Art - Charles Darwent on war paintings too true to be good
For a glimpse of the stupidity of war, try standing in front of C R W Nevinson's Paths of Glory (1917). Yes, the picture's subject is nasty: two dead soldiers in the no-man's land at Ypres, their bodies strung out on the wire, stiff with rigor. The soldiers' faces are buried in the mud as though they, too, have had to turn away from the unbearableness of Nevinson's image. The painter has done his job in a palette that reeks of phosphorous and cordite, its acid light bleached as if by gas. Even so, Paths of Glory is by no means a great painting. Nevinson has tried hard not to be painterly - he has tried rather to be photographic - in tacit admission of the fact that paint is just not the right medium for his subject. The essence of that subject's horror is its instantaneousness: the moment of impact, the whistle of the bullet, the rapidity of decomposition. For all Nevinson's photographic cropping and flattening, and his visibly rapid-fire brushwork, Paths of Glory remains too composed, too slow. It is the all too still life of an all too moving death.
The idiocy surrounding this image has nothing to do with its artistic failure, though, but with the men from the Ministry of Defence who commissioned it. When Nevinson, an official war artist, first tried to exhibit Paths of Glory in London in December 1917, the War Office censors refused him permission. (Nevinson defiantly showed the work three months later anyway, with a "Censored" label across it.) The picture clearly showed dead Tommies, which - in spite of casualty figures already known to be in seven figures - was judged to be bad for civilian morale. What makes this decision particularly oafish, though, is that the same censors were apparently unbothered by Nevinson's earlier battle paintings: a body of work that counts with Goya's Desastres de la Guerra as among the most terrifying images of war ever made.
Why are his earlier pictures so much greater than Paths of Glory? Their ambiguity is one possible explanation. In June 1914, on the edge of the Great War, Nevinson had published the English Futurist Manifesto in league with the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti had already announced the speeding automobile to be more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, to which Nevinson added the rider that English futurism should now produce "art that was strong, virile and anti-sentimental".
Somewhere in this unlovely mix of modern technophilia and old-fashioned nationalism, you seem to hear the opening shots of the first world war. Look at the earlier paintings in the Imperial War Museum's show of Nevinson's work and you will see something that looks disturbingly like celebration. In Returning to the Trenches (1914), Nevinson finds a subject that clearly touches his futurist heart: namely, the idea of a human war machine, of men transformed - improved - into a single, mechanistic unit. La Mitrailleuse [The Machine-Gunner] (1915) also celebrates new, mechanical man in Nevinson's stylistic fusion of the French gunner with his gun. In Bursting Shell (1915), you sense the painter rising to the modernist challenge of finding a means of representation that goes beyond representation, a way of painting the unpaintable. Nevinson's shell burst is a work of genius, both the cubist dismemberment of an exploding house and a synaesthetic portrait of the violence that caused it.
By On the Road to Ypres (1916), though, something has happened. The picture is chilling, its jagged forms and glacial palette transforming the soldiers it depicts into mechanised horsemen of the apocalypse. There is still the futuristic fascination with choreographed movement, but that fascination is now tinged with something like horror. The decorative patterns of mechanical war, exaggerated and formalised, now have less to do with heroism than with remorselessness. Something else is happening in Nevinson's work as well. In Searchlights (1916), the painter is still concerned with the formal qualities of searchlight beams rather than with their ominousness: the picture hovers somewhere between representation and abstraction. By Piccadilly by Night (1918) Nevinson has retreated into the security of Edwardian figure painting. Technology, such as it is, is represented in the bumbling form of London buses. Searchlight beams are consigned to the picture's top right-hand quarter, and painted representationally.
It is easy enough to guess at the reasons for this transformation. By 1916 the painter had spent enough time at the front line to have seen the outcome of both Marinetti's technological dream and his own of British virility. As interesting as this stylistic change - perhaps more so - is the reverse transformation in critical attitudes to his work. When Nevinson painted his most savage images, they passed official muster because their obvious formal qualities put them in the harmless realm of art. When he painted infinitely less horrific pictures, their apparent realism caused an official furore. The stupidity of the men who ran Britain's war has seldom been shown more graphically.
"C R W Nevinson: The Twentieth Century", at the Imperial War Museum, London, to 30 January 2000, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 25 February-7 May
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