The First World War, which was fought between 1914 and 1918, had an immediate impact on popular culture. In the over a hundred years since the war ended, the war has resulted in many artistic and cultural works from all sides and nations that participated in the war. This included artworks, books, poems, films, television, music, and more recently, video games. Many of these pieces were created by soldiers who took part in the war.
The years of warfare were the backdrop for art which is now preserved and displayed in such institutions as the Imperial War Museum in London, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Official war artists were commissioned by the British Ministry of Information and the authorities of other countries.
After 1914, avant-garde artists began to consider and investigate many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, "The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe." [1] In this same period, academic and realist artists continued to produce new work. Traditional artists and their artwork developed side by side with the shock of the new as culture reinvented itself in relationships with new technologies. [2]
Some artists responded positively to the changes wrought by war. C. R. W. Nevinson, associated with the Futurists, wrote that "This war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness." [3] His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote that Nevinson's painting La Mitrailleuse (now in the Tate collection) 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.' [4]
Pacifist artists also responded to the war in powerful ways: Mark Gertler's major painting, Merry-Go-Round , was created in the midst of the war years and was described by D. H. Lawrence as "the best modern picture I have seen" [5] and depicts the war as a futile and mechanistic nightmare. [3]
The commissions related to the official war artists programmes insisted on the recording of scenes of war. This undermined confidence in progressive styles as commissioned artists conformed to official requirements. The inhumanity of destruction across Europe also led artists to question whether their own campaigns of destruction against tradition had not, in fact, also been inhuman. These tendencies encouraged many artists to "return to order" stylistically. [3]
The Cubist vocabulary itself was adapted and modified by the Royal Navy during "the Great War." The Cubists aimed to revolutionize painting — and reinvented the art of camouflage on the way. [6]
British marine painter Norman Wilkinson invented the concept of "dazzle painting" -— a way of using stripes and disrupted lines to confuse the enemy about the speed and dimensions of a ship. [7] Wilkinson, then a lieutenant commander on Royal Navy patrol duty, implemented the precursor of "dazzle" on SS Industry; and in August 1917 HMS Alsatian became the first Navy ship to be painted with a dazzle pattern. Solomon J. Solomon advised the British Army on camouflage. In December 1916 he established a camouflage school in Hyde Park [8] In 1920, he published a book on the subject, Strategic Camouflage. [9] Alan Beeton advanced the science of camouflage. [10]
An early influence of the War on artists in the United Kingdom was the recruiting campaign of 1914–1915. Around a hundred posters were commissioned from artists by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee of which two and a half million copies were distributed across the country. Private companies also sponsored recruitment posters: Remember Belgium, by the Belgian-born Frank Brangwyn and The Only Road for an Englishman by Gerald Spencer Pryse were two notable examples produced on behalf of the London Electric Railways. Although Brangwyn produced over 80 poster designs during the War, he was not an official war artist. [11] His grim poster of a Tommy bayoneting an enemy soldier (“Put Strength in the Final Blow: Buy War Bonds”) caused deep offence in both Britain and Germany. The Kaiser himself is said to have put a price on Brangwyn's head after seeing the image. [12]
Brangwyn states in 1917 that Will Dyson's cartoons were "an international asset to this present war." His exhibition of "War Satires" in 1915 was followed by him being appointed an Australian official war artist.
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1915 was noted for the paucity and general poor quality of paintings on war themes, but The Fighting-Line from Ypres to the Sea by W. L. Wyllie was noted for its bold experimentation in showing a bird's-eye view of war from an aeroplane. George Clausen's symbolist allegory Renaissance was the most memorable painting of that 1915 exhibition, contrasting ruins and oppression with dignity and optimism. [13] When exhibited in the spring of 1916, Eric Kennington's portrayal of exhausted soldiers The Kensingtons at Laventie caused a sensation. [14] Painted in reverse on glass, the painting was widely praised for its technical virtuosity, iconic colour scheme, and its ‘stately presentation of human endurance, of the quiet heroism of the rank and file’. [15] Kennington returned to the front in 1917 as an official war artist.
The general failure of academic painting, in the form of the Royal Academy, to respond adequately to the challenges of representing the War was made clear by reaction to the 1916 Summer Exhibition. Although popular taste acclaimed Richard Jack's sentimental Return to the Front: Victoria Railway Station, 1916, the academicians and their followers were stuck in the imagery of past battle pictures of the Napoleonic and Crimean eras. Arrangements of soldiers, officers waving swords, and cavalrymen swaggering seemed outdated to those at home, and risible to those with experience of the front. A wounded New Zealander standing in front of a painting of a cavalry charge commented that "one man with a machine-gun would wipe all that lot out." [10]
Charles Masterman, head of the British War Propaganda Bureau, acting on the advice of William Rothenstein, appointed Muirhead Bone as Britain's first official war artist in May 1916. [16] In April 1917 James McBey was appointed official artist for Egypt and Palestine, and William Orpen was sent to France. Orpen's work was criticised for superficiality in the pursuit of perfectionism: "in the tremendous fun of painting he altogether forgot the ghastliness of war". [10]
The most popular painting in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1917 was Frank O. Salisbury's Boy 1st Class John Travers Cornwell V.C. depicting a youthful act of heroism. But of more artistic importance in 1917 was the establishment on 5 March of the Imperial War Museum and the foundation during the summer of the Canadian War Memorials Fund by Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere and significant work by Australian war artists. [10]
David Bomberg's experiences of mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches - as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme - permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age. [17] This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version. [18] Percy Delf Smith created realistic depictions of his time in the trenches and more fantastical depictions based on medieval dance of death imagery. [19] [20]
At the 1918 Royal Academy exhibition, Walter Bayes' monumental canvas The Underworld depicted figures sheltering in a London Underground station during an air raid. [10] Its sprawling alien figures predate Henry Moore's studies of sheltering figures in the Tube during the Blitz of World War II.
Walter Richard Sickert's The Integrity of Belgium, painted in October 1914, was, when exhibited in Burlington House in January 1915 at an exhibition in aid of the Red Cross, recognised as the first oil painting exhibited of a battle incident in the Great War. [10]
Among the great artists who tried to capture an essential element of war in painting was Society portraitist John Singer Sargent. In his large painting Gassed and in many watercolors, Sargent depicted scenes from the Great War. [21]
British painter Wyndham Lewis was appointed as an official war artist for both the Canadian and British governments, beginning work in December 1917 after Lewis' participation in the Third Battle of Ypres. For the Canadians he painted A Canadian Gun-Pit (1918, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) from sketches made on Vimy Ridge. For the British he painted one of his best known works, A Battery Shelled (1919, Imperial War Museum)(see ), drawing on his own experience in charge of a 6-inch howitzer at Ypres. Lewis exhibited his war drawings and some other paintings of the war in an exhibition, "Guns", in 1918.
An unlikely war artist was Sir Alfred Munnings, who is best known as a painter of purebred racehorses; but he turned his painter's skills to the task of capturing images of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade in the war. [22] His mounted portrait of General Jack Seely (later Lord Mottistone) on his charger Warrior achieved acclaim. [23] Forty-five of his canvasses were exhibited at the "Canadian War Records Exhibition" at the Royal Academy, [24] including Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron at Moreuil Wood in March 1918. Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew of Lord Strathcona's Horse cavalry, was awarded the Victoria Cross for leading the attack. [25]
Less well known are paintings which feature teams of work-horses in the staging areas behind the front lines with the Canadian Forestry Corps. [26] The artist later recalled these days in his autobiography:
British painter John Nash believed that "the artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe, and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye." [28]
The artist's most celebrated war painting is Over the Top (oil on canvas, 79.4 x 107.3 cm), now hanging in the Imperial War Museum in London. In this painting, the artist presents an image of the 30 December 1917 Welsh Ridge counter-attack, during which the 1st Battalion Artists Rifles (28th London Regiment) left their trenches and pushed towards Marcoing near Cambrai. Of the eighty men, sixty-eight were killed or wounded during the first few minutes. [29]
Nash himself was one of the twelve spared by the machine gun fire in the charge depicted in the painting. He created this artwork three months later. [29] The war artist crafted a chilling, harsh, vivid image. The painting offers a narrative of men moving forward despite the likelihood of not coming back alive:
Australian painter Arthur Streeton was an Australian Official War Artist with the Australian Imperial Force, holding the rank of lieutenant. He served in France attached to the 2nd Division.
Streeton brought something of the antipodes Heidelberg school sensibility to his paintings of an ANZAC battlefield in France.
Streeton's most famous war painting, Amiens the key of the west shows the Amiens countryside with dirty plumes of battlefield smoke staining the horizon, which becomes a subtle image of war.
As a war artist, Streeton continued to deal in landscapes and his works have been criticised for failing to concentrate on the fighting soldiers.
Streeton aimed to produce "military still life", capturing the everyday moments of the war. Streeton observed that, "True pictures of battlefields are very quiet looking things. There's nothing much to be seen, everybody and thing is hidden and camouflaged."
A sculpture by Charles Web Gilbert was designed as a part of the Mont St. Quentin Memorial which was dedicated in the mid-1920s at Mont St. Quentin, France. The original memorial to the men of the 2nd Australian Division features an heroic bronze statue of an Australian soldier bayoneting a German eagle. [31]
A bronze plaque on the pedestal of the monument reads: 'To the officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the 2nd Australian Division who fought in France and Belgium in the Great War 1916, 1917, 1918.'
The statue on top of the memorial and the bas reliefs on its sides, which were sculpted respectively by Lieutenant Charles Web Gilbert and May Butler-George, were removed by the occupying German Army in 1940. They were later replaced with a new statue and new reliefs. [31]
Iconic memorials created after the war are designed as symbols of remembrance and as carefully contrived works of art.
In London, the Guards Memorial was designed by the sculptor Gilbert Ledward in 1923–26. The edifice was erected on Horse Guards Parade and dedicated to the five Foot Guards regiments of World War I. The bronze figures were cast from guns from the Great War, commemorating the First Battle of Ypres and other battles. [32]
World War I has been the subject of numerous novels; by far the most well-known is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front , which presented a bleak view of the war from the German perspective.
The war was also the subject of well-known poetry, most notably by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both of whom served in the war (as did Remarque). Another notable poem is "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian soldier John McCrae, who also served in the war; it led to the use of the remembrance poppy as a symbol for soldiers who have died in war.
Several entire genres grew out of the disillusionment and disappointment of World War I. The hard-boiled detective novels of the 1920s featured bitter veteran protagonists. The horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft after the war showed a new sense of nihilism and despair in the face of an uncaring, chaotic cosmos, very unlike his more conventional horror before the war.
World War I was never quite so fertile a topic as World War II for American fiction, but there were nevertheless a large number of fictional works created about it in Europe, Canada, and Australia. Many war novels, however, have fallen out of print since their original. Numerous scholarly studies have covered the major fictional authors and writings. [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40]
Plays set during World War I include:
Over 100 films have been set, in whole or in part, in World War I. Among the most notable are:
There have been several television series and miniseries set during World War I.
In 1964, the British Broadcasting Corporation with cooperation from its counterparts with Australia and Canada, has a 26-part series called The Great War . It focused on the aspects of World War I.
The 1969 Doctor Who science fiction serial "The War Games" initially appears to be set in no man's land in World War I, although it is later revealed that British and German soldiers from World War I have been transported to an alien planet along with the armies of other historical wars from human history.
The fourth series of the 1971–75 British television drama Upstairs, Downstairs , which aired in 1974, was set during the years of World War I and showed the war's effects from the perspective of a townhouse in London.
The 1985 Australian miniseries Anzacs was about members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during World War I and the 2015 miniseries Gallipoli was about the Gallipoli campaign.
Blackadder Goes Forth , the fourth and final series of the British sitcom Blackadder , which aired in 1989, presented a satirical view of the war and the British military.
My Boy Jack was a 2007 television film, adapted from the play of the same name, about Rudyard Kipling's son, who was killed in France. [41] [42]
The second season of the British television drama Downton Abbey , which aired in 2011, showed the effects of the war mostly from the perspective of the eponymous estate. The season particularly focused on how great houses in Britain served as convalescent homes during the war. [43]
World War I is used for the season 2 episode "The War to End All Wars" of the NBC series Timeless . In the episode, Rufus and Wyatt travel to World War I on September 14, 1918, to save Lucy from Rittenhouse.
In addition:
There have been comparably few games set during World War I. Many of those that have been made focused on the air war, such as Sopwith from 1984. However, NecroVision is one of the few first person shooters games set in World War I, where the player fights on known battlefields during the war, such as the Somme. Call of Duty: Black Ops II 's final DLC pack features "Origins", a zombie map that is set in a dieselpunk France during World War I.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War was released by Ubisoft in 2014. The game is about four characters who help a German soldier find his true love. This adventure is inspired by letters written during World War I.
While not many video games are set during World War I there has been a considerable amount of modifications for other games that change these either partially or completely into the World War I setting (such as "The Great War" mod for Napoleon: Total War ).
On May 7, 2016, EA DICE revealed Battlefield 1 , a first-person shooter video game primarily set in World War I featuring the Harlem Hellfighters, the Red Baron and Lawrence of Arabia. It was released on October 21, 2016, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
In the 2019 game Death Stranding , player character Sam Porter Bridges encounters hostile skeletal soldiers in American World War I-era uniforms within a World War I trench.
Other examples include:
The years from 2014 to 2019 represented the centennial of the First World War. Over this period, several groups commemorated individuals, battles, and movements connected to the war, often with an emphasis on national identities. [44]
The Menin Gate, officially the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, is a war memorial in Ypres, Belgium, dedicated to the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are unknown. The memorial is located at the eastern exit of the town and marks the starting point for one of the main roads that led Allied soldiers to the front line.
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W. Nevinson, and was also known as Richard.
Military art is art with a military subject matter, regardless of its style or medium. The battle scene is one of the oldest types of art in developed civilizations, as rulers have always been keen to celebrate their victories and intimidate potential opponents. The depiction of other aspects of warfare, especially the suffering of casualties and civilians, has taken much longer to develop. As well as portraits of military figures, depictions of anonymous soldiers on the battlefield have been very common; since the introduction of military uniforms such works often concentrate on showing the variety of these.
A war artist is an artist either commissioned by a government or publication, or self-motivated, to document first-hand experience of war in any form of illustrative or depictive record. War artists explore the visual and sensory dimensions of war, often absent in written histories or other accounts of warfare.
Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton was an Australian landscape painter and a leading member of the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism.
Paul Nash was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.
Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, was an Irish artist who mainly worked in London. Orpen was a fine draughtsman and a popular, commercially successful painter of portraits for the well-to-do in Edwardian society, though many of his most striking paintings are self-portraits.
Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator and designer.
William Frederick Longstaff was an Australian painter and war artist best known for his works commemorating those who died in the First World War.
Sir Alfred James Munnings, is known as having been one of England's finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken critic of Modernism. Engaged by Lord Beaverbrook's Canadian War Memorials Fund after the Great War, he earned several prestigious commissions, which made him wealthy. Between 1912 and 1914 he was a member of the Newlyn School of artists. His work was part of the art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics, the 1932 Summer Olympics, and the 1948 Summer Olympics.
Eric Henri Kennington was an English sculptor, artist and illustrator, and an official war artist in both of the world wars.
The use of horses in World War I marked a transitional period in the evolution of armed conflict. Cavalry units were initially considered essential offensive elements of a military force, but over the course of the war, the vulnerability of horses to modern machine gun, mortar, and artillery fire reduced their utility on the battlefield. This paralleled the development of tanks, which ultimately replaced cavalry in shock tactics. While the perceived value of the horse in war changed dramatically, horses still played a significant role throughout the war.
British official war artists were a select group of artists who were employed on contract, or commissioned to produce specific works during the First World War, the Second World War and select military actions in the post-war period. Official war artists have been appointed by governments for information or propaganda purposes and to record events on the battlefield; but there are many other types of war artist.
Canadian official war artists create an artistic rendering of war through the media of visual, digital installations, film, poetry, choreography, music, etc., by showing its impact as men and women are shown waiting, preparing, fighting, suffering, celebrating. These traditionally were a select group of artists who were employed on contract, or commissioned to produce specific works during the First World War, the Second World War and select military actions in the post-war period. The four Canadian official war art programs are: the First World War Canadian War Memorials Fund (CWMF), the Second World War Canadian War Records (CWR), the Cold War Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program (CAFCAP), and the current Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP).
Australian official war artists are those who have been expressly employed by either the Australian War Memorial (AWM) or the Army Military History Section. These artist soldiers depicted some aspect of war through art; this might be a pictorial record or it might commemorate how war shapes lives.
Colin Unwin Gill was an English artist who painted murals and portraits and is most notable for the work he produced as a war artist during the First World War.
The Hall of Remembrance was a series of paintings and sculptures commissioned, in 1918, by the British War Memorials Committee of the British Ministry of Information in commemoration of the dead of World War I.
The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28 June 1919 is an oil-on-canvas painting by Irish artist William Orpen, completed in 1919. It was one of the paintings commissioned from Orpen to commemorate the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919. The work is held by the Imperial War Museum in London.
The Menin Road is a large oil painting by Paul Nash completed in 1919 that depicts a First World War battlefield. Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to paint a battlefield scene for the proposed national Hall of Remembrance. The painting is considered one of the most iconic images of the First World War and is held by the Imperial War Museum.
