1. -What were the characteristics of British Art during World War I ?
-How did the war affect the type of art British artists realized?
-How was art used to represent the front and the home front?
-How did the government use art as a tool of propaganda?
WAR ARTISTS

2. Representing the front - battlefields
The painting commemorates the 1st Artists’ Rifles involvement in an attack in December, 1917, at Welsh Ridge, near Marcoing (south west of Cambrai). The consequences were disastrous.
Over the top
Paul Nash
(1918)

3. Representing the front - battlefields
Butler's title links Count von Bismarck’s policy to its consequences - the invasion of Belgium. In 1914 Louvain was razed to the ground in response to a Belgium uprising against the occupying German force.
Blood and Iron
Charles Ernest Butler
(1916)

4. Representing the front - bombardments
A Battery Shelled, Percy Wyndham Lewis (1919)
The rise in modern warfare (unfamiliar and highly industrialized) led to new and experimental artistic responses.
This painting is an example of vorticist painting (rejection of landscapes and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards abstraction.)

5. Representing the front - injuries
The scene takes place in a hospital called the Shambles in Dunkirk, where Nevinson worked as a medic. Doctors and medical orderlies hastily treat the injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital. He described the scene in his autobiography, Paint and Prejudice: “Our doctors took charge, and in five minutes I was nurse, water-carrier, stretcher-bearer, driver, and interpreter.”
The Doctor
CRW Nevinson
(1916)

6. Representing the front – conditions of living
The painting depicts men in his unit, and includes a self-portrait. He shows a moment when his platoon, exhausted from four days and sleepless nights have arrived to the protection of the ruined village at Laventie.
The Kensingtons at Laventie
Eric Kennington
(1915)

7. Representing the front - Landscapes
Depicting the Western front landscape was problematic. Indeed, the spaces were featureless because of the long range artillery fire and the system of trench warfare. Yet, the unique character of the Western front remained.
Here it depicts an area of Somme.
Mines and the Bapaume Road, La Boiselle
William Orpen
(1917)

8. Representing the front - Landscapes
It is a modernized landscape painting: the shelled woods, dismembered trees and traumatised fields work as a metaphor for the wider destruction and suffering of the war.
The Field of Passchendaele
Paul Nash

9. Representing the home front
The painting measures how far the war economy had developed; but it also illustrates how life had changed, and how women's work and roles had altered.
Shop for machining 15-inch shells
Anna Airy
(1918)

10. Representing the home front
There was a need for a new workforce to farm the land. Therefore, Women’s Land Army was established in 1917.
Voluntary Land Workers in a Flax-Field
Randolph Schwabe
(1919)

11. Representing the grief of a nation
He uses the nakedness of the figure and the starkness of the barren landscape to emphasise the grief and emptiness of death.
It also conveys the wider sense of a nation in mourning.
Youth Mourning
George Clausen
(1916)

12. Representing the grief of a nation
At the end of WWI, attention was given to public expressions of remembrance. He chose to focus on the “forgotten” ordinary soldiers rather than on the politicians he saw arguing over peace terms.
To the Unknown British Soldier in France
William Orpen
(1919)

13. Art as a tool for propaganda
The dead soldier on the right, retaining his youthful good looks, is shown lying by the cross, his hand on Jesus's feet, as if he was inspired by, and is replicating, the sacrifice of Jesus. He seems to have died peacefully, consoled by this vision.
It was described as "the finest picture that the war has yet produced" in The Graphic's Christmas number of 1914.
The Great Sacrifice
James Clark
(1914)