Art and the First World War
From Irish Marxist Review 10
The images for this article have not appeared. The article WITH the images can be read at http://www.irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/124/126.
The images for this article have not appeared. The article WITH the images can be read at http://www.irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/124/126.
Art reflects society. This statement, which is based on a core proposition of historical materialism, is fundamentally true – all art has its roots in developing human social relations – but it is also a condensation of a very complex interaction. This is because the social relations that art reflects are antagonistic relations of exploitation, oppression and resistance. So we should also remember Brecht’s words that "Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it".
In Europe in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance art ‘reflected’ society in that a huge amount of it was
commissioned by the church and religious subject matter was predominant. But
this didn’t stop Michelangelo, for example, using an ostensibly religious
subject, such as David, to express both revolt of the people of Florence against rule by the Medici bankers
and homoeroticism. Rembrandt ‘reflected’ the early bourgeois society of the 17th
century Dutch Republic by painting numerous portraits of
Dutch burghers but also drew attention to, and showed his sympathy with, the
outcasts of that society in his etchings of beggars. Constable ‘reflected’ the
industrial revolution sweeping Britain at the time not by painting factories but
by painting the English landscape as a rural idyll, much as Wordsworth and
Coleridge took off to the Lake District. William Morris expressed his hatred
for late Victorian capitalism by celebrating the visual culture medieval Europe.
A very
large amount of art, in many different countries, reflected the cataclysm of
the First World War but it did so in a wide variety of ways.
But first
we should see this in historical perspective. War has been an important theme
in art since war became a central feature of human society – with the division
of society into classes and the development of the state. Thus in the art of
Pharaonic Egypt we find depictions of Ramses II in his war chariot; in Ancient
Greece numerous representations of the Trojan wars in sculptures and on vases;
in medieval Florence Paulo Ucello gives us ‘The Battle of San Romano’, which
also pioneers the development of single point perspective. !7th
century Dutch art features a whole school of maritime paintings which
specializes in naval battles (reflecting the major role played by sea power in
the Dutch Revolt and in the establishment of the Dutch Republic with its empire
stretching from New Amsterdam to Batavia.
The
overwhelming majority of all these art works, whether they are masterpieces or
mediocre, do not just depict war, they celebrate it. ‘The ruling ideas in
society are the ideas of the ruling class’, says Marx, ‘The class which
has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same
time over the means of mental production’, and this applies even more strongly
to painting and sculpture than to poetry and literature, because of its
dependence on commissions, on wall space in palaces, churches and public
buildings and its embodiment in very expensive physical materials (eg marble
and bronze). Consequently, from the
Parthenon marbles depiction of the Battle of the Centaurs and the Chinese
Terracotta Army, through Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari, Titian’s portrait
of Charles V at the Battle of Marburg, to David’s Oath of the Horatii and Napoleon
Crossing the Alps, and Lady Elizabeth Butler’s Scotland Forever!, we find literally innumerable works glorifying
war and military leaders. 18th and 19th century British
art, in particular, is filled with (generally second rate) paintings recording
the progress of Britain’s military exploits and colonial conquests – Woolf at
Quebec, Clive of India, Nelson, Wellington, Gordon at Khartoum, the Battle of
Omdurman and so on.
The only important exception to this pattern is provided by
Goya’s extraordinary series of etchings The
Disasters of War born out of his direct experience of the Spanish peasants’
resistance to Napoleon’s occupying army. To this day these brutal works remain
the most searing sustained indictment of the inhumanity and horror of war in
the history of art. But as I said they were absolutely an exception – until the
First World War.
Before we come to how that change occurred we need briefly
to review the development of art leading up to the War.
Modernism, Futurism and
Vorticism
The emergence of modern art dates roughly from the mid-19th
century with Courbet and Manet, followed by the Impressionists (Monet,
Pissarro, Sisley etc), Symbolists (Redon, Moreau, Klimpt) and
post-impressionists (Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh). In the early 20th
century this development accelerated and, in artistic terms, radicalized with
the swift and overlapping succession of avant-garde movements such as the
Viennese Secession, Fauvism, Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, Die Brucke and Die
Blau Reiter (Expressionism), Orphism, Futurism, Rayonism, Vorticism and the
beginnings of abstract art with Kandinsky[1].
Artistically it was cubism that was to prove the most profound and most
important of these movements[2]
but in the years just leading up to the War it was Futurism that held centre
stage and made the biggest impact in avant-garde artistic circles across
Europe.
Futurism was a poetic and artistic movement founded in Milan
in 1909 by the Italian poet, Felippo Marinetti who authored its grandiloquent
manifesto. Futurism was a response to the dramatic eruption of modernity –
modern industrial capitalism concentrated in Italy’s
northern cities – within traditional Italian society. It denounced the past and
all its works in favour of the new and the modern, enthusiastically and
uncritically celebrating the machine, speed, the automobile and the aeroplane.
With a great fanfare Marinetti’s manifesto declares:
1. We intend to sing the
love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and
revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has
exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive
action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and
the slap.
4. We affirm that the
world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A
racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive
breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the
Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who
hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend
himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor
of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle,
there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a
masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to
reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why
should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of
the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute,
because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
Given the historic moment, the extraordinary burst of
urbanization combined with electrification and numerous other startling
technical innovations and scientific breakthroughs, the appeal of this
one-sided intoxication with the machine and speed is not hard to understand.
And it managed to inspire some powerful works of art such as Boccioni’s
sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in
Space and Balla’s Abstract Sound +Speed. However, the
Manifesto went on to say:
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth
dying for, and scorn for woman.
Here we see revealed the reactionary arrogance, brutality
and incipient fascism that lay at the heart of Italian Futurism[3]. In
the event the eagerly anticipated War was to claim the lives of a number of
Futurist artists, most notably Umberto Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia,
and destroy Futurism as an art movement. Marinetti’s militarist bravado could
not survive the brutal reality of the war experience, at least not as an
inspiration for avant-garde art.
Much the same happened with the British incarnation of
Futurism, namely Vorticism. The Vorticist art movement was formed in 1914 by
the artist and writer, Wyndham Lewis, in loose association with a number of
other artists including David Bomberg, William Roberts, Christopher Nevinson,
Henri Gaudier-Bresca, Jacob Epstein and Edward Wadsworth. The aesthetic of
Vorticism , as displayed in its magazine BLAST[4]
was a combination of cubism and futurism but Lewis’s general world view and
attitude to war was similar to that of Marinetti. Nevinson was also strongly
influenced by Marinetti and another influence on Vorticism was the poet, Ezra
Pound, who gave it its name. Like Marinetti, Pound went on to become a fascist
and Mussolini supporter. Vorticism did not survive the war. A number of the
artists went to war and some became official war artists but the war changed
their attitudes and their art practice.[5]
Nevinson, Nash and
others
The two most important British war artists were Christopher
Nevinson and Paul Nash. Between them they produced some of the most powerful
depictions and expressions of the horrific reality of the war.
Nevinson was the son of a war correspondent and a
suffragette. He trained as an artist the Slade School of Art. At the start of
the war Nevinson joined and ambulance unit where he tended wounded French
soldiers and for a while served as a volunteer ambulance driver. In January 1915
ill health forced his return to Britain
but he was later made an official war artist and returned for a while to the
Western Front.
At first he used a Futurist and Vorticist approach to
produce extremely effective representations of soldiering which did not
romanticize or glorify war but also stopped short of actually showing the
slaughter. Probably the best example of his work at this period was La
Mitrailleuse which his fellow artist, Walter Sickert, called ‘probably the most
authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting’[6].
C W R Nevinson French Soldiers Resting C W R Nevinson La Mitrailleuse
But Nevinson was deeply affected by his work with the wounded,
especially a group he found more or less dumped and left to die in a shed
outside Dunkirk. The memory of this
haunted him and it was some time before he found the strength to depict it. The
result when he did was a dark brooding and compassionate painting ironically
entitled La Patrie in which no trace
of Futurist enthusiasm remains.
C.W.R. Nevinson La Patrie, 1916
At first when he
became an official war artist Nevinson seemed to lose his critical edge, and
focused on relatively sanitized images of aerial combat, but when, after a
while, he produced tougher images he immediately fell foul of army censorship.
In particular they refused to permit him to exhibit his 1917 work Paths of Glory on the grounds that it
showed British dead.
C W R Nevinson, Paths
of Glory, (1917.).
Significantly this work was straightforwardly naturalist and
showed no trace of Futurist/Vorticist influence.
Paul Nash, whose work is described by Richard Cork as ‘the
most impressive… made by any British artist during the conflict’ [7]
was a very different case from Nevinson. Before the war Nash was a rather
anaemic water colourist and landscape painter with no radical or avant-garde
tendencies. The experience of the war transformed him and by November 1917 he
was writing to his wife:
I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who
will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to
go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a
bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.[8] What Nash did to convey his message, and get round the problem of the censor at the same time, was use landscape in such a way show the full horror of the war without depicting dead soldiers.
Paul Nash The Wire (1917)
Paul Nash We are Making a New World (1918)
Paul Nash, The Menin Road
(1919)
No one looking at these pictures of land that has been
tormented and tortured can fail to grasp that they are gazing on killing fields
of appalling dimensions.
Some of the most haunting images of the war – they are close
to unbearable to look at – come from a very unlikely source. Henry Tonks was a
surgeon who became Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Art where he
taught amongst others Augustus John, GGwen John, Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer,
David Bomberg, John Nash and William Orpen. When war broke out he resumed his
medical career and in 1916 became a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps
. This led him to produce pastel drawings recording facial injury cases.
Henry Tonks, Faces of Battle, 1916
Here the most straightforward artistic naturalism turns,
simply by virtue of the reality it depicts, into a devastating indictment of
the war.
Many British artists – William Orpen, John Nash, Stanley
Spencer, William Roberts, David Bomberg and others produced war related work –
but the dramatic effect of the First
World War on British art is, perhaps
best summed up by the example John Singer Sargent. Before the war Sargent was
one of London’s most successful
society portraitists painting pictures like this:
Serving as a war artist turned him into the painter of this:
John Singer Sargent, Gassed,
1919.
From Franz Marc to
George Grosz
The story of art on the other side of no-man’s land is not,
of course, the same but it is remarkable similar. In pre-war Germany
it was Expressionism rather than Futurism that was artistically dominant but
there were a number of links between the two tendencies (particularly via the
influence of Kandinsky and Robert Delauney). In addition the powerful influence
of the philosophy of Nietzsche ensured that there was no shortage of artists
willing to greet the outbreak of war as a great ‘cleansing’ and ‘purification’.[9]
Two examples are August Macke and Franz Marc, founding
members in 1911 (along with Kandinsky) of the Expression avant-garde group, Der
Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Prior to the war both produced work that was
brightly coloured, optimistic even ‘exalted’.
August Macke, Girl with
Blue Birds, 1914.
Franz Marc, Little
Yellow Horses, (1912).
In his major study of the period Richard Cork writes of
Macke
Like so many of his
contemporaries, he greeted the declaration of war with an initial enthusiasm
that led him to anticipate ‘walloping’ the French in August…. (Max) Ernst
recalled, ‘Influenced by Futurism, he accepted war not only as the most
grandiose manifestation of the modern age but also as a philosophical
necessity’. [10]
His close friend, Franz Marc, took a similar view and both
signed up to fight. But both were rapidly disillusioned by the reality. Cork
continues:
Macke was sent with his Rhineland
Regiment to France
on 8 August. Whatever Nietzschean illusions he may have harboured about the purgative
value of war were quickly destroyed. ‘It is all so ghastly that I don’t want to
tell you about it’, he wrote to his wife.[11]
Within two months Macke, after fighting in seven battles,
was dead – to the dismay of Marc. Eighteen months later Marc was also killed,
at Verdun, but not before he
produced a bleak ‘Sketchbook from the Battlefield’ including The Greedy Mouth which shows the war as
a strange devouring monster.
Another example is the expressionist sculptor, Ernst
Barlach, for whom it was a ‘holy war’
which he depicted as a charging swordsman of ferocious power.
Ernst
Barlach, The Avenger, (1914)
Three
months participation as an infantry soldier in 1915 (after which he was
invalided out) was enough to turn Barlach into a convinced opponent of the War
and this so influenced all his subsequent work that he was later denounced by
the Nazis as a ‘degenerate’ artist.
Many other
German artists went through this transformation. Max Slevogt is a case that
parallels John Singer Sargent. Before the war he was a painter of pleasant
impressionist landscapes. He became an official war artist and what he saw
turned him into an artist who produced searing indictments of the slaughter.
Max
Slevogt, The Country House in Max Slevogt, Paroxysm of Destruction
Godramstein. 1912. (Spectres
fight with their own Severed Limbs)
1916.
Otto Dix was an enthusiastic volunteer in 1914 and fought on
the Western and Eastern Fronts, including at the Somme,
until his discharge in December 1918. But after the war nightmarish prints that
are reminiscent of Goya in their unflinching depiction of the brutality of war.
Otto Dix, Wounded Man, 1916 Otto Dix, Storm Troopers
advancing
Under a Gas Attack, 1924.
Kathe Kollwitz is in some ways a special case because of her
politics, artistic style, gender and
different, gender related, experience. As a committed socialist (and member of
the SPD) she was producing naturalistic, or one could say social realist,
depictions of working people, the poor and their sufferings long before the
war. She was not really part of the expressionist, cubist or futurist
avant-garde and, perhaps for personal biographical reasons (the death of her
siblings. including her younger brother Benjamin) death, grief and mourning
were always central themes in her work. One of her most powerful pieces, Woman with Dead Child, dates from 1903.
Despite this she initially supported the war, doubtless influenced by the SPD,
but then in October 1914 her son, Peter, was killed on the battlefield and this
sent her into prolonged depression. However, she turned profoundly against the
war and eventually came to the conclusion ‘that Karl Liebknecht was proved
right’.[12]
Her artistic response to the war focused not on the horror of battle but on the
grief of widows and mothers.
Kathe Kollwitz, The Survivors, (1919) Kathe Kollwitz, Widows and Orphans,
(1919)
Perhaps the
most radical of all the war artists was George Grosz who viewed the war with
hostility from the start and already in 1914 produced an ink drawing, Pandemonium, which depicted crowds in
the grip of ‘patriotic’ frenzy and war fever. In 1915 he made a series of
drawings and lithographs which, in the words of Richard Cork, were ‘obsessed
with corpses’ such as Battlefield with
Dead Soldiers and The Shell. But
what also distinguished Grosz was the satirical savagery with which he depicted
the profiteers and bourgeois whom he held responsible for the war.
George
Grosz, Pandemonium, 1914 George
Grosz, The Explosion, 1916
George
Grosz, For the Rich the Booty,
George Grosz, These War Invalids are
For the
Poor the Curse of War, 1919. Becoming a Positive Pest!, 1920.
Grosz was
an active revolutionary as well as an artist. He took part in the Spartacist
Rising of January 1919 and went on to be a founder member of the German
Communist Party.
The Dadaist Response
What has
been presented here is, necessarily, a highly selective sample of the vast
amount of art generated by the First World War in all the belligerent
countries. A huge number of artists produced war related work – John Nash,
Stanley Spencer, William Roberts, William Orpen, Albin Egger-Lienz, Oscar
Kokoshka, Natalia Goncharova, Max Beckmann, George Leroux, Fernand Leger, Pierre
Bonnard and Felix Vallotton are just a few of those not specifically discussed.here..
Consequently a comprehensive survey is completely beyond the range of this
article. What I have tried to show is a) the general trajectory of war art at
the time, which was overwhelmingly in the direction of opposition to the war
and b) some of what I consider to be the most powerful images.
However,
there is one further and very different artistic reaction to the war which
needs to be highlighted – that of the Dadaist movement. At the start of this
article I noted that Constable ‘reflected’ the industrial revolution by
painting its opposite, the English countryside, my point being that the fact
that the relationship between art and its social context is often complex and
dialectical does not make that relationship any the less real. Dadaism
responded to the war not by depicting its battles or its horrors but with its
own iconoclastic revolt against all past and existing culture.
Dada was founded
in early 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich by a group of artists and poets who
included Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco
and Hans Richter. As Dawn Ades notes, ‘It was essentially an international
movement: of the Zurich Dadaists, Tzara and Janco were Rumanian, Arp Alsatian,
Ball, Richter and Huelsenbeck were German.’[13]
What brought them to Zurich was the same thing that brought
Lenin there – its location in neutral Switzerland. The participant, Hans Richter,
observes:
To
understand the climate in which Dada began, it is necessary to recall how much
freedom there was in Zurich, even during a world war. The
Cabaret Voltaire played and raised hell at No.1 Spiegelgasse. Diagonally
opposite, at No.12 Spiegelgasse, the same narrow thoroughfare in which the
Cabaret Voltaire mounted its nightly orgies of singing, poetry and dancing,
lived Lenin. Radek, Lenin and Zinoviev were allowed complete liberty… It seemed to me the Swiss authorities were
much more suspicious of the Dadaists, who after all were capable of
perpetrating some new enormity at any moment, than of those quiet studious
Russians … even though the latter were planning a world revolution.[14]
Dada was
born out of disgust at the war. Richard Huelsenberg wrote in 1920, ‘we were
agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most
autocratic, sordid and materialist reasons’[15]
Whereas Lenin and his comrades aimed to turn the imperialist war into a civil
war and thus overthrow capitalism, the Dadaists declared war on the art and
culture of a rotten society believing that it was irredeemably corrupted and
complicit. To all official and established art they counterposed the defiant
and nihilistic gesture, art that claimed to be anti-art.
The idea of destroying bourgeois art with art
or with gestures was always an illusion – capitalist society and the capitalist
art world has demonstrated again and again its ability to incorporate this kind
of artistic rebellion. And viewed in retrospect the actual art works produced
by the Zurich Dadaists do not stand out as exceptionally radical,
outlandish or extreme within the story
of modern art. Nor do they appear as in any way protests against the war.
Hans
Richter, Autumn, 1917.
Marcel Janco, Dance, 1916.
Nevertheless
the Dada concept and the Dada attitude proved highly fertile in terms of the
development of modern art in the 20th century. Within a few years
there were Dadaist groups in Berlin, New York, Paris, Cologne and other cities involving artists
as diverse as Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, George Grosz and John Heartfield (
the great photomontage artist). Dada typography was taken up by Russian
constructivism. Dada also led directly to Surrealism, perhaps the most
important and influential avant garde art movement after World War I. And in
New York Dadaism produced the genuinely iconoclastic work of Marcel Duchamp,
which really did change the course of modern art and our whole understanding of
what constitutes art.
Marcel
Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 Marcel Duchamp,
L.H.O.O.Q
Causes and Consequences
Having thus
shown the profound effect of the First World War on European art at the time,
it remains to try to say why this
happened, why the artistic response to the war was so qualitatively different
to any previous war (war, after all, has always involved immense brutality) and
then to reflect on longer term
consequences of this.
When it is
matter of understanding why art developed as it did Marxism, with its
historical materialist method, comes into its own. As Trotsky wrote:
It is very true that one cannot always go by
the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of
art. A work of art should in the first place be judged by its own law, that is,
by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency
in art has originated in a given period of history.[16]
Nevertheless,
even with the aid of historical materialism, such explanation, seeking to show
the relationship between general social historical development and specific
developments within in the history of art, must involve a certain element of
speculation. As Marx noted:
It is always necessary to
distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and
the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it
out[17]
In this case I think we can identify the convergence of two
main historical phenomena: the changed social position of artists and the
specific nature of the war.
From about 1848, when the bourgeoisie lost its role as a
revolutionary class and moved firmly into the camp of reaction, a split opened
up between the more advanced artists and the aristocratic/ bourgeois ruling
classes. Beginning with Courbet and progressing through the Impressionists to
the likes of Seurat, Van Gogh, and Toulouse Lautrec the artists, in Clement
Greenberg’s phrase ‘migrated to Bohemia’.
We are not talking about proletarian art here – the artists remain
predominantly of middle class origin and petty bourgeois in their objective
class position[18] – but
in many cases they live and work along side the working class and the poor and
this is reflected in the art – its subjects and their treatment. Courbet paints
stone breakers and supports the Paris Commune, Seurat depicts workers on the
banks of the Seine, Van Gogh paints peasants and postmen
not kings and emperors, and Picasso’s blue period gives us the Parisian poor.
The development of capitalist society with its growing educated middle class
also made it more possible for artists to survive, albeit with difficulty, by
selling their work, independently of state, church or ruling class patronage.[19] In art, as in life, there were right wing as
well as left wing tendencies but both right and left were in some sense in
revolt against the old order. Thus, the late 19th and early 20th
century prepared the ground for artistic revolt against the war.
However, the main factor was undoubtedly the character of
the war itself. The imperialist nature of the war and the absence of a
significant element of national liberation was important in that, once the
early illusions disappeared, there was widespread perception that it ‘wasn’t
worth it’ and that lives were being sacrificed ‘for nothing’ i.e. for no
legitimate political or moral purpose. But history had long been replete with
brutal dynastic and imperialist wars, without producing anti-war art. Here the
sheer scale and duration of the war, and of the slaughter, was hugely
important. Previous wars had fought largely either by mercenaries or relatively
small professional armies and even if they lasted a long time consisted of a
series of battle of shortish duration. There was no precedent for the mass
conscription and prolonged war of position in trenches that dominated the First
World War.
This meant,
as we have seen in our brief survey, that significant numbers of artists were
drawn into the war as participants, and became casualties, in a way that had
not happened before. The enormous casualty rate also ensured that the war
reached back into and affected the whole of society. When in his ‘Anthem for
Doomed Youth’, the poet Wilfred Owen evokes the image of young men drawn from
‘sad shires’ and ‘the drawing down of blinds’ we see this happening all across England. No town or village, scarcely a
family, remained untouched by the catastrophe.
Thus
history created both a supply of potentially anti-war artists and a social
demand for anti-war art. Moreover the shift from initial, naïve, enthusiasm to
bitter disillusionment and opposition which we have seen among artists was a
reflection a much wider societal reaction.
When it
comes to consequences we can note three main things. First, the profusion of
anti-war art became part (a small part, of course, compared to the revolt of
the masses) of the struggle against the war, not just ‘a mirror to reflect
reality but a hammer to shape it’.
Second, the
art, like the poetry and novels, helped to fix the image of the war as a
disaster in the popular consciousness and social memory, thus making it much
more difficult to rehabilitate it or retrospectively ‘celebrate’ it. Third, it
put an end – one cannot say ‘forever’ but up to the present and for the
foreseeable future – to art that seeks to romanticise or glorify war and that
is a small but permanent step forward.
[1] The pivotal role of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon in this
process is discussed in John Molyneux, ‘A revolution in paint: 100 years of
Picasso’s 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, London 1969.
[3] In 1919 Marinetti was to co-write
another famous manifesto – the Fascist
Manifesto of Benito Mussolini.
[4] BLAST was edited by Lewis. Only two
issues appeared, one in Summer 1914 and one in 1915, but they had a lasting
impact on British art.
[5] With the partial exception of
Wyndham Lewis.
[7] Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde
Art and the Great War, Yale University Press, 1994, p.196.
[9] The backing of the war by German
Social Democracy was also a significant factor in securing the initial support
of many artists including Katthe Kollwitz who will be discussed later.
[10] Richard Cork, as above, p.42
[11] As above, p.43.
[12] Karl Liebknecht, close comrade of
Rosa Luxemburg, voted 1 out of 111 SPD Reichstag deputies against War Credits.
He went on to form the Spartakus League (forerunner of the German Communist
Party, and participate in the Spartakus Rising in the German Revolution. As a
result he, along with Rosa Luxemburg, was murdered by counter revolutionary
Freikorps in January 1919. Kollwitz marked his death with a powerful woodcut, Memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht.
[13] Dawn Ades, ‘Dada and Surrealism’ in
Nikos Stangos ed., Concepts of Modern Art,
London 1981, p.111.
[15] Cited in Dawn Ades, as above, p.111.
[17] K.Marx, !859 Preface, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
[18] In 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.
[19] In a way that was not possible for
Goya or Velasquez or Michelangelo.
1 comment:
Great essay. Note however the images don't seem to be loading and it therefore took me at least thrice the time to read, having to google each image individually! More time to ponder the subject matter I suppose though eh...
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