Art of World War I
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Soldiers as Artists
Amongst the millions of conscripts there
were painters of every nationality and
every school of painting.
Those who were born around the year
1880 belonged to the generation that
was called up immediately on the
outbreak of war.
The war held no secrets for men such as
these – they were the ones who did the
fighting.
Many of them drew and painted what
" No entry! "
they saw and lived through. From the Front line sentries on watch,
sketchbooks of pencil drawings done at "covering" the mobilization, in
"Les Vosges".
the front to the canvases painted on
returning home, theirs is an intense and Georges Scott (1874-1943),
drawing published in
accurate testimony. L'Illustration on August 8th
1914.
The Fighting Men
Mobilisation meant that civilians suddenly
became soldiers plunged into a whole new
world, governed by different laws: the
world of military order and imminent death.
In spite of the propaganda in both camps
which depicted the artificial image of
triumphant heroes, it was not like that at
all.
Up until the nineteenth century, war had
mainly been the affair of career soldiers but
now it was gradually absorbing greater and
greater numbers of people. After 1914,
one's social class and occupation were no
longer taken into account. This war in
which everybody was fighting against William Orpen, Ready to Start,
1917, 60 x 50.8 cm, oil on canvas,
everybody else was first and foremost a Imperial War Museum, London.
war of civilians of all nationalities with
compulsory conscription for those of an age
to bear arms.
Otto Dix (1891-1969)
The Self-Portrait as a Soldier, lighted
by reds and the white reserve, is a
celebration of strength and violence
verging on savagery. It can be seen
as the quintessence of the image of
war, proclaiming the necessity of the
struggle and the intoxication of
destruction with no remorse or
regrets.
Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Soldat (Self-Portrait as a
Soldier), 1914, ink and watercolour on paper, on
both sides, 68 x 53.5 cm, Municipal Gallery,
Stuttgart.
Otto Dix (continued)
On the back of the previous painting….
On the other side, the Self-Portrait as
a Gunner is in opposition to this over-
simplified interpretation, with the all-
pervasive black, the shadow around
the helmeted head, the worried look
and the stark contrast between the
warlike symbols of the gold facings
against a background of night and
death. Despite his youth and his
attraction to the war as an experience
of the unknown, Dix is not unaware
of the horror of war, the appalling
daily chronicle of which he later did
drawings and etchings.
Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis mit Artillerie-Helm (Self-Portrait Wearing a
Gunner's Helmet), 1914, ink and watercolour on paper, on both sides,
68 x 53.5 cm, Municipal Gallery, Stuttgart.
Lovis Corinth (1858-1925)
Neither the subject nor the painter give in
to the exalted belligerency of the moment.
Despite the fact that Corinth paints with
emphatic touches, he keeps his distance
from all forms of expressionism, in order,
more simply, to depict the worry, the
melancholy and the unease of the artist in
his soldier's garb.
Lovis Corinth, Bildnis Hermann Struck (Portrait of
Hermann Struck), 1915, oil on canvas, 80.5 x
59.5 cm.
André Mare (1885-1932)
This is his self-portrayal as a soldier. Mare’s job
was to prepare and organise the camouflaging
of the artillery positions. He lived close to the
front lines in the same conditions as an
ordinary private, with no privileges or
pleasures. His natural language was Cubism, a
style he had been using since 1912. He
highlights the thinness of his face and the cap
and around the faces he organises picturesque
symbolic elements dominated by the three-
coloured harmony of the French flag. Shortly
after this self-portrait, Mare was seriously
wounded by a shell whilst setting up
observation posts in Picardy. He was operated
on by the doctor and author Georges Duhamel
at Ressons, and recovered from his wounds
caused by three pieces of shrapnel.
André Mare, Autoportrait (Self-Portrait), 1916, Sketchbook 2, p. 7, ink and watercolour on paper,
Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne.
Egon Schiele (1890-1918)
A survivor after three years of war, he had
been decorated; there are two medals on
his tunic, but his face, eyes and joined
hands indicate the weariness and the
indifference of this prematurely old man.
He portrays him in the same way as he
had formerly depicted the Russian
prisoners he guarded - with the same
coldness and objective acuteness. The
absence of the bust, uniform and any
setting aggravates this feeling of loss and
isolation. This could also be a depiction of
Schiele's own loneliness (which his peers in
Vienna considered distrustfully if not
reprovingly, so much so that they took him
to court for alleged indecency).
Egon Schiele, Heinrich Wagner, Leutnant i. d. Reserve (Portrait of
Reserve Lieutenant Heinrich Wagner), 1917.
The Battlefield
Le Miroir May 2nd 1915
On May 2nd 1915, Le Miroir published the first snapshot of a battle:
the exploding of a shell while infantry dragoons carried out an
assault in a landscape of meadows and woods. The poor quality of
the picture is given by the newspaper as ultimate proof of its
authenticity. The "as if you were there" photographic style came
into fashion, heralding a long run of photographs, years before the
famous shot taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, in
which we see a republican soldier at the very moment of being
brought down by a bullet as he runs. This did not, however, prevent
painters from producing some war paintings in very different styles.
Alfred Basel (1876-1920)
The first solution was to tell a story. The
artist chose an episode and described it amid
a wealth of detail. Basel, a Viennese painter
and engraver, was called up as a reserve
officer. He took part in the fighting against
Russian and Polish troops in Galicia. He
became a war painter in 1915. He chooses a
precise moment, which he had probably
witnessed, around which to build a narrative
vision: a squad of Austro-Hungarian
infantrymen stealthily approaching a village
controlled by the enemy who surrenders and
flees. A bombed-out farm is in flames. Basel
Alfred Basel, Erstürmung des Dorfes Stary Korczyn avoids all stylistic effects, preferring the
durch das Landsturminfanterieregiment Nr. 1, 22.
Dez. 1914 (Attack on the Village of Stary Korczyn extreme simplicity of a painting that tells a
by the Vienna First Infantry Regiment on tale.
December 22nd 1914), 1915-6, tempera on
canvas, 99 x 99 cm, Heeresgeschichtliches
Museum, Vienna.
Eric Kennington (1888-1959)
In 1914, Kennington enlisted with
the Kensingtons, the 13th London
Regiment. He fought in northern
France where he was wounded and
sent home in June 1915. During his
convalescence, he produced this
portrait of a group of infantrymen
who had halted among the snow-
covered ruins of a village.
Kennington himself can be seen,
wearing a dark blue balaclava
helmet and standing behind the
soldier with a German pickelhaube
strapped to his backpack by way of
a trophy. First exhibited in 1916, the
work created a sensation owing to
Eric Kennington, The Kensingtons at Laventie, oil the painting's attention to detail and
on glass, 139.7 x 152.4 cm, Imperial War Museum, total rejection of lyricism of any
London.
kind.
C. R. W. Nevinson (1889-1946)
The son of a journalist and famous war
correspondent, Nevinson went to Paris in
1911, where he discovered Cubism, which
was to have a lasting influence on him and
which taught him all about construction and
the geometry of modern forms. His
representation of the machine-gun and its
operator is exemplary: the hard lines of the
machinery dictate those of the robotised
soldiers who become as one with the killing
machine. The painting caused quite a stir, in
France as well as in Britain. Apollinaire
praised its painter as being one who
"translates the mechanical aspect of modern
warfare where man and machine combine to
form a single force of nature. His painting
Machine-gun conveys this idea exactly.”
C. R. W. Nevinson, Machine-gun, 1915, oil on
canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm, Tate Gallery, London.
William Roberts (1895-1980)
Although Roberts had distinguished
himself through his brightly-coloured
semi-Cubist style, this work reveals a
different, more descriptive style. The
painting commemorates one of the
most symbolic events of the war: on
April 22nd 1915, the first use of toxic
gases by the German artillery against
positions held by the Allies, French
Zouave troops dressed in red and
blue, and Canadian troops dressed in
khaki. The clashes of colours add to
the intensity of expression, as do the
view from above, the expressions of
horror, and the large number of
figures in this monumental work.
William Roberts, The First German Gas Attack at
Ypres, 1918, oil on canvas, 304.8 x 365.8 cm,
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Dix’s vision sometimes verges on
the nightmarish. Seen head on,
close up, throwing their grenades
among the barbed wire and tree
roots, the masked soldiers appear
inhuman, just like the surroundings
which appear unreal, the No Man's
Land of the trenches. It is
noteworthy that Dix chose to depict
not enemy, but German soldiers. In
1924, which was one of a set of 50
plates entitled War, this engraving
shocked public opinion in that Dix
Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor
(Assault under Gas), 1924, watercolour, 35.3 x
shows a complete lack of respect
47.5 cm, Deutsches Historisches Museum, for his old comrades in the fighting
Berlin. forces. In place of the exaltation of
heroism, he prefers to denounce
the savagery of the destruction.
Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956)
Another example of a monumental
representation, but from a later period.
The work of Brangwyn is that of an
artist who made large formats and
brutal realism his personal hallmark.
Paying great attention to detail in his
skilful stagings of attacks, he
composed pictures whose dimensions
and composition seek a spectacular
effect. In 1924, he was commissioned
to do a set of wall paintings for
Westminster Palace, including this one,
where his expressionism was found
unacceptably morbid for the official
building it was painted for.
Frank Brangwyn, Tank in Action, 1925-26,
tempera on canvas, 366 x 376 cm, National
Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
Félix Vallotton (1865-1925)
Before going to the front to
attempt to paint the war, Vallotton
engraved emblematic images of it.
His album entitled This is War is a
collection of his woodcuts - a
technique he mastered during the
1890s - one which demands
extreme simplicity, bold contrasts
between black and white, and
ruggedness of line. This makes it
particularly appropriate for
depicting warfare, groping with
knives in the dark sapping
trenches, between enemies who
could hardly see each other. The
Félix Vallotton, Dans l'ombre (In the Shadow),
details on the helmets are all there
1916, woodcut on paper, 17,7 x 22,5 cm, Galerie is to indicate the nationality of
Paul Vallotton, Lausanne. either side.
Fernand Léger
Léger painted this picture, the
largest and most accomplished of
his war paintings whilst
convalescing in Paris. Although
there is nothing tragic or, strictly
speaking, warlike, about the
subject, here, for the first time on
such a large scale, Léger develops
the idea of the automaton that he
puts forward in his drawings. The
soldiers are faceless and
Fernand Léger, La partie de cartes (Soldiers Playing at Cards),
1917, oil on canvas, 129 x 193 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, expressionless, they are reduced
Otterlo. to cones, barrels, pyramids and
tubes which can only be distinguished by the insignia showing their ranks, and their
decorations. The space in which they are playing is the narrow enclosed space of a
geometry punctuated by the vertical lines in the background and the broken lines in
the centre. All that remains of any colour, in a painting dominated by the blue-greys
of the greatcoats and the metal helmets, are a few touches of ochre and red.
C. R. W. Nevinson
After a period of leave or rest on the home
front, a march brings French troops to the
front line. This was a possible opportunity
for an epic picture of one of those lyrical
visions seen in the propaganda. Nevinson
however had by then already lost any
illusions, despite the early dating of the
painting, which was exhibited in London
early in 1915. There is nothing
enthusiastic or heroic about these soldiers.
They are bent under the weight of the
outsize packs and guns as they move
forward as quickly as they can - towards
the carnage. The reds and blues of the
uniforms fade away amid the greys and
C. R. W. Nevinson, Returning to the Trenches, 1914-15, ochres as Nevinson divides the foreground
oil on canvas, 51 x 76 cm, National Gallery of Canada, up with slanting lines in the Futurist
Ottawa manner in order to reinforce the feeling of
precipitation.
The Landscape
Fire invented a new landscape, devoid of
landmarks or colour. When Jean Hugo
went to the front line for the first time
during the spring of 1915, he discovered
the battlefield with the rising of the sun:
"The plain, which stretched as far as the
eye could see, seemed to have been
churned up by a mad plough. The
entanglement of trenches formed in the
grass a huge white net with much of the
mesh gnawed away. In the middle, there
was a pile of stones and beams from
which emerged, here and there, a house
and a tree with all its leaves: La Targette.
Further on, some charred tree trunks and
a few white stones: Neuville-Saint-Vaast
(...) There were thousands of men on this
plain and I could only see one of them. He
was lying face down with his nose in the Photo from Le Miroir May 2nd 1915
grass; he was dead." Jean Hugo, Le regard
de la mémoire 1914-1945 (The Look of
Memory), Actes Sud, 1983.
The Age of Artillery
This is how Henri Barbusse describes the night-time bombardments on the Artois front in
1915: "The rumbling of the artillery became more and more frequent and ended up
forming a single rumbling of the whole earth. From all sides, outgoing bursts and
explosions threw forth their flashing beams which lit up the dark sky over our heads with
strips of light in all directions. Then the bombing grew so heavy that the flashes became
continuous. In the midst of the uninterrupted chain of thunder claps we could see each
other directly, helmets streaming like the bodies of fish, gleaming black iron shovels, and
the whitish drops of the endless rain, truly it was like moonlight created by cannon fire.”
Paul Nash, Void (Néant), 1918, oil on canvas, 71.4 x Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, oil on canvas, 182.9 x
91.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 317 cm, Imperial War Museum, London.
Max Beckmann
Beckmann adds to the immediacy of this
image by depicting the fraction of a second
before the explosion. He makes it even
more expressive by avoiding too much
depth, with a pile of corpses in the
foreground, soldiers firing or running away
around the incandescent ball which is about
to spew out flames and shrapnel. There is
no escape for the man who has turned
away with his arms spread out, or for the
man firing the gun. A similar fate to that of
the disfigured victims all around awaits
them.
Max Beckmann, Die Granate (Shell), 1915, dry-point on
paper, 38 x 28.8 cm.
C. R. W. Nevinson
Nevinson's painting shows a syncopated
geometrical transcription of an explosion.
It combines two kinds of geometry: one of
angles and triangles, suggestive of flying
shrapnel; the other of curves and spirals,
evoking the flames and curls of smoke.
Nevinson adds colour, a chromatic analysis
of the flash of an explosion in a restricted
space - ruins, a dugout or a well, we
cannot tell which.
C. R. W. Nevinson, A Bursting Shell, 1915, oil on canvas,
76.2 x 55.9 cm, Tate Gallery, London.
C. R. W. Nevinson
A year later, when he returned to this
subject, his treatment was simpler and
more narrative. Nothing remains of the
phosphorescent spiral, and Nevinson
reduces his language to a proliferation of
oblique lines radiating out from a central
point - the point of impact - which he also
places at the summit of two dark triangles.
He again abandons nearly all the colours of
the spectrum, using only greys and
browns, so much so that his treatment of
the explosion is almost photographic. While
the painting retains its symbolic force, it
has lost some of its experimental value.
C. R. W. Nevinson, Explosion, c.1916, oil on canvas, 61 x
45.8 cm.
George Grosz
In January 1917, Grosz, who up to then had been convalescing, was recalled to
his unit. The following day he was hospitalised and shortly afterwards, owing
to the seriousness of his depression and the nervous disorders which affected
him, he was interned in an institution for the mentally ill. He experienced
repeated attacks accompanied by nightmarish hallucinations. In April, the
painter was declared unfit for further service.
Explosion was painted shortly
afterwards, not as the memory of
the fighting, but rather as an
allegory of the destruction: a town
is razed and catches fire in a
bombardment and cannot escape
the destructive fury that had taken
hold of Europe. This is Cubo-
Futurism in a dreamlike vein.
George Grosz, Explosion, 1917, oil on
panel, 47.8 x 68.2 cm, Museum of Modern
Art, New York.
Félix Vallotton
Félix Vallotton, Le plateau de Bolante
(Bolante Plateau), 1917, oil on canvas,
Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine -
BDIC, Paris
In Vallotton's landscapes where there is no sign of the thousands of men hidden
in the trenches. We may well look far into the distance, as far as the horizon,
scour the slopes of mutilated trees and the plain in the distance, there is nothing
living to be seen, there are only a few wisps of white smoke and the barely
perceptible furrows of the communication trenches dug in the ground. The work
is disappointing, being short on picturesqueness, pathos, and intensity - Vallotton
was certainly aware of this and yet he refused to cheat. He wished to paint only
what the soldier saw: earth, patches of grass, tree trunks and sky.
John Nash
Oppy was a village not far from
Vimy. Fortified by the Germans, it
withstood the assaults of the
British, Canadian and French
troops until September 1918. John
Nash's painting depicts with
careful didacticism the
circumstances of the confrontation
- the destruction of nature, the
plain ravaged by shell-holes which
had been turned into lakes,
shelters dug deep in the ground,
and trenches with cemented floors
and arches reinforced by sheet
metal, and - once again - the
immobility, the void, the lookout
John Nash, Oppy Wood, 1917. Evening, oil on on his watch with his face at
canvas, 182.8 x 213.3 cm, Imperial War ground level among the roots and
Museum, London
clods of earth.
Georges Leroux
Leroux (1877- ?) belonged to a
camouflage unit and served in
northern France and Belgium.
He told how on returning from
a reconnaissance mission he
had seen "a group of French
soldiers taking shelter in a great
shell-hole full of water" and
how he later painted the picture
from a sketch made that same
evening. With a realism quite
unlike the style of Nash or
Léger, he produced a work
which attempts to represent as
Georges Leroux, L'Enfer (Hell), 1917-18, oil on accurately as possible the
canvas, 114.3 x 161.3 cm, Imperial War Museum, unrepresentable reality of war.
London.
C. R. W. Nevinson
During the Great War, aerial bombing
raids were carried out against civilian
targets by both the artillery and the
airforce. Here, Nevinson denounces
the German airforce - the Taube and
its attacks against civilian populations
- even though such attacks were
more often carried out by airships
such as the Zeppelin, and the Allied
airforces had also attacked German
towns in the Ruhr as the bombers'
range of action increased. A closer
perusal of the painting is highly
instructive in that it prefigures all
those photographs and paintings
which, during the Spanish Civil War
and the Second World War and those
which followed, chose civilian targets
C. R. W. Nevinson, A Taube, 1916-17, oil on canvas, 63.5 x - an even more odious crime as there
76.2 cm, Imperial War Museum, London. were children involved, as is the case
here.
C. R. W. Nevinson
Because Nevinson was so bold as to
paint the bodies of two Tommies in
front of the barbed wire, this
painting was banned from an
exhibition in 1918. Nevinson refused
to take it down and covered it with
brown paper on which he wrote
"Censored". This gesture earned
him a reprimand from the War
Office, for it was forbidden either to
show reality or to denounce
censorship. Nevinson had only
painted what every soldier had seen
dozens of times: comrades who had
fallen under fire during pointless
C. R. W. Nevinson, Paths of Glory, 1917, oil on canvas, assaults.
45.7 x 61 cm, Imperial War Museum.
Otto Dix
The light of the flares reveals what
was hidden in the night: a mound of
twisted bodies, skulls, limbs torn
apart - a dance of death. This, one
of Dix's most expressionistic works,
boils down everyday experience into
a central theme. The clashes of
colour intensify the violence of the
painting as can be sensed in the
artist's vigorous brushstrokes, in the
deformations, the explosions of red
and white and the patches of blue
partly covering the grey and green.
Later, Dix returned to this theme in
an uncompromisingly realistic style;
and yet this chaotic, vehement
painting of 1917 conveys the
revulsion and the terror no less
Otto Dix, Lichtsignale (The Flare), 1917, gouache on
paper, 40.78 x 39.4 cm, Städische Galerie, Albstadt.
effectively.
William Orpen
During the summer of 1916, a
fierce battle took place between
the Germans and the British at
Thiepval in the Somme and the
surrounding region. A few months
later, Orpen returned to the scene
of the battle to find the stones
littered with skulls, bones and
fragments of clothing. Typically,
Orpen refused to choose, his eye
and his painting enumerate the
human remains and broken
objects without distinction. The
weather is fine, and tufts of grass
and poppies, are growing in the
chalk ground around the scattered,
William Orpen, Thiepval, 1917, oil on canvas, 63.5 x
soon to be forgotten skeletons.
76.2 cm, Imperial War Museum, London.
Otto Dix
At a time when the Nazis had banned
him from teaching and exhibiting, Dix
secretly produced this last painting in
memory of his war and its dead. Even
more so than the triptych, the style is
inspired by the old German masters,
notably the treatment of the sky, the
roots and the branches. The literary
allusion helps to specify the subject -
no longer the carnage, but the flooding
of the trenches, which made fighting
impossible and forced soldiers from
Otto Dix, Flandern (Flanders) (after Le Feu by Henri Barbusse), both sides to flee their dugouts with no
1934-6, oil and tempera on canvas, Staatliche Museen Preußischer thoughts of killing each other.
Kulturbesitz, Berlin.
During the night they sought shelter out of the water's reach. At dawn, they discovered that
they were close to one another. Barbusse wrote: "It had now become an uncanny field of
rest. The ground was dotted with beings sleeping or gently stirring, lifting an arm, raising
their heads, coming back to life or else dying. The enemy trench finally collapsed in on itself
…. All these men with cadaverous faces in front of us and behind us, exhausted, drained of
speech and all will, all these men weighed down with mud, almost carrying their own burial,
looked like each other, as if they were naked. From both sides, men came out of that
dreadful night wearing exactly the same uniform of destitution and dirt."
John Lavery
Many hospitals for British troops
were set up in Etaples and many
men died here, to be buried in the
countryside above the River
Canche and the Paris-Boulogne
railway line. Before the Imperial
War Graves Commission brought
them together and arranged for
their upkeep, this is how it
appeared to Lavery as it had done
to Vallotton: crosses, a few flowers
and interminable rows among
John Lavery, The Cemetery, Etaples, 1919, oil on which women tend the graves.
canvas, 59 x 90 cm, Imperial War Museum, London.
Félix Vallotton
From Vallotton's time in Champagne
and Argonne, this is the most
straightforward painting, the one in
which style and means are not an
issue. It relies on the repetition of a
sign - a cross - in the depth of space.
The graveyard thus appears immense,
the crosses countless, and death
omnipresent as is the case in the
cemeteries remaining both from this
war and from World War II. Here and
there the wooden crosses are adorned
with wreaths and decorations. Using
the 'unknown soldier' symbolism that
Félix Vallotton, Le cimetière de Châlons-sur-Marne Vallotton introduced here a long time
(The Cemetery of Châlons sur Marne), 1917, oil on
canvas, 54 x 80 cm, Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine -
before it became the official French
BDIC, Paris. symbol under the Arc de Triomphe,
not one name is legible.
Discussion Questions
How were these depictions of the war
different from the war propaganda shown
in the postcards and recruitment posters?
How might a painting be able to portray
war more accurately than a photograph?
Why do you think many of these painting
were not welcomed by the authorities?
How does art work as a form of history?