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Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain

The First World War ended on 11 November 1918. To mark the end of the conflict Tate Britain has been hosting an extensive exhibition devoted to the aftermath of the war as it affected the art of the three main nations of Western Europe – Britain, France and Germany.

Thus there is nothing by artists from, say, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, nor from the white colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, nor from America which entered the war in 1917. It is a Western European show of Western European art.

Paths of Glory (1917) by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson © IWM

Masterpieces

The show includes a staggering number of masterpieces from the era, interspersed with fascinating works by much less-well-known artists.

For example, room one contains the Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, possibly my favourite work of art anywhere, by anyone. For me this hard brooding metallic figure contains the secret of the 20th century, and of our technological age.

Torso in Metal from “The Rock Drill” (1913-14) by Jacob Epstein. Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein

Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill (1913 to 1914) by Jacob Epstein. Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein

Layout

The exhibition is in eight rooms which take you in broad chronological order:

Images of battlefields and ruins, early movies, and memorabilia (helmets, medals, cigarette cases)
The official War memorials of the three featured nations (statues, designs and paintings by conventional artists such as William Orpen and the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger)
A room devoted to images of disfigured and maimed soldiers
Dada and Surrealism i.e. the extreme irrationalist response to the war of Swiss, German and French artists – including signature works by George Grosz, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters
A room of black and white prints showcasing series of lithographs and woodcuts made by Max Beckman, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix and Georges Rouault
The ‘return to order’ in a revival of nostalgic landscapes in works by Paul Nash and George Clausen, sculptures of sleek femininity by Eric Gill and Aristide Maillol, neo-classical portraiture by Meredith Frampton, and the revival of a strange post-war type of Christian faith in the work of Stanley Spencer and Winifred Knights
Politics and pass-times – divided between gritty depictions of a newly politicised working class by socialist and communist artists, such as The International by Otto Griebel, and a rare opportunity to see an original ‘portfolio’ or pamphlet of lithographs by George Grosz – and on the other hand, depictions of the newly fashionable night-life, the craze for jazz dancing depicted in The Dance Club 1923 by William Patrick Roberts, cabaret clubs of the Weimar Republic, or the Folies Bergère as painted by English artist, Edward Burra
The exhibition ends with brave new world visions of technology, machinery, skyscrapers, Russian constructivist images by El Lissitsky, the geometric paintings of Fernand Leger, and the sleek new design and architecture of the German Bauhaus school

1. Images of the battlefield

First impressionistic indications of the appalling nature of the war. A display case contains an original infantry helmet from each of the three featured nations, one French, one German and one British. Oil paintings of corpses in trenches or hanging on barbed wire. A rare black-and-white-film shot from an airship shows the devastation

2. Memorials

In terms of memorials I don’t think you can do better than Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall, arresting in its monolithic abstraction. But the show includes three large memorial sculptures by Charles Sergeant Jagger.

No Man’s Land (1919-20) by Charles Sargeant Jagger

3. The disfigured

The room of disfigured servicemen is hard to stay in. The grotesques of Otto Dix and Gorge Grosz are bearable because they have a cartoon savagery and exaggeration which defuses the horror. But the realistic depictions of men with their jaws shot away, half their faces missing, skin folding over where their eyes should be, and so on by artists like Heinrich Hoerle and Conrad Felixmuller, are almost impossible to look at.

Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, Two Victims of Capitalism by Otto Dix (1923) © Estate of Otto Dix

4. Dada and Surrealism

The exhibition takes on a completely different tone when you enter the room of works by Dada and Surrealist artists – although the grotesques of the previous room make you realise how so much of Dada’s strategy of cutting up and collage, of rearranging anodyne images (especially from glossy optimistic magazines and adverts), to create incongruous and grotesque new images, is actually a very reasonable response to the grotesqueness of war and its dismemberments.

Here there are works by Kurt Schwitters, pioneer of cut up and paste art, as well as the stunning painting Celebes by early Surrealist Max Ernst.

Seeing a number of examples of post-war collage – works by Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, the English Surrealist Edward Burra and their peers like Hannah Hoch and Rudolf Schlichter all together – brings out the superiority of George Grosz.

It’s probably because I’m a longstanding fan but he seems to me to combine the best eye for design and caricature, with the best feel for how to create a collage of elements cut out from newspapers and magazines.

As well as a good selection of his biting political satires, there is an opportunity to see a reconstruction of the Dada-mannequin he created for the 1920 Berlin Dada exhibition.

Why be sensible? How could you be sensible and take any of the standards and values of the old order seriously? After what they had seen in the trenches? After that old order had brought about Armageddon?

The Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture (1920) by George Grosz © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J.

5. Prints, lithographs, woodcuts

In the print portfolio room it is interesting to compare the style of the four featured artists: Max Beckman was too scratchy and scrappy and cluttered for my taste. The Georges Rouault images are harsh but use shading to create an eerie, gloomy depth, as if done with charcoal.

'Arise, you dead!' (War, plate 54) (1922-27) by Georges Rouault. Fondation Georges Rouault © ADAGCP, Paris and DACS, London

‘Arise, you dead!’ (War, plate 54) (1922 to 1927) by Georges Rouault. Fondation Georges Rouault © ADAGCP, Paris and DACS, London

By contrast Käthe Kollwitz’s series War is made from harsh, stark, pagan woodcuts, which exude a really primeval force. This set is a masterpiece. You can see the continuity from the harsh emotional extremism of pre-war German Expressionism, but here a widely used technique has found its perfect subject. Kollwitz is a great artist. Her images may be the most profound in the show.

The Survivors (1923) by Käthe Kollwitz

6. The return to order

After the physical and metaphysical gloom of the print room, room six is large, well lit and full of images of sweetness and delight. In all kinds of ways the European art world experience a post-war ‘return to order’, a revival of neo-classical technique, in music as much as in painting. It had quite a few distinct strands.

Landscape

One strand was a return to painting idyllic landscapes, represented here by a haycart trundling down a lane by the pre-war artist George Clausen, and a similarly idyllic but more modern treatments of landscape by the brothers Paul and John Nash.

Woman

After the disfigurements of the war and the parade of grotesques in the previous galleries, this one contains a number of images of complete, undisfigured bodies, particularly female bodies, used as celebrations of beauty, fertility, of life. These include the big, primeval statue Humanity by Eric Gill, alongside a more realistic depiction of a naked woman, Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol. After such horror, why not? Why not unashamed celebrations of peace, whole-bodiedness, beauty, youth, fertility – a new hope?

Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol (cast 1930) © Tate

Interestingly, this room contains three or four works by Picasso, portraits of women or a family on a beach, done in a kind of revival of his rose period, with the figures now more full and rounded.

Neue Sachlichkeit

Another strand was the particularly German style known as ‘New Objectivity’ which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere, not least because it was itself sub-divided into a number of strands and styles.

It’s represented here by a signature work from the era, Christian Schad’s half-realistic, half-cartoonish, and wholly haunting self-portrait of 1927.

Self-Portrait (1927) by Christian Schad © Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London

Christianity

Amazingly, after such a cataclysmic disaster, many artists retained their Christian faith, although it emerged in sometimes strange and eccentric new visions.

These are exemplified by the English artists Stanley Spencer, who is represented by one of the many paintings he made setting Christian stories in his native home town of Cookham. And also by the strange and eerie vision of Winifred Knights, here represented by her unsettling vision of the Flood.

The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights

Not so long ago I saw a whole load of Knights’ paintings at a retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Seeing it here makes you realise the link to the stark geometric modernism of someone like Paul Nash. But also to the deliberately naive style of Spencer. It is a kind of Christianity by floodlights.

Portraiture

Separate from these varieties of self-conscious modernism was an entire strand of neo-classical portraiture. A style which had observed and absorbed the entire Modernist revolution from Cezanne onwards, and then reverted to painting exquisitely demure neo-classical portraits, generally of demure and self-contained young women. Exemplified here by Meredith Frampton’s still, posed portrait of Margaret Kelsey.

Marguerite Kelsey by Meredith Frampton (1928) © Tate

Is this a portrait of refinement and sensibility? Or is there an eerie absence in it, a sense of vacuum? Does it have all the careful self-control of someone recovering from a nervous breakdown?

7. Politics and pastimes

Room seven juxtaposes images of The People, The International and the proletariat – with images of jazz bands and people getting drunk in nightclubs. Which is the real world? The International by the German communist painter Otto Griebel faces off against William Roberts modernist depiction of a jazz nightclub (heavily influenced, I’d have thought, by Wyndham Lewis’s pre-war Vorticism).

The Dance Club (1923) by William Roberts. Leeds Museums and Galleries © Estate of John David Roberts

By now it felt as if the exhibition was turning into an overview of artistic trends of the 1920s. A number of the works were painted 10 or 12 years after the end of the war. When does an aftermath stop being an aftermath?

8. Brave new worlds

The last room is devoted to technocratic visions of the machine age. Russian constructivists, French futurists, some of the old Vorticists, all the Bauhaus artists, looked to a future of skyscrapers, chucking out Victorian ideas of design and taste and creating a new, fully twentieth century art, architecture and design.

Fernand Leger perfected a post-cubist style based on brightly coloured geometric shapes suggesting a new machine civilisation, and the exhibition includes footage from the experimental film he made, Ballet Mechanique with music by the fashionably machine-age composer George Antheil. The Russian constructivist El Lissitsky devised an entirely new visual language based on lines and fractured circles. Bauhaus teacher Oskar Schlemmer is represented by an abstract figurine. Oskar Nerlinger evolved from pencil sketches of the war to developing a distinctive style of constructivist illustration featuring stylised views of up to the minute architecture.

Radio Mast, Berlin (1929) by Oskar Nerlinger

Now I like this kind of thing very much indeed but I feel we had wandered quite a long way from the First World War. Much of this last room struck me as having next to nothing to do with the war, or any war, instead being the confident new visual language of the hyper-modern 20s and 30s.

Wandering back through the rooms I realised the exhibition splits into two parts: rooms one to five are unambiguously about war, the horrors of war, trenches and barbed wire and corpses, moving onto war memorials and horrible images of mutilated soldiers, how those disfigurements were taken up into the distortions and fantasies of Dada and Surrealism and then extracted into a kind of quintessence of bleakness in the woodcuts of Kollwitz.

And then part two of the show, rooms 6, 7 and 8 show the extraordinary diversity of forms and style and approaches of post-war art, from nostalgic or semi-modernist landscape, through neo-classical if unnerving portraiture, Christianity by floodlight, from bitterly angry socialist realism to the frivolities of jazz bands and strip clubs, and then onto the Bauhaus and Constructivist embrace of new technologies (radio, fast cars, cruise liners) and new design and photographic languages.

Whether these latter rooms and their contents can be strictly speaking described as the ‘aftermath’ of the Great War is something you can happily spend the rest of the day debating with friends and family.

But there is no doubting that the exhibition brings together a ravishing selection of masterpieces, well-known and less well-known, to create a fascinating overview of the art of the Great War, of the immediate post-war period, and then the explosion of diverse visual styles which took place in the 1920s.

From the po-faced solemnity of:

To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921-8) by William Orpen © IWM

to the compelling crankiness of:

‘Daum’ Marries her Pedantic Automaton ‘George’ in May 1920, John Heartfield is Very Glad of It (1920) by George Grosz © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J.

From the earnest political commitment of:

Demonstration (1930) by Curt Querner. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie © DACS

to the vision of an all-metal brave new technocratic future:

Abstract Figure (1921) by Oskar Schlemmer

The promotional video

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by Simon on September 1, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, War

Tagged 1918, Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One, Aristide Maillol, art, Ballet Mechanique, Bauhaus, Berlin Dada exhibition, Britain, Celebes, Charles Sergant Jagger, Christian Schad, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Cookham, Curt Querner, Dada, Edward Burra, El Lissitsky, Eric Gill, exhibition, Fernand Leger, First World War, France, George Antheil, George Clausen, George Grosz, Georges Rouault, German Expressionism, Germany, Hannah Höch, John Nash, Käthe Kollewitz, Käthe Kollwitz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckman, Max Ernst, Meredith Frampton, Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, Oskar Nerlinger, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Otto Griebel, Painting, Paul Nash, Rock Drill, Rudolf Schlichter, sculpture, Stanley Spencer, Surrealism, Tate Britain, Vorticism, Weimar Republic, William Orpen, William Patrick Roberts, Winifred Knights, Wyndham Lewis

Posted by Simon on September 1, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/aftermath-art-in-the-wake-of-world-war-one-tate-britain/

The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery

This year sees the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War One. The National Portrait Gallery is inaugurating a four-year course of exhibitions, lectures, educational activities etc and they’re kicking off with The Great War in Portraits – a small (three rooms), beautifully formed and FREE exhibition!

Rock Drill

It opens with Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill, surely one of the most striking art works of the century, a pioneering Modernist sculpture from 1913, designed to sit atop an actual giant pneumatic drill. At its launch it bespoke the liberating, alienating but awesome power of modern technology, capturing the energy and optimism of first wave Modernism. Later, in 1916, as the war became more devastating and less the triumph of modern, clean technology people expected, Epstein removed the drill and splayed limbs to produce the cutdown version we see today. It is not so much the Modernism of the image which came to seem apt – but this mutilation of the original work.

Kings and Kaisers

Room one has portraits of the men who got us into this mess: paintings of Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V, Emperor Franz Joseph, a photograph showing George V with his cousin Czar Nicholas II. As a result of their orders some 70 million men were mobilised and nine million killed.

Generals and men

Room two displayed portraits of the Generals, the men who led the armies through this mess: Field Marshall von Hindenberg, Commander of the Allied Forces Ferdinand Foch, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, General Sir Herbert Plumer, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. All these were painted by Sir William Orpen (‘financially one of the most successful, and eventually one of the most honoured, portrait painters working in Britain in the twentieth century’) who is the most-represented artist here. Along with his portraits of the generals are his images of the common soldier: Man in trench, a Grenadier Guardsman, the Receiving room – and a revealing self portrait.

All very interesting and effective. But for me the room is electrified by the relatively compact and super powerful La Mitrailleuse by CWR Nevinson, whose work was recently featured at the Dulwich Picture Gallery Crisis of Brilliance show, and which I also saw recently in a Great War show at the Leeds Art Gallery. Like the Rock Drill, this shard from the brink-of-the-war movement, Vorticism, dominated all the other images in its room, including the naturalistic Dead Stretcher Bearer by Rogers and the milk-and-water post-Impressionism of Walter Sickert’s The Integrity of Belgium.

Heroes and villains

The third, final and big room contained a portraits of outstanding (Allied) heroes of the War: Captain A Jacka, Gilbert Insall, JB McCudden and GB McKean – as well as an entire wall dedicated to a grid of 40 or so photos of soldiers (and two women). Most of them are famous (Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon) but some just anonymous soldiers. Possibly the most striking was an amazingly confident/arrogant portrait of the legendary Baron von Richtofen, the fighter ace.

The post-War divide between British and Continental art

The final half dozen paintings provide a stark and maybe unintended contrast which sheds light on a major issue: why British art became a provincial backwater for a lot of the 20th century, while Europe saw an extraordinary explosion of experimental and avant-garde art.

The commentary summarises: for the British the Great War came to represent the horror of the new: of new technology, of new mass societies, of new ways of slaughtring each other. And the struggling avant-garde in this country was tainted by it, with it. After the trauma of the War British society wanted comforting, a return to traditional and conservative forms and subjects. For a few years before the Great War London almost became the capital of modern art and the Modernist movement. After the war, Britain washed her hands of all that and the focus shifted to Paris, with parallel movements in revolutionary Germany, in proto-Fascist Italy and in the new communist Soviet Union.

Because in those countries the Great War had led directly to the state collapsing. The old regimes, the old ways, the old archdukes and kaisers and czars were fatally associated with the catastrophe, and they paid the price, swept away, executed, forced into exile. And along with them went many of the cultural and aesthetic values associated with the old ways, the old beliefs, the old styles. In these countries the Modern held out hope for a new start, and artists all over Europe threw themselves into the new ways of seeing and making.

Epitomising the vast gulf which was already yawning between British art and European art, this small show ends by juxtaposing the visionary Expressionism of Ernst Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier, his hand chopped off, a swathe of violent reds and blues, a naked cabaret girl in the background foreshadowing Weimar decadence; with Glyn Warren Philpot’s very decent, very calm, very assured portrait of Siegfried Sassoon, a protester in the War who quickly reverted to the fox-hunting man of his class and background, and whose later prose and poetry epitomises the stifling blanket of decency which settled over Britain between the wars, and beyond…

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