A current exhibition at Tate Britain, in London, directs our attention to what happened to European art in the wake of the Great War. I wondered if there was anything new to be said about the conflict, because the past five years have seen a succession of exhibitions presenting different reflections on that period.* I was wrong.
One remarkable feature of this particular collection was that it drew together work by artists from Britain, France and Germany, thus escaping from the reliance upon British official war artists that has tended to characterise other exhibitions I have seen.
I was moved to tears by the large section presenting “print portfolios”, by Otto Dix, Kathe Kollwitz, Georges Roualt and Max Beckman. Perhaps the unfamiliarity of these works has to do with the fact that none of the official British war artists did attempt to work in print media. Perhaps it has been significant that the concept of a “war artist” at that time directed attention largely to the front lines and actually ignored the experience of the civilian population. This print collection, however, corrected that narrowness of vision in a tremendously powerful way.
The later part of the show dealt with the “return to order” after the war, and this I found truly disturbing, because of the speed with which the experience of the war and its lessons seem to have been shrugged off so easily by the artistic community. There were, of course, significant new directions in art, but they appear to have featured a historical amnesia of astonishing proportions. The idea of memory as a source of artistic creativity interests me greatly, and I did find it puzzling that in the case of the Great War memory had been so thoroughly purged.**
*Including, of course, my own exhibition dealing with the experience of Italy during the war, entitled Presente! that will be shown in Bradford Cathedral in October.
**Except, significantly, in Germany, where a large proportion of the print work to which I have referred depicted the suffering of the poor, bereaved and wounded who bore the consequences of the war for many years after its end.