BRITISH ART AND THE GREAT WAR The Great War promoted the breakthrough of modernism in British literature, but it discouraged avant-garde experimentation in the visual arts. These painters found that those who controlled museum space and government commissions detested irony or avant-garde styles:  Wyndham Lewis ( ): pioneer of Vorticism  Paul Nash ( ): influenced by Cubism  John Nash ( ): Paul’s younger brother  C.R.W. Nevinson ( ): Cubist trained in Paris  William Orpen ( ): fashionable portrait painter

“What did YOU do in the Great War?” (1915): Photographic realism was the preferred style for recruitment posters

“Step Into Your Place,” Great Britain, 1915

E. Kealey, “Women of Britain Say – GO!” Great Britain, 1915

Emile Boussu, “Reims Cathedral in Flames” (1914)

Instructions regarding Field Punishment #1, January 1917 (Canadian): See Graves, p. 176

W.H. Margetson, “The Angels of Mons”

John Singer Sargent ( ), “Gassed,” 1918/19 (a somber topic, treated in traditional style)

John Singer Sargent, “A Street in Arras” (1918)

Pablo Picasso, “Girl with a Mandolin” (Paris, 1910): A pioneering work of “analytical cubism”

Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase, #2,” 1912: Described by a U.S. critic of the Armory Show as “an explosion in a shingle factory”

David Bomberg, “Sappers at Work,” 1918/19 (first version)

David Bomberg, “Sappers at Work,” final version in the National Gallery of Canada, 1919

C.R.W. Nevinson, “Machine-Gun” (1915): Apollinaire wrote that Nevinson “translates the mechanical aspect of modern warfare where man and machine combine to form a single force of nature.”

C.R.W. Nevinson, “French Troops Resting” (1916)

C.R.W. Nevinson, “A Bursting Shell” (exhibited in London, December 1915)

C.R.W. Nevinson, “Paths of Glory” (1917): Banned from exhibition!

Eric Kennington, “The Kensingtons at Laventie” (1915/16)

Eric Kennington, “Gassed and Wounded” (1918)

Wyndham Lewis, “The Crowd” (1915; example of “Vorticism”)

Wyndham Lewis, “A Canadian Gun-Pit” (1918): Imitating Orpen’s style gained him commissions

Wyndham Lewis, “A Battery Shelled” (1919)

John Nash, “Over the Top” (Cambrai, 1917): Of 80 men in Nash’s company, 68 were killed or wounded in a few minutes

John Nash, “Oppy Wood, 1917: Evening”

Paul Nash, “The Ypres Salient at Night” (undated)

Paul Nash, “Void” (1918)

Paul Nash, “We Are Making a New World” (1918)

William Orpen ( ), “Ready to Start” (June 1917)

William Orpen, “Dead Germans in a Trench” (1918)

William Orpen, “To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France,” 1922/23 (photograph of first version)

William Orpen, “To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France,” final version of 1927

The Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. Designed by Sir Edward Lutyens, built in 1919/20: “The Glorious Dead”