BIOGRAPHY: A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great WarBy David Boyd Hancock Old Street Publishing, 386pp. £20
THE EARLY Years of the 20th century were full of promise. Barriers of class and gender were breaking down; technology offered a new world of ever-increasing speed and mechanisation; women cut their hair, wore trousers and looked forward to the vote. In the pubs and salons of London, artists and writers debated endlessly how to represent the new century, whether to maintain a truly English approach or to embrace Futurism, Cubism and the other “isms” of continental Europe.
Then, on Tuesday August 4th, 1914, war broke out. In a Britain that was more concerned with events in Ireland than with those in Germany, it took people by surprise. For the five young artists in this book, it was of less interest than the latest drama in their own circle, in which the promising young painter John Currie had shot first his lover then himself.
The five artists are Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Richard Nevinson. They all passed through the Slade art school, lashed by Professor Henry Tonks, who saw drawing as the foundation of art and warned his students not to risk the “contamination” of modern French painting. Nash kept aloof from the London art scene and Spencer went home to Cookham for tea, but the other three were bound into a tight triangle of friendship, love, rivalry and jealously. Gertler fell in love with Carrington (as she liked to be called), as did Nevinson. Carrington then fell in love with the Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey, who was gay and so spared her the unpleasant necessity of sexual intercourse.
A group biography, using a few individuals to illuminate a wider situation, is an interesting but difficult formula. Too often, the reader is defeated by the constant shuffling of characters and events, and so fails to develop a relationship with the protagonists. Boyd Hancock deals with this admirably by introducing his artists one by one and establishing each personality before moving on to the next. Writing with style and economy, he successively integrates the individuals within the broader picture and shows how each responded to the crisis of war.
As a woman, Carrington was an observer not a participant, but the other four artists were confronted by a stark choice: to paint or to fight. Mark Gertler was in a particularly unhappy situation: neurotic and undersized, he was also Jewish and foreign, the son of a poor immigrant family from Galicia, on the borders of Poland and the Ukraine. This parentage, along with his weak health, enabled him to escape conscription but he made his own contribution, telling Carrington that "The best way we can help is to paint". His wartime masterpiece, The Merry Go Round, shows soldiers and civilians clamped to their wooden steeds, their mouths agape in a rictus of terror.
The first to join up was Paul Nash. He volunteered for the home service and was eventually sent to the Front in 1917. The horrors that he experienced marked him as an artist and a man for the rest of his life, but by a “queer lucky accident” he broke a rib a week before the “Big Push” and was invalided out.
Stanley Spencer, diminutive, homely and dedicated to his art, resisted the pressure as long as possible. “It is not”, he said, “that we might have an unpleasant time; it is that it means a complete disorganization of our work perhaps ruination to it”. But in the end he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and then the Royal Berkshires as an infantryman. Dispatched to Macedonia, he discovered unexpected strengths within himself and also the subject matter of one of his greatest paintings.
The most complex response to the war can be seen in Richard Nevinson. A disciple of the Italian Futurists, he declared that “All artists should go to the front to strengthen their art by a worship of physical and moral courage” and to “free themselves from the canker of professors”. But his brief experience of the battlefield – 10 grim months with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit – soon expunged the glamour of war.
Nevinson returned to the Front, as did Nash, when the Official War Artists Scheme was introduced. It gave them access to the trenches and a surprisingly free rein to report on what they found. Their response was a body of work that depicted the birth throes of the new century and transformed the way we feel about war.
Up to that point, public perceptions had been shaped by Lady Elizabeth Butler’s stirring depictions of imperial gallantry, with red-coated cavalrymen, gleaming helmets and flashing sabres (astonishingly, she continued to paint like this right through the first World War). But Nevinson, using the language of Cubism and Futurism, showed men as grey automatons locked into the machinery of destruction. Nash, meanwhile, depicted a world that was literally torn apart, with the skeletons of blasted trees reaching imploringly out of the glutinous mud and stinking pools of water: “I am no longer an artist, interested and curious,” he wrote, “I am a messenger . . . Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth.”
Lucy Trench is Interpretation Editor at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her book on the VA will be published this autumn
