A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First War, Paul Gough
At the end of his famous poem, Easter 1916, W. B. Yeats proclaimed ‘A terrible beauty is born’.
Bristol based academic Paul Gough takes this line for the title of his new book on the art of the First World War. Yet, despite the date of his title, Yeats was referring not to any events on the battlefields of mainland Europe, but to the Easter Rising of 1916, a doomed bid for Irish freedom from British rule.
However appropriate we may find it that Paul Gough has used a work of Irish nationalism for a work specifically on British artists (and many Irish at the time refused to recognise this war as a world war, so ferociously did they oppose Irish involvement in it), this title is aesthetically appropriate: its oxymoronic overtones encapsulate the central problem of art in the war: how does one make beauty from something so terrible?
Indeed, morally, should one make beauty from such horror? What should the purpose of art in war be? Journalistic reportage, propaganda (whether pro or anti war)? What reactions is it trying to provoke in its audience?
These are not merely academic questions – as a country currently involved in two wars it is important for people to think about and question the ways in which images and accounts of war are produced, even manipulated, and for what ends.
Faced with the utter flatness and bleakness of the decimated fields of Flanders and the front line, some artists added planes, explosions and action to the dull landscape – an early version of a sexed up dossier, albeit with less sinister ends.
Gough’s success in producing a book whose academic credentials are impeccable, yet whose content is engaging and gripping enough to fascinate the casual reader is perhaps aided by the way that the art and poetry of the First World War have a persistent hold over the public imagination and consciousness in a way unparalleled by any other artistic movement.
An impressive range of artists – William Orpen, Paul and John Nash, Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer, to name only the most well known, are covered in lucid, engaging prose, with generous illustration so that the reader can actually look at the works being discussed (unfortunately rarer than you might think in art books).
The stories uncovered are fascinating: artists desperate to go to war in order to depict what was recognised as not only the Great War, but the great artistic subject of the age; battles with the authorities - Nevinson, having fallen foul of the censors who refused to allow pictures of British dead to be displayed, exhibited his Paths Of Glory anyway, but covered with a paper with the word ‘censored’ scrawled upon it: a piece of brazen showmanship and antiestablishment sentiment that Banksy has yet to equal.
They are also tragic: the now common stories of shell-shock, the sense, after the war, as Paul Nash put it, of being a ‘war artist without a war’. In this book, in the images and in the stories of their makers, the horror of war is palpable, and it is a horror which must still be faced, a hundred years after the ‘war to end all wars’.
Available at Samsom & Co, £29.99
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