LEGION OF CHRIST COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES

The Art of the War

Influence of World War I in Art

Professor: Louise Joyner

Student: Br. Fernando Adorno
Course: [H317] [Art & Music
History]
Third Semester Paper
Cheshire, January 16, 2020
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Everyone knows or has heard about The World Wars. Many know the Second
World War: what it was, what parties were involved; perhaps because it was more recent.
However, few know that the First World War, “The Great War”, was a cataclysmic
conflict that changed the world; it divided the life of men and their history into two
realities. In this paper, we will seek to discover the impact it had on art.

World War I was not only a devastating catastrophe that killed 37 million people1,
sank the great empires, and changed the map of the world2, but also completely upset art,
which became the base of modern art.

World War I "created an epoch in art,"3 said Leo Braudy, a World War I expert, in
the Los Angeles Times, explaining how that first global conflict contributed to the
consolidation of modernism in all cultural, political, and musical, literary, and artistic
fields, which left a deep and lasting mark.

For many artists, the First World War was a “deeply traumatic experience that,
paradoxically, led them to develop a work with characteristics and a quality that they did
not open otherwise,” said Stephen Forcer, a specialist in Surrealism and Dadaism at the
University of Birmingham.

Decades before the War, the Renaissance perspective of the object had
predominated in art - the different points of view, the main object in the center, and the
secondary objects around it. Aesthetics was entering the modern world and breaking the
schemes created in the previous great periods of art. The outbreak of the War in 1914
accelerated any process that took place in society and let every facet of art be challenged.

Since the end of the 19th century, art had joined the whirlwind of modernity and
demanded from the artists originality and autonomy rather than mastery and fidelity to

1
List of wars by death toll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Modern
2
Tanzman, H. (2018)
3
Johnson, R. (2012)
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the object set. Encouraged by the advances of science, painters denied tradition and
abandoned the Renaissance style of making the canvas a window into the world, now
considered an idealistic world. Art - like philosophy and literature - set aside objectivity,
focused on the subject, and began to show the world from the artist’s perspective.

The Impressionists expanded their color palette,

began to challenge the world of perspective, and blurred
the shapes. The canvas served like one of the newly
invented machines, the camera, where the artist captured
a moment as he saw it. It would no longer be a straight
jacket. It would let their potential fly, trying to express
reality as they saw it.

Figure 1:La Mitrailleuse, 1915:

War. A situation of so many problems, seeing
people treating themselves worse than
animals. So much hate and evil that the
world experiences. In the beginning, the
War promised freedom and justice, and
many were the artists and writers who
supported it, sought to glorify it, for

Figure 2:A Battery Shelled, 1919 example, the British artist Christopher
Nevison, but after experiencing the horrors
of the battlefield, his appreciation changed. The “essence of the new war,” he said, “is
overwhelming of an extreme and totally anti-heroic imbalance.” He is known for his
work “La Mitrailleuse,” 1915 (The Machine Gun) about which the London Evening
News said it "is an example of what civilized man did to the civilized man in the first
quarter of the twentieth century.” World War I, said Percy Wyndham Lewis, was an
absurd nightmare, which had nothing to do with everyday reality, which it represented in
his work “A Battery Shelled,” 1919.

.
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War is not just a conflict between parties. It involves, even more, the people's life
and their dignity because although somebody wins the war, its consequences in the
people’s mind and heart are permanent. We see this reflected in all the humanistic works
of the time. Through the personal expression of the authors, it is reflected what they feel,
what they carry within each of the styles. That is why we cannot totally frame a style;
they are increasingly personal.

It is not a secret that during the First World War man was cruel and ended the
lives of many people. This forced artists to exchange the colorful landscapes of the
French countryside for the desolate bloody meadows that the War left in its wake:
desolation, pain, misunderstanding, skies loaded with violence and terror. The artist of
that time manipulates the shapes and colors so that the feelings of anguish and
melancholy are more noticeable, and his whole inner world stands out.
Gilbert Rogers paints his work “Gassed:
in Arduis Fidelis,” 1918, where he
shows an officer killed and alone in the
mud and surrounded by puddles. This is
an unforgettable and disturbing image of
the harsh reality of war. Seeing this
picture in detail, the logo of the Red
Cross on his right arm denotes not a Figure 3:Gassed: in Arduis Fidelis, 1918

soldier of action, but a medical officer that

perhaps we intuit wanted to help someone else
and therefore he left the trenches. The death of
this soldier means that at least two people died
that day; both he and the one he was going to
Figure 4: Path of Glory, 1917 help.

War has sought the glory of men wanting to be better, to win; but at what price?
This was stated by Christopher Nevison in his work “Paths of Glory,” 1917, which
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presents the image of two British soldiers rotting in the mud of the "No man's land." 4 The
last two paintings were censored because of their explicit expression of war.

At this point of the paper, it would be Figure 5: A Taube, 1915

interesting to ask, are these very crude

paintings? The answer is yes; however, that
does not mean they are not reality. After the
trauma and pain, the artist wanted to
represent finding, with shapes and colors, the
way to express the confusion felt by the First
World War. The war changed art in the sense
Figure 4: A Taube, 1915
that, from that moment, the experience of the
artist came to life in a painting. For example, Christopher Nevison's paintings are
empathic realism. "There, the small boy lay before me, a symbol of all that was to come,"
said Nevinson on the image of a dead child in “A Taube5,” 1915, painted in Dunkirk after
a bombing.

The art that emerges from moment of the war is a constant movement. To
contemplate the painting produces noise that indicates the war: the great explosions
everywhere, despair, people running, and shouting. That is the dynamism that a post-war
painting has. In the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA, 522) there is an
exhibition of Picasso Responding to War. “I have not painted the war,” said Pablo
Picasso in 1944, “because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer
for something to depict.”6

Most of the paintings exhibited in this paper were on display at the Imperial War
Museum, London, which divided its exhibitions into two galleries: the first called
“Truth” which contains works created on the battlefront, as many of those already

4
Lugar donde la nada, la muerte y la destrucción gobernaban. [it was a place where
Figure 6: Youth Mourning, 1916
nothingness, death and destruction ruled] https://definicion.mx/tierra-nadie/
5
A Taube is a reference to the German airplane model “die Taube” or dove
6
Taken from MoMA exhibition.
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analyzed, and the second, “Memory” which contains the works of the artists who painted
back home. The latter shows the great consequences, remembrance of the deceased, for
example, the great moving work of George Clausen, “Youth Mourning,” 1916 a painting
inspired by the death of his daughter's fiancé. It is a commemoration of a missing
generation, it is a powerful image of the pain and sacrifice that the war brought with it.

Finally, we can conclude that regardless of

the situation in history, society is a reality with
many facets or different elements. All of them
"condition", a human being to reality, and at the
same time, men build society. It is dance. There
can be no society without man but man is who he
is because of society. That is the culture, and
learning from it, we can find the relationship
points that help us to work in our mission as Legionaries and future priests. In order to
change the culture, it is necessary first to know it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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JOHNSON, R., Art forever changed by World War I, Los Angeles Time, July 21st, 2012.
ROBERTS, M., For King and Country: No Man’s Land, The Saturday Evening Post, April
3th, 1915. Vol. 187, 4, P. 57.
SASS, E., 12 Technological Advencement of World War I, Mental Floss, April 30th, 2017.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31882/12-technological-advancements-
world-war-i
SCHOFIEL, R., Issues of War, Luviri Press, Muzuzu 2018.
TANZMAN, H., How World War I Changed Map of the World, Real Clear History
Articles, 2018.
https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2018/11/29/how_world_war_i_changed
_map_of_the_world_389.html