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.

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.

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Art and the First World War John Molyneux