I make no claims to being an art critic, and I generally loathe modern art, but to my eye, it is clear that the avant-garde artists of the First World War captured some of its essence. Most clear is the dynamism of many of their paintings. Here's a selection pieces from the pre- to postwar years.
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| Ludwig Meidner, "Apocalyptic Landscape," 1913 |
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| Man Ray, "A.D. 1914," 1914 |
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| Marsden Hartley "Painting Nr. 5," 1914–1915 |
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| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner "Self-Portrait as a Soldier," 1915 |
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| Gino Severini "Cannon in Action," 1915 |
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| Pierre Albert-Birot "The War,"1916 |
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| Gert Heinrich Wollheim "The Wounded Person," 1919 |
The Curator at Madrid's Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza 2008 show "The Avant-Garde and the Great War" made these comments for the catalog:
The period inmediately prior to the outbreak of war in 1914 coincided with a highpoint of activity among the avant-garde movements. In addition, the experience of World War I exercised a powerful influence on the work of numerous artist during this period from the main artistic movements of the day — Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Abstraction, etc. Often the works are prophetic or apocalyptic.
The thing about art produced during the Great War, is that the overwhelming majority of pieces were not modernist in any way all. Most was still in the traditional style.
ReplyDeleteWe have simply been trained or forced by museum curators, art dealers and other people who make their living from selling or exhibiting or writing about art, to think that modernist art was the only acceptable form of art to appreciate.
As the decades pass and after that centuries, modernist 20th century art will come to be seen as a temporary aberration in the history of art, a sideshow, a side-track and dead-end, a temporary amusement or catharsis, brought on by the collective social insanity of the war itself.
The above examples of paintings are not at all what the great masses of people would have seen during or after the war years. Realistic, representational art would still have been the predominant art style in all the media ...
I concur, citing John Singer Sargent's "Gassed" presently housed in the Imperial Art Museum in London.
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