rigid and as implacable
  as their terrible gun. The machine
  has retaliated by making man in its
  own image ... The crew and the gun
  are one, equipped for one end, only
  one--destruction. Horrible!"

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

The only reference to the greater war being fought lay in the orientation of the gunners, who, in keeping with cartographic reality, face left to right on the canvas, defending the free world behind them (west) from the tyranny emanating from the east. (12) They face the enemy squarely, with a determination which betrays no sense of indecision or possibility of retreat, in keeping with Petain's ethos of 'Ils ne passeront pas' (13) A fallen comrade lying slumped in the gun-pit, beneath a modern-day crown of thorns (barbed wire), reminds the viewer of the dictum 'Et in Arcadia Ego'. (14) The corpse's proximity to a wooden cross provides romantic and theological symbolic associations for the martyrdom of the individual, who, like Christ himself, has given everything for the triumph of good over evil. In the painting's cold and clinical message and method, there was no pandering to a national sentiment extolling the values of 'amour sacre de la patrie'. (15) Walter Sickert called it 'the most concentrated and authoritative utterance on war in the history of painting'. (16)

Paths of glory

By 1916 Nevinson was probably the best known artist in London and by early 1917, therefore, the Department of Information, noting the popularity he had achieved as a freelance, decided to commission him formally as an official war artist. His popular painting was seen as a potentially priceless national asset for the global information campaign and the artist himself regarded as a 'desperate fellow and without fear', being 'only anxious to crawl into the front line and draw things full of violence and terror'. (17) On his return to the Front in this capacity, however, Nevinson no longer advocated either the rebel modernism of the pre-war years, or the war-modernism by which his reputation had been cemented, moving instead towards representational forms more likely to appeal to critics. However, alhough tamed technically, Nevinson's message became more potent, and clearer than ever, with the result that his work was branded detrimental to the British war effort and censored by the government which had employed him. Like his literary counterparts, he could no longer condone, or indeed remain an impartial observer, of what was happening around him. Fellow artist and old Slade classmate Paul Nash captured the feeling of many when he wrote from Passchendaele: 'It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger ... Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth'. (18)

The name of Nevinson's painting Paths of glory (Fig. 6) was taken from Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard':

  The boast of heraldry, the pomp of
  power,
  And all that beauty, all that wealth
  e'er gave,
  Awaits alike the inevitable hour,
  The paths of glory lead but to the
  grave.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Perhaps in this painting Nevinson was lamenting the dead of Passchendaele at the end--both realistically and metaphorically--of the 'parting day'. Here, on this field of destruction, the common man tragically represented the flower 'born to blush unseen'. If this was the painting's raison d'etre, then it was a fitting and melancholy tribute to the thousands of British soldiers who had lost their lives in Flanders. On the other hand, it was suspected that Nevinson may have been employing a 'bitter truth' to draw the public's attention to 'the old lie' (in Wilfred Owen's words): dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. (19) Here, Horace's poetic ideology was ridiculed by the inglorious bloated corpses of nameless, slaughtered, youth for whom this was anything but a path of glory. Owen had come closer to the reality when he had asked 'What passing bells for these who die as cattle?' (20)

The government, however, was not prepared to let such a morale-damaging image into the public domain. This was, after all, the era when journalists such as W. Beach Thomas could write of the dead Tommy: 'Even as he lies in the field he looks more quietly faithful, more simply steadfast than others'. (21) Journalists also propagated a manufactured morality and the sterilised image of a modern Thermopylae which the nation, and its artists, were expected to reflect. The prime minister H.H. Asquith had elaborated the idea of the 'fallen', saying that 'His lance is broken / but he lies content / With that high hour / In which he lived and died'. (22) These were thought to be the innocent victims of what the Bishop of London had called 'a war for purity' (23) and should surely repose in a more fitting 'corner of a foreign field'. (24) In the light of prevailing national sentiment, Nevinson's depiction of putrefying corpses seemed hardly appropriate.

Nevinson recalled the controversy:

   A Don't had been issued to the
   censors on pictures of dead bodies.
   Cause--some poor mother had
   recognised the mangled body of her
   own son in an official photograph.
   A painting which I made of corpses,
   of course, had no portraits in it, but
   nevertheless the rule applied. (25)

Of course he protested 'My picture happened to be a work of art', (26) depicting no actual person to be identified by a grieving relative, and having as a subject something that the British public had hardened to anyway. Undaunted, however, he exhibited Paths of glory, regardless of an absolute ban, with the word 'Censored' scrawled across it in blue chalk on brown paper and stuck to the canvas (Fig. 7). The restricted painting very predictably cornered the press reviews, which, under the heading 'Things we want to know', asked, 'what is hidden by the patch?' (27) Later, in an article entitled 'When the Censor Censored "Censored" ', Nevinson referred to the whole incident as 'censorship reduced to an absurdity'. (28) The painting was bought by the Imperial War Museum and removed from exhibition immediately.

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

By the Armistice, on 11 November 1918, Nevinson, who was suffering from acute depression, was happy to leave the subject of war behind. But even after a quarter of a century, and several failed suicide attempts, it was clear that his name would be forever associated with the events of 1914-18. Reporting his death in 1946, the New, York Times could lament the passing of a 'genius, playboy and war hero', while The Scotsman had no doubt where his legacy to the history of art lay, stating 'he will be remembered as the painter of the First Great War.' (29)

For: Private James Muir, Royal Scots, 1st Garrison Bn., number 28668, died March 1917, buried Famagusta Military Cemetery, Northern Cyprus.

(1) 'Men Who Marched Away' was written by Thomas Hardy and first published in The Times on 9 September 1914.

(2) Though his father, H.W. Nevinson, was a famous war correspondent and his mother, Margaret, an active suffragette campaigner.

(3) See M. Welsh, 'Nevinson at the Slade: Gertler, Carnington and Art', APOLLO, vol. CLIV, no. 476 (October 2001), PP. 37-42.

(4) See idem, 'The eminent English Futurist', in J. Black (ed.), Blasting the Future, London, 2004, pp. 1927.

(5) E. Gosse, 'War and literature', Edinburgh Review, October, 1914, p. 313.

(6) J.D. Symon, 'War and Creative Art', English Review, December, 1915, p. 520.

(7) St John Ervine, "The War and Literature', North American Review, July 1915, p. 98.

(8) 'The Passing of the Battle Painter; No Inspiration in the Trenches', The Times, 30 April 1915, p. 15.

(9) C.R.W. Nevinson, 'War Notes and Queries. Comments and Suggestions in Brief from our readers', Daily Graphic, 11 March 1915, p. 14.

(10) Cited in D. Franck, The Bohemians, Paris. 2001, p. 226.

(11) C. Lewis Hind, 'Man and His Machine', Evening News, 16 March 1916,.

(12) The defence of the west, of the setting sun and the metaphorical connotations contained therein, was after all, what the war was about, and was widely used by poets end artists alike.

(13) 'They shall not pass'.

(14) This literally translates into 'Even in Arcadia, I, death, hold sway'.

(15) Taken from La Marseillaise and literally meaning the sacred love of one's country.

(16) Welter Sickert, 'O Matre Pulchra', Burlington Magazine, vol. XXIX, no. 157 (April 1916), p. 35.

(17) C.F.G. Masterman to Buchan, 18 May 1917. C.R.W Nevinson Correspondence File, Imperial War Museum (hereafter IWM), archive 226A/6.

(18) Cited in R. Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant--Garde and the Great War, London, 1994, p.1.

(19) 'It is a sweet end honourable thing to die for one's country'. This sentiment was ridiculed by Wilfred Owen in his poem 'Dulce et decorum est'.

(20) W. Owen, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', cited in J. Stallworthy, Anthem For Doomed Youth, London, 2002, p, 107.

(21) W. Beach Thomas, Daily Mirror, 22 November 1916.

(22) Taken from 'The Volunteer' by Herbert Asquith. Cited In R Fuseell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 1975, p. 59.

(23) M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, Bantam Press, 1989, p. 236. The Bishop advocated the killing of all Germans, young and old, guilty and innocent in what would be described today as ethnic cleansing.

(24) This celebrated line is taken from 'The Soldier' by Rupert Brooke, the opening stanza of which reads 'If I should die think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England...' Brooke, who died on his way to Gallipoli, also talked of '...the red / Sweat wine of youth' to describe the destruction of a generation.

(25) C.R.W. Nevinson, Evening Post, 31 May 1919.

(26) Nevinson to Masterman, 3 December 1917. C.R.W Nevinson Correspondence File, IWM, archive 226A/6. Later Richard reiterated the point that these were not portraits in the New York Evening Post, 31 May 1919.

(27) London Mail, 16 March 1918.

(28) C.R.W. Nevinson, 'When the Censor Censored Censored', Royal British Legion Journal, Octobe, 1932, p. 114.

(29) D. Bliss, Scotsman, 8 October 1946.

Dr Michael J.K. Walsh is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Northern Cyprus. He is the author of C.R.W. Nevinson: This Cult of Violence (Yale University Press, 2002).

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