i8 
LAND & WATER 
September 2S, 1916 
Nevinson and His War Pictures 
By C. Lewis Hind 
PAINTERS have not been inspired by the war. 
It is too near, too overwhelming. You cannot 
paint a tiger while the beast is springing at your 
throat ; but later, with the help of the tiger 
cage at the Zoological (iardens, you may attempt to set 
down what you saw and felt. Briefly, painting, like 
poetry in the accredited definition, is emotion remem- 
bered in tranquility. 
The black and white ancn, especially the cartoonists, 
have done better than the painters — Spencer Pryse, 
E. J. Sullivan, and Will Dyson. Paintings one remembers 
are Clausen's " Youth Mourning," Sickcrt's " Belgian 
Soldiers," and Kennington's "The Kensingtons"; but 
the author^ of these outstanding works have not been 
lired to fury by the conflict. 
Found His Soul 
One painter, artist I will call him, C. R. W. Nevinson, 
has found himself in the war, found his painting 
soul, and forced it to function piercingly and vividly. 
Before August, 1914, he was, as a 'technician, 
" all dressed up and nowhere to go." That is, he 
had acquired, adapted, adopted and resolved in his 
bright intelligence, a formula of seeing and painting, 
which was a highly organised and revolutionary instru- 
ment ; but the trouble was, there was nothing in the 
ordiuary peace life to employ it upon, nothing to bring 
his scientific instrument into line with humanity. In 
those days I found Ne\inson's paintings becoming less 
and less interesting, and finally a bore. Then the war 
broke out. In October i()i4, Nevinson went to Flanders 
as a motor-ambulance driver for the ist Anglo-Belgium 
Field Ambulance. He was at Ypres through the ist and 
2nd bombardments and returned to London in February 
1915. He then had seven months' service in the 
R.A.M.C., and was eventually discharged as unfit, after 
a severe illness, with the memory of that awful time and 
a bundle of " hasty and surreptitious sketches." 
His formula of painting was already perfected. Now, 
at last, he had his subject. When the list of excuses for 
the war, or war-gains, great and small, small and great, 
is made up, one may be that Greece found her soul, 
which she had lost for nearly two thousand years ; 
another that a young and ambitious artist, still in the 
twenties, well-equipped, and well-satisfied that artisti- 
;ally he was right, foimd himself. 
I remember vividly my emotional and intellectual 
delight before the first picture I saw from Xevinson's 
brush in the post-war days. It was " La Mitrailleuse," 
which has been acquired by the Contemporary Art Societv, 
md is included in the exhibition of his war pictures just 
opened at the Leicester (ialleries. It shows four French 
soldiers (one dead) and a machine gun in a horrid pit. 
Barbed wire protects it above, and beyond is the 
luminous, indifferent sky. This essay in direct expression 
is a trenchant criticism of modern warfare. It is despair- 
ful, not horrible. The brave men are as inhuman as the 
gun. The twain are one, just implacable instruments 
of death, grey, intent, venomous, and scientifically 
certain as the geometrical formula in which the artist 
has encased his swift vision. This picture seemed to me 
to be a new thing, an outstanding work, and it was \erv 
satisfactory to read what so distinguished an artist as 
Mr. Walter Sickert said about it later in the BiiHiiii^lon 
Mas^azinc : " Mr. Nevinson's ' Mitrailleuse ' will pro- 
bably remain the most authoritative and concentrated 
utterance on the war in the history of painting." 
Here, it becornes necessary to hark back some years 
and to enquire briefly how it became possible for Nevinson 
to paint " La Mitrailleuse," and to give us the essence of 
the cold and pitiless intellectuality of war in a geometrical 
formula, originally derivative, but which he has quite 
made his own. The bloodless revolution began years ago 
in Holland with Van Gogh ; in France with Cezanne, and 
Piccasso who, after a spell as an " ordinary artist, i' became 
the liTgh priest of Cubism. It produced many move- 
ments, which have been given many names— Post Im- 
pression, Neo Impressianism, Cubism, Futurism, Vor- 
ticism and so on. All aimed at much the same thing — 
at expression not representation, all sought to strip oft 
externals and get down to reality, or to quote Nevinson's 
own words, " an abstract, dynamic, and mental im- 
pression rather than a concrete, static, or optical." In 
this country the fun began after the Post Impressionist 
exhibition at the (irafton (ialleries. Art became active, 
a living thing, and talk was as furious as in the old 
Zola-Manet days. Fierce youths in sombreros and 
peg-top trousers spoke of Mr. Frank Dicksee's " Two 
Crowns " at the Tate Gallery, dated 1900, as the last 
gurgle of the old world (many of these fine fierce youths 
are now dead on the field of honour). What days those 
were, and how hard it was for the mere laymen to keep 
abreast of those mushroom art dynasties. Depositions 
and decapitations occurred between a Saturday and a 
Monday. Knowing that- you were about to meet an 
eminent Cubist, you would "get up" Cubism and 
flatter him by your knowledge of it, and his importance 
in the movement. Whereupon he would hit you over 
the head and shout : " I am no longer a Cubist : a la 
bas Cubisme : I am a Vorticist." 
His Early Career 
Through all this ferment C. R. W. Nevinson passed 
hitting and being hit. He sowed and gathered ; he 
plucked and slough6d, and this exhibition is his harvest— 
the first, I hope, of many and greater harvests. Here is 
a brief record of his time of fertilising the ground and 
planting. Born 1889, he was educated at Uppingham, 
and studied at the St. John's Wood Art School, the Slade, 
Julian's and Circle Russe, Paris. His iirst subjects were 
work and workers in the great industrial towns, his 
method Impressionism. Then he came under the in- 
fluence of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Derain : he sought 
solidity, form, structural composition, and abstract 
pictorial values — method post-Impressionism. Next, realis- 
ing that pictorial art has as little to do with the " imitation 
of natural forms as has music with the imitation of natural 
sounds," he became a Cubist. Then his hatred of every- 
thing "old, fusty, second-hand, Old Mastery, romantic," 
and his enthusiasm for modern mechanism, and " the 
restless, seething dynamicism " of our cities, sent him 
headlong into Futurism, and he in conjunction with 
Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto on " Vital English 
Art." Then came the war, and this vivid revolutionary, 
eager and intelligent, had the luck of his life, got his sub- 
ject, in horrible completeness, straight and deep, as you 
will see if you visit the Leicester (ialleries. This shooting 
star shot into a worid of art, where things are being 
made anew. He exploded bombs at the venerable planets. 
The planets shine splendidly as of yore. Titian, Rem- 
brandt, Velasquez look on bcnignantly. They are above 
taunts and Futurist assaults, and it is quite certain 
that the shooting-stars of to-day, if ever thev become 
planets, will be also violently assaulted by the' shooting 
stars of 500 years hence. 
And now back to Nevinson's exhibition. 
This is war seen through a temperament, done in a 
technique, which, it seems to me, absolutely suits the 
gnm subject. Sometimes he cannot help being pictorial, 
and when he is, as in " A Taube," we are shown the 
naked horror and shame of war. In " Before the 
Storm," an aeroplane defying the oncoming tempest 
(reproduced on the opposite page) , we have a big glimpse 
of Its splendid daring, and in " Troops Resting," also re- 
produced here, a statement that this geometrical formula 
can make a thing seem more like life than the episode itself. 
We are all, whether painters, writers, saints, organisers, 
or air-engme makers after the same goal— simplicity. 
Nevinson has distilled it from a rbtort brimming with 
rnany complexities. In the search we are divided, in 
the result we are one, and all can subscribe to Anatole 
France's wisely simple saying : "A simple style (in 
painting as in prose) is like a white light. It is complex, 
but not to outward sff>min!T " 
