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Art and the First World War
John Molyneux
Art reflects society. This statement,which is based on a core
proposition of his-torical materialism, is fundamentally true- all
art has its roots in developing humansocial relations - but it is
also a condensa-tion of a very complex interaction. This isbecause
the social relations that art reflectsare antagonistic relations of
exploitation,oppression and resistance. So we shouldalso remember
Brecht’s words that ‘Art isnot a mirror to reflect reality, but a
ham-mer with which to shape it’. In Europe inthe Middle Ages and
the Renaissance art‘reflected’ society in that a huge amountof it
was commissioned by the church andreligious subject matter was
predominant.But this didn’t stop Michelangelo, for ex-ample, using
an ostensibly religious sub-ject, such as David, to express both
re-volt of the people of Florence against ruleby the Medici bankers
and homoeroticism.Rembrandt ‘reflected’ the early bourgeoissociety
of the 17th century Dutch Republicby painting numerous portraits of
Dutchburghers but also drew attention to, andshowed his sympathy
with, the outcastsof that society in his etchings of
beggars.Constable ‘reflected’ the industrial revolu-tion sweeping
Britain at the time not bypainting factories but by painting the
En-glish landscape as a rural idyll, much asWordsworth and
Coleridge took off to theLake District. William Morris expressedhis
hatred for late Victorian capitalism bycelebrating the visual
culture medieval Eu-rope.
A very large amount of art, in manydifferent countries,
reflected the cataclysmof the First World War but it did so in
awide variety of ways.
But first we should see this in historicalperspective. War has
been an important
theme in art since war became a centralfeature of human society
- with the divisionof society into classes and the developmentof
the state. Thus in the art of PharaonicEgypt, we find depictions of
Ramses II inhis war chariot; in Ancient Greece, numer-ous
representations of the Trojan wars insculptures and on vases; in
medieval Flo-rence, Paulo Ucello gives us ‘The Battleof San
Romano’, which also pioneers thedevelopment of single point
perspective.17th century Dutch art features a wholeschool of
maritime paintings which special-izes in naval battles (reflecting
the majorrole played by sea power in the Dutch Re-volt and in the
establishment of the DutchRepublic with its empire stretching
fromNew Amsterdam to Batavia).
The overwhelming majority of all theseart works, whether they
are masterpiecesor mediocre, do not just depict war, theycelebrate
it. ‘The ruling ideas in soci-ety are the ideas of the ruling
class’, saysMarx, ‘The class which has the means ofmaterial
production at its disposal, hascontrol at the same time over the
meansof mental production’, and this applieseven more strongly to
painting and sculp-ture than to poetry and literature, be-cause of
its dependence on commissions,on wall space in palaces, churches
andpublic buildings and its embodiment invery expensive physical
materials (eg mar-ble and bronze). Consequently, from theParthenon
marbles depiction of the Bat-tle of the Centaurs and the Chinese
Terra-cotta Army, through Leonardo’s lost Bat-tle of Anghiari,
Titian’s portrait of CharlesV at the Battle of Marburg, to
David’sOath of the Horatii and Napoleon Cross-ing the Alps, and
Lady Elizabeth Butler’sScotland Forever!, we find literally
innu-
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merable works glorifying war and militaryleaders. 18th and 19th
century British art,in particular, is filled with (generally
sec-ond rate) paintings recording the progressof Britain’s military
exploits and colonialconquests - Woolf at Quebec, Clive of In-dia,
Nelson, Wellington, Gordon at Khar-toum, the Battle of Omdurman and
so on.
The only important exception to thispattern is provided by
Goya’s extraor-dinary series of etchings The Disastersof War born
out of his direct experi-ence of the Spanish peasants’ resistance
toNapoleon’s occupying army. To this day,these brutal works remain
the most sear-ing sustained indictment of the inhumanityand horror
of war in the history of art. Butas I said they were absolutely an
exception- until the First World War.
Before we come to how that change oc-curred we need briefly to
review the devel-opment of art leading up to the War.
Modernism, Futurism andVorticism
The emergence of modern art datesroughly from the mid-19th
century withCourbet and Manet, followed by theImpressionists
(Monet, Pissarro, Sisley,etc.), Symbolists (Redon, Moreau,
Klimt)and post-impressionists (Seurat, Cezanne,Gauguin, Van Gogh).
In the early 20thcentury this development accelerated and,in
artistic terms, radicalized with the swiftand overlapping
succession of avant-gardemovements such as the Viennese
Secession,Fauvism, Analytic and Synthetic Cubism,Die Brücke and
Der Blaue Reiter (Expres-sionism), Orphism, Futurism,
Rayonism,Vorticism and the beginnings of abstract
art with Kandinsky.1 Artistically it wascubism that was to prove
the most pro-found and most important of these move-ments2 but in
the years just leading up tothe War it was Futurism that held
cen-tre stage and made the biggest impact inavant-garde artistic
circles across Europe.
Futurism was a poetic and artisticmovement founded in Milan in
1909 bythe Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti who au-thored its
grandiloquent manifesto. Fu-turism was a response to the
dramaticeruption of modernity - modern industrialcapitalism
concentrated in Italy’s northerncities - within traditional Italian
society.It denounced the past and all its works infavour of the new
and the modern, enthu-siastically and uncritically celebrating
themachine, speed, the automobile and theaeroplane. With great
fanfare, Marinetti’smanifesto declares:
1. We intend to sing the love of danger,the habit of energy and
fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will beessential elements of
our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalteda pensive immobility,
ecstasy, andsleep. We intend to exalt aggres-sive action, a
feverish insomnia, theracer’s stride, the mortal leap, thepunch and
the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnif-icence has been enriched by
a newbeauty: the beauty of speed. A rac-ing car whose hood is
adorned withgreat pipes, like serpents of explo-sive breatha
roaring car that seemsto ride on grapeshot is more beauti-ful than
the Victory of Samothrace.
1The pivotal role of Picassos Les Demoiselles D’Avignon in this
process is discussed in John Molyneux,‘A revolution in paint: 100
years of Picassos Demoiselles’, International Socialism 115, July
2007.http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=341
2 See John Berger, ‘The moment of cubism’, in The Moment of
Cubism: And Other Essays, London1969.
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5. We want to hymn the man at thewheel, who hurls the lance of
hisspirit across the Earth, along the cir-cle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself withardour, splendour, and
generosity, toswell the enthusiastic fervour of theprimordial
elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no morebeauty. No work without
an aggres-sive character can be a masterpiece.Poetry must be
conceived as a vio-lent attack on unknown forces, to re-duce and
prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory ofthe centuries! Why should
we lookback, when what we want is to breakdown the mysterious doors
of the Im-possible? Time and Space died yes-terday. We already live
in the abso-lute, because we have created eter-nal, omnipresent
speed.
Given the historic moment, the ex-traordinary burst of
urbanization com-bined with electrification and numerousother
startling technical innovations andscientific breakthroughs, the
appeal of thisone-sided intoxication with the machineand speed is
not hard to understand. Andit managed to inspire some powerful
worksof art such as Boccioni’s sculpture, UniqueForms of Continuity
in Space and Balla’sAbstract Sound +Speed. However, theManifesto
went on to say:
1. We will glorify warthe world’sonly hygienemilitarism,
patriotism,the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful
ideas worth dyingfor, and scorn for woman.
Here we see revealed the reactionaryarrogance, brutality and
incipient fascismthat lay at the heart of Italian Futurism.3
In the event, the eagerly anticipated Warwas to claim the lives
of a number of Fu-turist artists, most notably Umberto Boc-cioni
and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia,and destroy Futurism as an art
movement.Marinetti’s militarist bravado could notsurvive the brutal
reality of the war ex-perience, at least not as an inspiration
foravant-garde art.
Much the same happened with theBritish incarnation of Futurism,
namelyVorticism. The Vorticist art move-ment was formed in 1914 by
the artistand writer, Wyndham Lewis, in looseassociation with a
number of otherartists including David Bomberg, WilliamRoberts,
Christopher Nevinson, HenriGaudier-Bresca, Jacob Epstein and
Ed-ward Wadsworth. The aesthetic of Vor-ticism , as displayed in
its magazineBLAST4 was a combination of cubismand futurism but
Lewis’s general worldview and attitude to war was similar tothat of
Marinetti. Nevinson was alsostrongly influenced by Marinetti and
an-other influence on Vorticism was the poet,Ezra Pound, who gave
it its name. LikeMarinetti, Pound went on to become a fas-cist and
Mussolini supporter. Vorticismdid not survive the war. A number of
theartists went to war and some became offi-cial war artists but
the war changed theirattitudes and their art practice.5
Nevinson, Nash and others
The two most important British warartists were Christopher
Nevinson and
3In 1919 Marinetti was to co-write another famous manifesto -
the Fascist Manifesto of Benito Mus-solini.
4BLAST was edited by Lewis. Only two issues appeared, one in
Summer 1914 and one in 1915, butthey had a lasting impact on
British art.
5With the partial exception of Wyndham Lewis.
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Paul Nash. Between them they producedsome of the most powerful
depictions andexpressions of the horrific reality of thewar.
Nevinson was the son of a war corre-spondent and a suffragette.
He trainedas an artist the Slade School of Art. Atthe start of the
war Nevinson joined anambulance unit where he tended woundedFrench
soldiers and for a while served asa volunteer ambulance driver. In
January1915 ill health forced his return to Britainbut he was later
made an official war artistand returned for a while to the
WesternFront.
At first he used a Futurist and Vorticistapproach to produce
extremely effectiverepresentations of soldiering which did
notromanticize or glorify war but also stoppedshort of actually
showing the slaughter.Probably the best example of his work atthis
period was La Mitrailleuse which hisfellow artist, Walter Sickert,
called ‘prob-ably the most authoritative and concen-trated
utterance on the war in the historyof painting’.6
C W R Nevinson French Soldiers Resting
C W R Nevinson La Mitrailleuse
But Nevinson was deeply affected byhis work with the wounded,
especially agroup he found more or less dumped andleft to die in a
shed outside Dunkirk. Thememory of this haunted him and it wassome
time before he found the strength todepict it. The result when he
did was adark brooding and compassionate paintingironically
entitled La Patrie in which notrace of Futurist enthusiasm
remains.
C W R Nevinson La Patrie (1916)
6 Walter Sickert, The Burlington Magazine, September/October,
1916
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At first when he became an official warartist Nevinson seemed to
lose his criticaledge, and focused on relatively sanitizedimages of
aerial combat, but when, after awhile, he produced tougher images
he im-mediately fell foul of army censorship. Inparticular they
refused to permit him toexhibit his 1917 work Paths of Glory onthe
grounds that it showed British dead.
C W R Nevinson Paths of Glory (1917)
Significantly this work was straightfor-wardly naturalist and
showed no trace ofFuturist/Vorticist influence.
Paul Nash, whose work is describedby Richard Cork as ‘the most
impres-sive made by any British artist during theconflict’ 7 was a
very different case fromNevinson. Before the war Nash was arather
anaemic water colourist and land-scape painter with no radical or
avant-garde tendencies. The experience of thewar transformed him
and by November1917 he was writing to his wife:
I am no longer an artist in-terested and curious, I am
amessenger who will bring backword from the men who arefighting to
those who want thewar to go on for ever. Feeble,
inarticulate, will be my mes-sage, but it will have a
bittertruth, and may it burn theirlousy souls.8
What Nash did to convey his message,and get round the problem of
the censor atthe same time, was use landscape in such away show the
full horror of the war withoutdepicting dead soldiers.
Paul Nash The Wire 1917
Paul Nash We are Making a New World 1918
7Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great
War, Yale University Press, 1994,p.196.
8 Paul Nash (1949). Outline : an autobiography and other
writings. Faber and Faber, London.
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Paul Nash The Menin Road 1919
No one looking at these pictures of landthat has been tormented
and tortured canfail to grasp that they are gazing on killingfields
of appalling dimensions.
Some of the most haunting images ofthe war - they are close to
unbearable tolook at - come from a very unlikely source.Henry Tonks
was a surgeon who becameProfessor of Fine Art at the Slade Schoolof
Art where he taught amongst othersAugustus John, Gwen John,
WyndhamLewis, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg,John Nash and William
Orpen. When warbroke out he resumed his medical careerand in 1916
became a lieutenant in theRoyal Army Medical Corps . This led himto
produce pastel drawings recording facialinjury cases.
Henry Tonks Faces of Battle (1916)
Here the most straightforward artisticnaturalism turns, simply
by virtue of thereality it depicts, into a devastating indict-ment
of the war.
Many British artists - William Or-pen, John Nash, Stanley
Spencer, WilliamRoberts, David Bomberg and others pro-duced war
related work - but the dramaticeffect of the First World War on
British artis, perhaps best summed up by the exam-ple John Singer
Sargent. Before the warSargent was one of London’s most success-ful
society portraitists painting pictureslike this:
John Singer Sargent - Pre WW1 Portraits)
Serving as a war artist turned him intothe painter of this:
John Singer Sargent Gassed (1919)
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From Franz Marc to GeorgeGrosz
The story of art on the other side of no-man’s land is not, of
course, the same butit is remarkable similar. In pre-war Ger-many
it was Expressionism rather than Fu-turism that was artistically
dominant butthere were a number of links between thetwo tendencies
(particularly via the influ-ence of Kandinsky and Robert
Delauney).In addition the powerful influence of thephilosophy of
Nietzsche ensured that therewas no shortage of artists willing to
greetthe outbreak of war as a great ‘cleansing’and
‘purification’.9
Two examples are August Macke andFranz Marc, founding members in
1911(along with Kandinsky) of the Expressionavant-garde group, Der
Blaue Reiter (TheBlue Rider). Prior to the war both pro-duced work
that was brightly coloured, op-timistic even ‘exalted’.
August Macke Girl with Blue Birds (1914)
Franz Marc Little Yellow Horses (1912)
In his major study of the periodRichard Cork writes of Macke
Like so many of his contempo-raries, he greeted the declara-tion
of war with an initial en-thusiasm that led him to an-ticipate
‘walloping’ the Frenchin August... (Max) Ernst re-called,
‘Influenced by Futur-ism, he accepted war not onlyas the most
grandiose manifes-tation of the modern age butalso as a
philosophical neces-sity’.10
His close friend, Franz Marc, took asimilar view and both signed
up to fight.But both were rapidly disillusioned by thereality. Cork
continues:
Macke was sent with hisRhineland Regiment to Franceon 8 August.
Whatever Niet-zschean illusions he may haveharboured about the
purgativevalue of war were quickly de-stroyed. ‘It is all so
ghastlythat I don’t want to tell youabout it’, he wrote to
hiswife.11
9The backing of the war by German Social Democracy was also a
significant factor in securing theinitial support of many artists
including Katthe Kollwitz who will be discussed later.
10 Richard Cork, as above, p.4211 As above, p.43.
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Within two months Macke, after fight-ing in seven battles, was
dead - to the dis-may of Marc. Eighteen months later Marcwas also
killed, at Verdun, but not beforehe produced a bleak ‘Sketchbook
from theBattlefield’ including The Greedy Mouthwhich shows the war
as a strange devour-ing monster.
Franz Marc The Greedy Mouth (1915)
Another example is the expressionistsculptor, Ernst Barlach, for
whom it wasa ‘holy war’ which he depicted as a charg-ing swordsman
of ferocious power.
Ernst Barlach The Avenger (1914)
Three months participation as an in-fantry soldier in 1915
(after which he wasinvalided out) was enough to turn Barlachinto a
convinced opponent of the War and
this so influenced all his subsequent workthat he was later
denounced by the Nazisas a ‘degenerate’ artist.
Many other German artists wentthrough this transformation. Max
Slevogtis a case that parallels John Singer Sargent.Before the war
he was a painter of pleasantimpressionist landscapes. He became
anofficial war artist and what he saw turnedhim into an artist who
produced searingindictments of the slaughter.
Max Slevogt The Country House in Godramstein (1912)
Max Slevogt Paroxysm of Destruction (Spectres fight withtheir
own Severed Limbs) (1916)
Otto Dix was an enthusiastic volunteerin 1914 and fought on the
Western andEastern Fronts, including at the Somme,until his
discharge in December 1918. Butafter the war produced nightmarish
printsthat are reminiscent of Goya in their un-flinching depiction
of the brutality of war.
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Otto Dix Wounded Man (1916)
Otto Dix Storm Troopers Advancing Under a Gas Attack(1924)
Kathe Kollwitz is in some ways a spe-cial case because of her
politics, artisticstyle, gender and different, gender
related,experience. As a committed socialist (andmember of the SPD)
she was producingnaturalistic, or one could say social re-alist,
depictions of working people, thepoor and their sufferings long
before thewar. She was not really part of the ex-pressionist,
cubist or futurist avant-gardeand, perhaps for personal
biographical rea-sons (the death of her siblings. includingher
younger brother Benjamin) death, griefand mourning were always
central themes
in her work. One of her most power-ful pieces, Woman with Dead
Child, datesfrom 1903. Despite this, she initially sup-ported the
war, doubtless influenced by theSPD, but then in October 1914 her
son,Peter, was killed on the battlefield and thissent her into
prolonged depression. How-ever, she turned profoundly against
thewar and eventually came to the conclusion‘that Karl Liebknecht
was proved right’.12
Her artistic response to the war focusednot on the horror of
battle but on the griefof widows and mothers.
Kathe Kollwitz The Survivors (1919)
Kathe Kollwitz Widows and Orphans (1919)
12Karl Liebknecht, close comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, voted 1 out
of 111 SPD Reichstag deputiesagainst War Credits. He went on to
form the Spartakus League (forerunner of the German CommunistParty,
and participate in the Spartakus Rising in the German Revolution.
As a result he, along withRosa Luxemburg, were murdered by counter
revolutionary Freikorps in January 1919. Kollwitz markedhis death
with a powerful woodcut, Memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht.
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Perhaps the most radical of all thewar artists was George Grosz
who viewedthe war with hostility from the start andalready in 1914
produced an ink draw-ing, Pandemonium, which depicted crowdsin the
grip of ‘patriotic’ frenzy and warfever. In 1915 he made a series
ofdrawings and lithographs which, in thewords of Richard Cork, were
‘obsessed withcorpses’ such as Battlefield with Dead Sol-diers and
The Shell. But what also dis-tinguished Grosz was the satirical
savagerywith which he depicted the profiteers andbourgeois whom he
held responsible for thewar.
George Grosz Pandemonium (1914)
George Grosz The Explosion (1916)
George Grosz For the Rich the Booty, For the Poor theCurse of
War (1919)
George Grosz These War Invalids are Becoming a PositivePest!
(1920)
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Grosz was an active revolutionary aswell as an artist. He took
part in theSpartacist Rising of January 1919 andwent on to be a
founder member of theGerman Communist Party.
The Dadaist Response
What has been presented here is, nec-essarily, a highly
selective sample of thevast amount of art generated by the
FirstWorld War in all the belligerent coun-tries. A huge number of
artists producedwar related work - John Nash, StanleySpencer,
William Roberts, William Orpen,Albin Egger-Lienz, Oscar Kokoshka,
Na-talia Goncharova, Max Beckmann, GeorgeLeroux, Fernand Leger,
Pierre Bonnardand Felix Vallotton are just a few of thosenot
specifically discussed.here. Conse-quently a comprehensive survey
is com-pletely beyond the range of this article.What I have tried
to show is the generaltrajectory of war art at the time, whichwas
overwhelmingly in the direction of op-position to the war, and some
of what Iconsider to be the most powerful images.
However, there is one further and verydifferent artistic
reaction to the war whichneeds to be highlighted - that of
theDadaist movement. At the start of thisarticle I noted that
Constable ‘reflected’the industrial revolution by painting its
op-posite, the English countryside, my pointbeing that the fact
that the relationshipbetween art and its social context is
oftencomplex and dialectical does not make thatrelationship any the
less real. Dadaism re-sponded to the war not by depicting
itsbattles or its horrors but with its own icon-oclastic revolt
against all past and existingculture.
Dada was founded in early 1916 atthe Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich
by a groupof artists and poets who included HugoBall, Tristan
Tzara, Richard Huelsen-beck, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and
HansRichter. As Dawn Ades notes, ‘It wasessentially an
international movement: ofthe Zurich Dadaists, Tzara and Janco
wereRumanian, Arp Alsatian, Ball, Richterand Huelsenbeck were
German.’13 Whatbrought them to Zurich was the same thingthat
brought Lenin there - its locationin neutral Switzerland. The
participant,Hans Richter, observes:
To understand the climate inwhich Dada began, it is neces-sary
to recall how much free-dom there was in Zurich, evenduring a world
war. TheCabaret Voltaire played andraised hell at No.1
Spiegel-gasse. Diagonally opposite, atNo.12 Spiegelgasse, the
samenarrow thoroughfare in whichthe Cabaret Voltaire mountedits
nightly orgies of singing, po-etry and dancing, lived Lenin.Radek,
Lenin and Zinovievwere allowed complete lib-erty the Swiss
authorities weremuch more suspicious of theDadaists, who after all
were ca-pable of perpetrating some newenormity at any moment,
thanof those quiet studious Rus-sians even though the latterwere
planning a world revolu-tion.14
Dada was born out of disgust at thewar. Richard Huelsenberg
wrote in 1920,‘we were agreed that the war had been
13 Dawn Ades, ‘Dada and Surrealism’ in Nikos Stangos ed.,
Concepts of Modern Art, London 1981,p.111.
14Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, London 1966,
p.16.15Cited in Dawn Ades, as above, p.111.
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contrived by the various governments forthe most autocratic,
sordid and material-ist reasons’15 Whereas Lenin and his com-rades
aimed to turn the imperialist warinto a civil war and thus
overthrow capi-talism, the Dadaists declared war on theart and
culture of a rotten society believ-ing that it was irredeemably
corrupted andcomplicit. To all official and establishedart they
counterposed the defiant and ni-hilistic gesture, art that claimed
to be anti-art.
The idea of destroying bourgeois artwith art or with gestures
was always anillusion - capitalist society and the capital-ist art
world has demonstrated again andagain its ability to incorporate
this kindof artistic rebellion. And viewed in ret-rospect the
actual art works produced bythe Zurich Dadaists do not stand out as
ex-ceptionally radical, outlandish or extremewithin the story of
modern art. Nor dothey appear as in any way protests againstthe
war.
Hans Richter Autumn (1917)
Marcel Janco Dance (1916)
Nevertheless the Dada concept andthe Dada attitude proved highly
fertile interms of the development of modern art inthe 20th
century. Within a few years therewere Dadaist groups in Berlin, New
York,Paris, Cologne and other cities involvingartists as diverse as
Max Ernst, Francis Pi-cabia, George Grosz and John Heartfield (the
great photomontage artist). Dada ty-pography was taken up by
Russian con-structivism. Dada also led directly toSurrealism,
perhaps the most importantand influential avant garde art
movementafter World War I. And in New YorkDadaism produced the
genuinely icono-clastic work of Marcel Duchamp, which re-ally did
change the course of modern artand our whole understanding of what
con-stitutes art.
Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917)
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Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q (1919)
Causes and Consequences
Having thus shown the profound effect ofthe First World War on
European art atthe time, it remains to try to say why thishappened,
why the artistic response to thewar was so qualitatively different
to anyprevious war (war, after all, has always in-volved immense
brutality) and then to re-flect on longer term consequences of
this.
When it is matter of understandingwhy art developed as it did
Marxism, withits historical materialist method, comesinto its own.
As Trotsky wrote:
It is very true that one cannotalways go by the principles
ofMarxism in deciding whetherto reject or to accept a work ofart. A
work of art should in the
first place be judged by its ownlaw, that is, by the law of
art.But Marxism alone can explainwhy and how a given tendencyin art
has originated in a givenperiod of history.16
Nevertheless, even with the aid ofhistorical materialism, such
explanation,seeking to show the relationship betweengeneral social
historical development andspecific developments within in the
historyof art, must involve a certain element ofspeculation. As
Marx noted:
It is always necessary to dis-tinguish between the mate-rial
transformation of the eco-nomic conditions of produc-tion, which
can be determinedwith the precision of naturalscience, and the
legal, politi-cal, religious, artistic or philo-sophic - in short,
ideologicalforms in which men becomeconscious of this conflict
andfight it out17
In this case I think we can identify theconvergence of two main
historical phe-nomena: the changed social position ofartists and
the specific nature of the war.
From about 1848, when the bour-geoisie lost its role as a
revolutionaryclass and moved firmly into the campof reaction, a
split opened up betweenthe more advanced artists and the
aristo-cratic/ bourgeois ruling classes. Beginningwith Courbet and
progressing through theImpressionists to the likes of Seurat,
VanGogh, and Toulouse Lautrec the artists, inClement Greenberg’s
phrase ‘migrated to
16 L.Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, London 1991, p.207.17
K.Marx, 1859 Preface,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-
economy/preface.htm.18In their large majority, artists remain
owners of their own means of production, and sellers of the
products of their labour, not of their labour power.
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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
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Bohemia’. We are not talking about prole-tarian art here - the
artists remain predom-inantly of middle class origin and
pettybourgeois in their objective class position18
- but in many cases they live and workalong side the working
class and the poorand this is reflected in the art - its
subjectsand their treatment. Courbet paints stonebreakers and
supports the Paris Commune,Seurat depicts workers on the banks of
theSeine, Van Gogh paints peasants and post-men not kings and
emperors, and Picasso’sblue period gives us the Parisian poor.
Thedevelopment of capitalist society with itsgrowing educated
middle class also made itmore possible for artists to survive,
albeitwith difficulty, by selling their work, inde-pendently of
state, church or ruling classpatronage.19 In art, as in life, there
wereright wing as well as left wing tendenciesbut both right and
left were in some sensein revolt against the old order. Thus,
thelate 19th and early 20th century preparedthe ground for artistic
revolt against thewar.
However, the main factor was undoubt-edly the character of the
war itself. Theimperialist nature of the war and theabsence of a
significant element of na-tional liberation was important in
that,once the early illusions disappeared, therewas widespread
perception that it ‘wasn’tworth it’ and that lives were being
sacri-ficed ‘for nothing’ i.e. for no legitimatepolitical or moral
purpose. But historyhad long been replete with brutal dynas-tic and
imperialist wars, without produc-ing anti-war art. Here the sheer
scale andduration of the war, and of the slaughter,was hugely
important. Previous wars hadfought largely either by mercenaries or
rel-atively small professional armies and evenif they lasted a long
time consisted of a se-
ries of battle of shortish duration. Therewas no precedent for
the mass conscriptionand prolonged war of position in trenchesthat
dominated the First World War.
This meant, as we have seen in our briefsurvey, that significant
numbers of artistswere drawn into the war as participants,and
became casualties, in a way that hadnot happened before. The
enormous casu-alty rate also ensured that the war reachedback into
and affected the whole of society.When in his ‘Anthem for Doomed
Youth’,the poet Wilfred Owen evokes the imageof young men drawn
from ‘sad shires’ and‘the drawing down of blinds’ we see
thishappening all across England. No townor village, scarcely a
family, remained un-touched by the catastrophe.
Thus history created both a supply ofpotentially anti-war
artists and a social de-mand for anti-war art. Moreover the
shiftfrom initial, näıve, enthusiasm to bitterdisillusionment and
opposition which wehave seen among artists was a reflectiona much
wider societal reaction.
When it comes to consequences we cannote three main things.
First, the profu-sion of anti-war art became part (a smallpart, of
course, compared to the revolt ofthe masses) of the struggle
against the war,not just ‘a mirror to reflect reality but ahammer
to shape it’. Second, the art,like the poetry and novels, helped to
fixthe image of the war as a disaster in thepopular consciousness
and social memory,thus making it much more difficult to
re-habilitate it or retrospectively ‘celebrate’it. Third, it put an
end - one cannot say‘forever’ but up to the present and for
theforeseeable future - to art that seeks to ro-manticise or
glorify war and that is a smallbut permanent step forward.
19In a way that was not possible for Goya or Velasquez or
Michelangelo.
33
Art and the First World War John Molyneux