Tag: WW1

Art for Victory

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 14th March 2019

Photograph of WW1 Dazzel Ships at sea.

Camouflage and its part in WW1 has a curious and quaint history. Most people know of the dazzle ships and how the painter Norman Wilkinson found that painting the ships not to fit in made them harder to target by the enemy. But other areas of WW1 where more subtle.

Leon Underwood – Looking Toward Ardregne, 1917

It was another artist, Leon Underwood who worked with Solomon J Solomon on making a fake tree Observation post. With so much of the war being fixed with both sides in trenches, any height was an advantage to see what the enemy was up to. You can see how trees ended up looking after months of shell-fire from the Paul Nash painting below, a fractured set of stumps piercing the sky.

Paul Nash – The Menin Road, 1919

The plans for the Trees were drawn out in blue print to look like Shelled Trees and then would be transported to the place and erected side-wards and hope the enemy didn’t notice one new tree on the horizon

Construction blueprint plan of the Observation Tree.

Below is a photograph of one of the trees in the state of manufacture. In front of the men are the shredded crowns of the trees.

Below is another photograph of a tree in situ on the field with a warren for the men to get in and out of. In the side would be a slit for the men to look out of, rather than looking over the top.

The painting below is a large Leon Underwood of how the tree was erected, foundations laid into the side of a trench so men could get under and in, others carrying the sides ready to be grafted together.

What I like about the camouflaged tree is how bonkers it is but also how obvious. Below is a painting in the epic, almost religious style by Leon Underwood, not unlike Jesus at the Cross.

Leon Underwood – Erecting a Camouflage Tree, 1919

Tags Leon Underwood, WW1

Nevinson in the Air

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 18th October 2017

C.R.W Nevinson – Pursuing a Taube, 1915

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson started the First World War working for the Red Cross. His work as an ambulance driver took him to the epicentre of the carnage and it’s effects of the war. His time was spent in France working in a disused goods shed converted to a make-shift hospital for up to 3000 men off the railway station in Dunkirk.

Nevinson contracted rheumatic fever in January of 1915 and returned to Britain to recover. During his recovery he started to paint from his sketches and studies made in France on the front lines and trenches for an exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in March 1916 and then at the Leicester Galleries in September.

By 1915 the theory that art and war could thrive together seemed to convert convincingly into practice as C. R. W. Nevinson, England’s only Futurist disciple and coauthor (with Marinetti) of Viral English Art, advocated upon his return from the front (from a ghastly experience as a medical orderly in Belgium).

“All artists should go to the front to strengthen their art by a worship of physical and moral courage and a fearless desire of adventure, risk and daring and free themselves from the canker of professors, archaeologists, cicerones, antiquaries and beauty worshippers”.

War and art, Nevinson felt. were going to thrive together. Marinettian philosophy had proved an admirable apprenticeship, and here was the perfect subject. Writing in the 1970s, William Wees saw that progression as entirely logical, noting. “The metaphorical implications of avant garde turned art movements into battles. advances and retreats, victories and defeats,” to the point that, years later, Nevinson would look back and declare,

“The war did not take the modern artist by surprise. I think it can be said that modern artists have been at war since 1912…. They were in love with the glory of violence. Some say that artists have lagged behind the war, I should say not! They were miles ahead of it.” †

By 1917, Nevinson was made an official war artist. The Black and White etchings from this period are from the ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals’ series published in 1917 in an edition of 200 by the Ministry of Information. Other artists involved where Frank Brangwyn, Muirhead Bone and William Rothenstein.

The contributing artists were paid well, each receiving £210 (about £10,000 today) with the possibility of further royalties from sales. The prints were a limited edition of two hundred. The ‘Efforts’ were sold for £2 2s 0d (£100) each and the ‘Ideals’ for £10 10s 0d (£500). ‡

C.R.W Nevinson – Making the Engine, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Acetylene Welding, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Assembling Parts, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Banking at 4000 Feet, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Sweeping Down on a Taube, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – In the Air, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Swooping Down on a Hostile Plane, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – War in the Air, 1918

‘War in the Air’ was produced as a very rare lithograph by the Ministry of Information for the Canadian War Memorial Fund in 1919.

C.R.W Nevinson – War in the Air, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Three British WWI Bi-Planes, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Over the Lines, 1917

C.R.W Nevinson – Night Raid, 1917

† Nanette Norris – Great War Modernism: Artistic Response in the Context of War, 1914-1918, p27-28, 2015.
‡ The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals, Online
C.R.W. Nevinson 1889 – 1946 Retrospective Exhibition Of Paintings, Drawings And Prints: Kettle’s Yard Gallery 1988

Tags British War Artists, CRW Nevinson, War Art, WW1

Ypres Tourism

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 27th November 2016

These pictures are from the ‘Michelin Guides to the Battle-Fields: Ypres and The Battles for Ypres’. It was a book giving the history of the first world war with maps and how each area was affected over time. I think most importantly they have pictures of the Ypres area during and directly after the war showing the carnage and the ruins, both with ruined machinery and buildings.

A difficult crossing. British and Belgian soldiers.

Today I think it might be easy to think a guide like this is distasteful, but there was a real demand of people who wanted to see where they lost family members and after the carnage the booklet is to the point with it’s histories.

Langemarck, with destroyed tank. The mound in the middle distance is all that remains of the church.

The British Cemetery Just outside of Ypres, on the road to Menin.

British Cemetery on the Polegsteert Road at Messines.

British Cemetery at the Hospice Notre-Dame.

The graveyards of the dead were rows of graves with wooden crosses staked in the ground while designs and ideas for war monuments were being designed. After the monuments had been designed and the graves laid out with stone uniformed crosses the families were asked if they would like to purchase the original wooden crosses and have it shipped back, those that where not bought by families were burnt.

The Flanders Battlefield in Winter.

The slopes of Scherpenberg Hill.

French troops passing in front of the ruins of Ypres Cloth Hall.

Messines Road.

Destroyed British Tank sunk in the mud at the entrance to Poelcappelle.

Before: Biebuyge House and below after the war.

After.

British Defence-works in front of Ypres.

On the back pages of the book is a page outlining what Michelin did in the War by converting their warehouses (four storey) into hospitals with Operating Theatres, X-Ray wards and Laboratory’s in seven weeks and opening on September 22nd 1914. All the expenses were paid by the Michelin company.

A view of one of the Michelin Wards.

An advert for photographic reproductions of the images in the book, most of them were provided by the Imperial War Museum, London.

Tags Photography, War Art, War Memorial, WW1, WWI, Ypres