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In contrast, many war artists offered harsh but realistic visual depictions of the death and destruction that resulted from combat. For example, when we look at C.R.W. Nevinson’s stark painting, Paths of Glory, irony comes to the forefont. Though the piece has an idealistic-sounding title, we shudder at the sight of two dead soldiers lying in the battlefield mud. We cannot identify with, or even identify these soldiers at all. Their faces are obscured and their bodies merge with the murky earth, suggesting the loss of identity and the waste of young lives. The brownish grey mud almost threatens to rise up and swallow the entire scene.Paul Nash’s 1917 work, The Menin Road, depicts a ruined Belgian landscape. Before us, dead tree trunks rise in a wasteland of mud and standing water. This spooky, alienating, place includes strange clouds

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of smoke penetrated here and there by searchlights. Despite these beams of light, we cannot see anything past the immediate scene. Here is chaos, irrevocable change, and devastation.

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Mark Gertler, Merry-Go-Round, 1916,oil on canvas, 189.2 x 142.2 cm (Tate)

During the years leading up to the war, many modernists began to turn their attention to their media; writers and authors broke free of traditional parameters of form and imagery and brought the very materials of their crafts to the forefront. They questioned the solidity of the bond between representation and meaning. Works like T.S. Eliot’s poem, "The Waste Land," Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round (above), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway sought to shock, alienate, or provoke audiences and to thereby explore new sensory and intellectual effects in art and literature.While the modernist movement had begun prior to the war, the conflict’s vast scale, brutality, and costs fascinated many artists and

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writers. The war definitively ended many social and cultural traditions that survived the nineteenth century and made clear the modern, mechanized world we were entering, a world where the older expressive forms and techniques no longer seemed adequate, appropriate, or compelling.

Poetry

First World War literature also presents a range of perspectives. Rupert Brooke’s patriotic ‘1914’ sonnet sequence became hugely popular in the early years of the war. At the outset of the war, many Britons were touched by the heroic sentiments of the poems, in particular, “The Soldier.” This poem’s combatant speaker assures the reader that his death in battle will mean that “there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.” Brooke’s poems pictured military service and death as purifying and noble. At the start of the war, when such nationalistic feeling was strong, many British soldiers departed for training with a copy of Brooke’s poems tucked into their kits. However, after years of devastating losses and with no clear resolution to the seemingly endless fighting, poets depicting the hard reality of the soldier’s experience gained more recognition. Wilfred Owen’s gloomy 1917 “Anthem for Doomed Youth” pictures the war’s fallen “d[ying] as cattle,” for example. Siegfried Sassoon’s 1918 piece, “Counter-Attack,” offers us the gruesome vision of a battlefield “place rotten with dead” where corpses “face downward, in the sucking mud,/Wallow…” Sassoon’s shocking verbal image recalls the horrible tableau of Nevinson’s dead soldiers lying facedown in the mud.

Women in War

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Women artists and writers played a significant role in documenting civilian and service experiences. Vera Brittain, who volunteered as a nurse, recorded her impressions of work and loss in her memoir, Testament of Youth, one of the war’s most recognized autobiographical works. Women artists documented other civilian realities such as female workers in factories—doing jobs vacated by men in the military— who had become crucial for war-related production.

Flora Lion for example, shows us a canteen for women munitions (weapons) workers in her painting, Women’s Canteen at Phoenix Works, Bradford. We can see the exhaustion that the workers are feeling. The women here look somewhat relieved for their tea break. Their resigned expressions and slouching posture underscore the mental and physical fatigue of this critical but dangerous line of work, but they also make us recognize the more emotional weariness of the civilian war experience.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/wwi-dada/art-great-war/v/room-1914-1915

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Socratic Seminar – The Art of World War I

During the years leading up to the war, many modernists artist began to turn their attention to their media; writers and authors broke free of traditional parameters of form and imagery and brought the very materials of their crafts to the forefront. They questioned the solidity of the bond between representation and meaning. Works like T.S. Eliot’s poem, "The Waste Land," Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway sought to shock, alienate, or provoke audiences and to thereby explore new sensory and intellectual effects in art and literature.

While the modernist movement had begun prior to the war, the conflict’s vast scale, brutality, and costs fascinated many artists and writers. The war definitively ended many social and cultural traditions that survived the nineteenth century and made clear the modern, mechanized world we were entering, a world where the older expressive forms and techniques no longer seemed adequate, appropriate, or compelling.

In this seminar we will explore a series of images from artist who depicted their interpretations of a changing world in response to the industrialization of the mid and late 19 th century. As you view each set of images provide your responses to the images through the discussion questions provided.

Image One: Sir Jacob Epstein, “The Rock Drill”

1. What suppositions (conclusions) can you make from the name of the artist and the name of the piece? What do these clues tell you about the culture of the artist world?

2. Describe the details in this sculpture. After doing so then discuss with your small group what the possible messages are about society at that time. Record your discoveries.

3. Do any elements in this work dominate over any other elements in this work or is there an equality of space in the work. Describe why you feel this way. What possible messages could the artist be sending through this decision?

4. What is the significance within the dates that the work was created and the dates that the work was modified? Is there any shift in the message of the piece with the modifications?

5. The modified version of the piece was created during the Battles of the Somme and the Verdun. Could there be any connections between these events and the piece?

Images Two and Three: World War I Propaganda Posters

1. What kind of tone do the elements of Poster One (on the left) leave with the viewer?2. What kind of tone do the elements of Poster Two (on the right) leave the viewer? 3. What could possibly have changed to explain the shift in tone between the two pieces? 4. Are there any clues from these posters that show that this is a world war as opposed to a

localized war? 5. Describe the difference in perspective between the two pieces? Which one tells the viewer that

things have changed in human history? What is the new message to the viewer?

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Images Five and Six: Documenting the War

1. In what ways do the styles differ between the two images? 2. Are both images realistic portrayals of the war? Why or why not? 3. Do the nationalities of the two artist have any bearing on the way they portrayed the war? 4. Try to explain what has changed with art in the work by Lewis. What could possibly explain this? 5. What are the two different messages that the viewers are left with here?

Images Seven and Eight: Interpreting the War

1. Is there any irony in the titles of these two works? What is it, explain?2. How do you know that these works were created towards the end of WWI? 3. What do these works tell the viewer about the state of mind of Europeans after WWI? 4. Is there any message of hope in the works? How is war viewed in them? Has the view of war

changed since the beginning of the war? How so? 5. How do the titles of these two works reflect a certain pessimism about human progress?

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