David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War
Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony
and Remembrance (Published for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British
Art by Yale University Press, New Haven and London).
Published in The Times Literary Supplement, 2004.
When it was suggested in the spring of 1918 that Mark Gertler might be invited
to participate in the official war artists’ scheme, the artist was ecstatic.
He was particularly impressed that ‘only young and modern painters’ had
been chosen to participate. ‘I look upon this as something very significant,’ he
told his friend and patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, ‘I mean, that a more
or less official committee, representing the Government should do this! … I
have a feeling that we are going to have good painting, after the War — there
are good times coming if only we can hold out. This War is not the end.’
The Great War was certainly not the end for modern British painting. For
a start, there was not the same culling in the trenches of the nation’s young artists
as there was of its young writers and thinkers. In part, this was owing to the
timely establishment of the official war artists scheme in the summer of 1916.
Though Gertler was a neurasthenic conscientious objector who never saw active
service, his friend Paul Nash was rescued from returning to frontline action
by his appointment in October 1917. Nash then pulled strings to have his brother
released from the trenches and included in the scheme: ‘Can you by any
fair or foul means help Jack home for a commission?’ he asked Winston Churchill’s
private secretary, the modern art collector Eddie Marsh. ‘It is unnecessary
to speak of Jack’s worth & his real value as an English artist and
it’s a damned shame if nothing can be done to extricate him from a position
in which he is in utmost danger.’
Out on the Macedonian Front, Private Stanley Spencer was experiencing a similar
fear of impending personal disaster. He was frustrated to have received a letter
inviting him to join the scheme, and then, as a new push began in the summer
of 1918, to have heard nothing more from London. ‘Apart from greed for
life’, he wrote afterwards, ‘I felt I had got a lot up my sleeve
that I wanted to produce before I died, & every day I was being detailed
off for worse & worse dangers.’
Of course, these artists were fortunate. Surviving the war was their priority;
painting it really only came second. Richard Nevinson did all he possibly could
to escape conscription, and the war artists’ scheme was these young men’s
route out of the unending madness: with no understatement Gertler called it ‘wretched
sordid Butchery’. Following a slightly haphazard course, it is the highs
and lows of this deeply significant scheme — its aims and ambitions, its
successes and failures — that Malvern explores in her stimulating and
copiously illustrated book.
As she points out, it was the Glaswegian printmaker Muirhead Bone who in 1916, ‘by
applying himself so assiduously to finding an alternative to conscription, almost
invented the idea of an official war artist.’ Once the project was launched
it self-consciously saw its role as the production of great art. The decision
was made that all commissions would be uniform in scale, and the dimensions settled
on were 6 feet by 10: the size of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano
in the National Gallery. (The Canadians went for an even grander scale: 10 feet
by 12 feet, the dimensions of Velasquez’s The Surrender of Breda, in
The Prado.) No other European nation recruited avant-garde artists in this
way, either
to support its war effort through what was effectively (and sometimes effective)
propaganda, or to make historical paintings as part of a grand scheme to memorialise
the war and the fallen.
Despite such fortuitous foresight with artists, amazingly no official British
war photographers were appointed to France until mid-1916. Painters were there
partly to fill this gap, and the relationship, and differences, between art
and photography during the war is one of the themes Malvern takes up. But she
is
particularly interested in examining the extent to which the British avant-garde
was compromised by its recruitment into the British propaganda effort. Could
these young artists work for the establishment, and yet still be considered
part of the avante garde? The answer would seem to be yes — and no. Gertler
never painted his commission of Londoners sheltering from a German air raid in
an Underground station because he refused to have his preliminary sketches put
before a panel for approval. ’I am not a machine,’ he told Lady Ottoline, ‘and
cannot paint a stroke to order.’ Likewise when Spencer was accepted into
the British War Memorials Committee scheme at the beginning of 1919, he opted
out after completing only one painting, telling his employers, ‘The thing
is … as artists we can do just what we like (that sounds very nice) BUT
WE MUST NOT DO WOT WE DON’T LIKE, woe unto us if we break this law.’
Malvern, however — and I think rightly — rejects any suggestion ‘that
either official employment or the war put an end to the avant-garde in Britain.
The avant-garde before 1914 was not unified and nor was it a unidirectional
and simple matter of progress. It was instead a shifting, dynamic and volatile
process
within and across cultural fields. After 1918, avant-garde art was played out
in highly charged circumstances and its politics became dangerous. That was
a consequence of the war. In Britain, that meant that some of our most significant
avant-garde artists sometimes identified with fascism. Writing this history
necessitates
reckoning with how this discomforts the story of British modernism, and unsettles
what it means to be British.’
Certainly in 1914 the British contemporary art scene had been going through
one of its headier periods, reaping the whirlwind of Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist
exhibitions. Inspired by the example of Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Walter
Sickert and the Bloomsbury Group, a crop of young British and international artists
that included Gertler, Spencer, Nevinson and the Nash brothers, as well as David
Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth,
were creating an exciting stir in England. It was 1914 that saw the establishment
of both the London Group and the Vorticists. In that epochal year — at
least according to Wyndham Lewis — to be an artist was to be the news. ‘Exhibitions
were reviewed in column after column’, he later boasted, and life and the
future had never looked better. But out in the wings life was busy laying plans
for mass-murder, and ahead lay what Siegfried Sassoon would call the ‘cemetery
for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century’. Without doubt
the war changed everything. But it is of course quite impossible to say where
the
avant-garde would have gone without it.
Of the young artists who had been making names for themselves in London in
1914, many were — remarkably — still alive in 1919. The major casualties
had been Isaac Rosenberg — best remembered today for his war poetry — and
the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. As The Times critic wrote in December 1919
in his review of ‘The Nation’s War Paintings’ exhibition at
the Royal Academy, this was ‘Art’s Fresh Start’. Before the
war, he suggested, artists had ‘had nothing momentous enough to paint … But
the war … has supplied a momentous theme, while it is an event in itself
so large, and so shattering of continuity, that even the dullest of us expect
all things to be different after it.’
Certainly for some of the young British artists the war had been the making
of their careers. Nash and Nevinson are the two most obvious examples, and
Malvern
pays particular attention to them. They are troubling examples, however. Though
both participated in the scheme, they both painted prominent works that appeared
to condemn the war. It seems hard, for example, to see Nash’s iconic We
are Making a New World as propaganda, especially went it is set beside the letter
to his wife, written from France in November 1917: ‘I am a messenger who
will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war
to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have
a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’ Likewise Nevinson,
a consummate publicist, deliberately and sarcastically censored his own painting
of two slain Tommies. Its title, Paths of Glory, deliberately evoked lines from
Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard: ‘The paths
of glory lead but to the grave’.
What Malvern attempts is to unravel this paradox, but it is sometimes unclear
how it can be resolved. This is her book’s greatest weakness. At times,
she attempts to pack too many ideas (and words) into a single, under-punctuated
sentence. Her structure, in what are really six long essays rather than six contiguous
chapters, also seems awry, costing clarity to her thesis. This book does not
come close to being an artists’ version of Paul Fussell’s brilliant
Great War and Modern Memory. But with its frequent insights, excellent appendices
and copious notes, it is an important and timely step in that direction.
© David Boyd Haycock.