Art of the First World War
The day had
excellent speakers and was a real bargain! In the morning we had Rebecca Newell
from the Imperial War Museum talking about the government war art schemes and
the artists who took part. In doing so she gave us a good overview of the art
of the period and the motivation behind its creation. The second talk of the
morning was David Boyd Haycock comparing the life and work of Paul Nash and,
one of my favourites, C.R.W. Nevinson, who had studied together at the Slade.
I’d not realised that they were born and died in the same years. He discussed
their war work plus the effect of the war on their subsequent work.
In the afternoon
we turned to the work of Sydney Carline with Jonathon Black. Carline, Stanley
Spencer’s brother in law, was a pilot in the Italian campaign and produced
extraordinary works influenced by his experience of flying and aerial battles.
He also looked at Carline’s travels with his brother Richard in the Middle East
when they were commissioned to paint the role the RAF had played in defeating
the Ottoman Empire in the region. Finally Paul Edwards took us through the life
and work of Wyndham Lewis with an emphasis on his painting “Battery Shelled”
for the proposed Hall of Remembrance.
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