"Aftermath" at Tate Britain; Postcript - the Royal Academy's Great Spectacle

Aftermath at Tate Britain; Postscript - the Royal Academy's Great Spectacle - 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition

The Exhibition called Aftermath at Tate Britain is a strange affair. Its starting point is the First World War. The Exhibition claims to “explore the impact of the ..War on the art of Britain, France and Germany between 1916 and 1932”.

(Why those dates are chosen is something I’m still puzzling over. 1932 was the last full year of the Weimar Republic in Germany – Hitler came to power in 1933.)

The Exhibition begins with the horrors of the trenches – scenes of death, destruction and human helplessness. “Horrors of the trenches” is a cliché that is well used; but that fact does not detract from the continued shocking impact of the art and literature of those that suffered and witnessed.

Accordingly one enters the Exhibition’s first room with familiar expectations and largely gets the familiar but powerful experience. There’s one thing which is different – a (just) post-war flickering film, taken from a balloon, of the awful destruction wrought on Ypres; made more poignant by the little groups of pedestrians moving slowly among the ruins. The “Hell of the North”, the French cycling press called the devastation, when racing returned to the region after the War. Although the term (L’Enfer du Nord) endured as the nickname of one the hardest classic races, it was by no means first coined as the reference to difficulties of the race itself.

The Exhibition then takes an interesting couple of turns – to Memorial art, and then to the Wounded. WW1 memorials are still the most prevalent form of public art in, I should think, the UK and France. (The sheer numbers of names inscribed on memorials in the tiniest of villages always astonishes me.) In France, the motif is often the sorrowing Marianne; in the UK, normally a stark plaque or cenotaph. But one French painting celebrates ironclad resolve.

This is La Guerre by Marcel Gromaire. It is a painting which was enormously popular in France. But one cannot help thinking that it suggests, as well as resolve, that it was necessary to be more, or less, than human to take part. These men are semi-mechanised..

Germany, where the legacy and memory of the War were bitterly contested, had few memorials. It was therefore startling, and moving, to see two magnificent works by German sculptors – Fallen Man (Wilhelm Lehmbruck), a life-size bronze of a naked man beaten to his knees, and a huge pitying angel figure suspended from the ceiling. Both were rejected at the time, the latter destroyed by the Nazis (but the artist preserved the cast, so the work was revived after WW2).

The Wounded section draws attention to the awful fact that the belligerent nations were left with millions of men suffering from amputations and disfigurements. In France, being mutile de guerre was a bitter badge of pride. (I can remember that in the 60s and 70s there were signs on the Metro giving them seating priority.) But in Germany war wounds were often badges of poverty and the country’s shame.

(Otto Dix)

However, it is the German strand of the Exhibition, as it continues, that is the most coherent. This is mainly because of the number of works by Grosz and Beckmann, and their obvious ideological commitment to portraying the rancid gulf between the poor (especially the wounded poor) and the prosperous bourgeoisie.

Germany was where the serious political differences played out, often bloodily, and where artists joined in the political wars. It was also, in the period covered by the Exhibition, the most febrile of societies, from the running street battles of the Left and Right to the extraordinary cabaret culture (in retrospect a carnival of defiance beset by gathering darkness).

The Exhibition’s offering of post-war British and French art has less clear-cut themes.

(Max Ernst)

With nods to Dada and surrealism, it focuses largely on a revival of classicism

(Meredith Frampton)

and a poignant melancholy realism exemplified by the landscapes of Paul Nash (who had been a landscape painter all along – his wartime paintings are mostly of landscapes all smashed).

This was in part a reaction to the pre-war avant garde art movements, such as Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism, under which the War had drawn emphatic and bloody lines, although their influence can still be seen in some of the wartime art itself – for example Nevinson’s painting of Ypres in flames at night.

There was also a jazziness around, pictures of angular, bright coloured dancers and musicians in crowded intimate venues – cousins to German cabaret.

But… what happened to political art? The Exhibition is pretty patchy on this: one or two studies of workers; a Red Flag choral scene.

Had the time span of the Exhibition been extended into the mid 1930s, one might have seen where some of the new realism tended- to the faux-classical romanticism promoted by the Nazis, in particular. And the curators could have included one of the most eloquent (even if not the most accomplished) of the realist paintings, of Jarrow Marchers, arrived in London, seen from the frivolous viewpoint of a West End cocktail party.

The Royal Academy's Great Spectacle

Concurrently with the usual vast Summer Exhibition of the good, indifferent and forgettable, the RA celebrates the Exhibition's 250th anniversary with a separate  exhibition chronicling its history and the evolution of artistic styles and fashions represented at the summer show.

(Frith - Oscar Wilde to the fore...)

It is delightful - a quiet retreat from the Summer crowds, occupying an elegant suite of former Academicians' rooms, also delightful.

Coming from the Tate, it is interesting to see the examples of post WW1 art. They indeed manifest the nostalgic classicism highlighted at the Tate. Two paintings in particular stand out: Youth Mourning by Sir George Clausen, which complements the Fallen Man sculpture discussed above (complements unconsciously: the works were created at different times and in different countries);

and Pastoral, by Frederick Robinson. This struck me as having strong undertones of mourning (in the poses of the adults - they could be by a grave; in the pose of the child - she looks a little wistful and lost), even if on its surface the subject is the protection of the flock by Good Shepherds.

........

On a completely different note, the Exhibition features, as an example of of mid C19 "genre painting" Frith's wonderful seaside crowd painting Ramsgate Sands. It has a joyful energy - created by the thrust of the happy, but woefully overdressed, crowd towards the sea - but held back firmly by a sartorial red line.

July 2018