British Art and the First World War, 1914-1924

British Art and the First World War, 1914-1924
Author: James Fox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107105870

Overturning decades of scholarly orthodoxies, James Fox makes a bold new argument about the First World War's cultural consequences.

British Art and the First World War, 1914–1924

British Art and the First World War, 1914–1924
Author: James Fox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316368912

The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.

Apocalypse in British Art and Visual Culture in the Early Twentieth Century

Apocalypse in British Art and Visual Culture in the Early Twentieth Century
Author: Thomas Bromwell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2024-11-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040256309

This book is the first substantial study of the presence and relationship with the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in modern British art from 1914 to 1945, addressing how and why practitioners in both religious and secular spheres turned to the subjects. The volume examines British art and visual culture’s relationship with the then-contemporary anxieties and hopes regarding the orientation of society and culture, arguing that there is an acute relationship to the particular forms of cultural discourse of eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium. Chapters identify the continued relevance of religion and religious themes in British art during the period, and demonstrate that eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium were thriving and surprisingly mainstream concepts in the period that remained vital in early to mid-twentieth-century society and culture. This book is a research monograph aimed at an audience of scholars and graduate students already familiar with the core focus of modern British art and cultural histories, especially those working on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in Theology, Sociology, or other disciplinary settings. It will also be of interest to scholars and students working on war and visual culture, or histories of imperialism. It will benefit scholars of early twentieth-century British art, demonstrating the intersection of art and religion in the modern era, and critically qualifies the standard secular canon and narrative of modern British art, and the general neglect of religion in existing art-historical literature.

Portraits of Remembrance

Portraits of Remembrance
Author: Margaret Hutchison
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0817320504

Interdisciplinary collection of essays on fine art painting as it relates to the First World War and commemoration of the conflict Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of painting played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public’s appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet provide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes. Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding panoramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public’s understanding of the war. Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contributors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume’s overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.

Museums, Modernity and Conflict

Museums, Modernity and Conflict
Author: Kate Hill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000260313

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts. Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the military came into existence during this period. Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the State Art Collections Dresden. Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.

The Real and the Romantic

The Real and the Romantic
Author: Frances Spalding
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2022-07-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0500777373

The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britains leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange. Throughout these years, the pursuit of the real was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the romantic, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.

Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain during the Second World War

Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain during the Second World War
Author: Rebecca Searle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350075450

The War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) were responsible for the production of some of the most iconic images of the Second World War. Despite its rich historical value, this collection has been poorly utilised by historians and hasn't been subjected to the levels of analysis afforded to other forms of wartime culture. This innovative study addresses this gap by bringing official war art into dialogue with the social, economic and military histories of the Second World War. Rebecca Searle explores the tensions between the documentarist and propagandistic roles of the WAAC in their representation of aerial warfare in the battle for production, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the bombing of Germany. Her analyses demonstrate that whilst there was a strong correlation between war art and propaganda, the WAAC depicted many aspects of experience that were absent from wartime propaganda, such as class divisions within the services, gendered hierarchies within industries, civilian death and the true nature of the bombing of Germany. In addition, she shows that propagandistic constructions were not entirely separate from lived experience, but reflected experience and shaped the way that individuals made sense of the war. Accessibly written, highly illustrated and packed with valuable examples of the use of war art as historical source, this book will enhance our understanding of the social and cultural history of Britain during the Second World War.

Postcards from the Trenches

Postcards from the Trenches
Author: Irene Guenther
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350015776

German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4” x 6” cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, Postcards from the Trenches is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the “degenerate” artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939

Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939
Author: Jennifer Farrell
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-10-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588397394

The bold graphic images made by artists affiliated with Vorticism, British Futurism, and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art capture the optimism and anxiety of early twentieth-century Britain. This richly illustrated volume features rare British prints from the Leslie and Johanna Garfield collection dating between 1913 and 1939—a period marked by two world wars, a global pandemic, the Great Depression, and the rise of Fascism and Communism, but also new technologies, women’s suffrage, and a growing focus on public access to art. Essays explore how artists turned to printmaking to alleviate trauma, memorialize their wartime experiences, and capture the aspirations and fears of the twenties and thirties. At the heart of the catalogue are the colorful linocuts made by artists associated with London’s celebrated Grosvenor School. The visually striking compositions by Sybil Andrews, Claude Flight, Cyril E. Power, and Lill Tschudi, among others, convey the vitality of quotidian life during the machine age.

The Last Great War

The Last Great War
Author: Adrian Gregory
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2008-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521450373

A groundbreaking new history of the British home front during the First World War.