Differences in Artistic Reaction to War.
“Faced with the carnage and cruelty of World War I, the British pulled back from modernism. Modernism was identified with the enemy. It was seen as uncertain, unpredictable—everything the British didn’t want to engage with anymore. You see them reaching backward to the steady, reassuring hands of tradition. [But] the Germans go in a different direction. There, you see Expressionism taking root. Kirchner and Beckmann are on the losing side and don’t want to connect with the past. They want to sever ties with all that.” - Paul Moorhouse, curator at the National Portrait Gallery.
Violence is ubiquitous. We are either the victim, the perpetrator, or the witness to violence. Thus our shared experience lends us the ability to condemn violence with unified vigor. However, despite the commonality in our outcomes, our reaction in response to violence differs from person to person and country to country. One such example in this divergence of reaction comes from the art following World War I or "The Great War". As the quote above states two different countries both reacted to the war's horrors, yet what they produced significantly differs from one another. The British turn back to their tradition of realism, while the Germans completely separate themselves from the past. What these separate reactions show is that despite the difference in reactions, art above all can provide comfort and understanding in response to a traumatic event.
For the British, their turn towards tradition allowed them to frame the atrocities of war in the context of the past. Since the Great War saw the advent of a new violence - a more gruesome and creative disaster - many who were witnesses struggled to understand due to their lack of reference. In order to correct that, they turned to what they knew. They framed their experiences with the traditional depictions of reality and war, As the reading about Goya shows, the artists in the wake of the war were not alone. They had the ability to look at the past, and see how people reacted to their own atrocities of the time. Through this temporal empathy, artists and the people of then could begin to grow their understanding. John Singer Sargent - a British-influenced American artist - for example painted his famed painting Gassed in response to a commission by the British War Memorials Committee. Their intention was to create a Hall of Remembrance filled with epic scenes of the War - inspired by Uccello's triptych of the Battle of San Romano. This was commissioned in May of 1918. 5 months before the war's end. People were scrambling to understand. And what they turned to... what their perception of war allowed them to see was the blatant violence of it all. This view point is shared by many artists of the past. No wonder the mass of bodies populating the scene appears correct and warranted. That's what they knew of and that was what they saw. Or wanted to see.
Because if this war was different... if they were a victim to a new evil creation... then they were alone to cope with it themselves. How can the past understand if they had never experienced anything similar? And if the past cannot understand, then they cannot explain. They would isolated in a new frontier with no map to guide them. To the British, this was a frightening thought. Yet to the Germans, that was all they wanted. (continued below image)
For the British, their turn towards tradition allowed them to frame the atrocities of war in the context of the past. Since the Great War saw the advent of a new violence - a more gruesome and creative disaster - many who were witnesses struggled to understand due to their lack of reference. In order to correct that, they turned to what they knew. They framed their experiences with the traditional depictions of reality and war, As the reading about Goya shows, the artists in the wake of the war were not alone. They had the ability to look at the past, and see how people reacted to their own atrocities of the time. Through this temporal empathy, artists and the people of then could begin to grow their understanding. John Singer Sargent - a British-influenced American artist - for example painted his famed painting Gassed in response to a commission by the British War Memorials Committee. Their intention was to create a Hall of Remembrance filled with epic scenes of the War - inspired by Uccello's triptych of the Battle of San Romano. This was commissioned in May of 1918. 5 months before the war's end. People were scrambling to understand. And what they turned to... what their perception of war allowed them to see was the blatant violence of it all. This view point is shared by many artists of the past. No wonder the mass of bodies populating the scene appears correct and warranted. That's what they knew of and that was what they saw. Or wanted to see.
Because if this war was different... if they were a victim to a new evil creation... then they were alone to cope with it themselves. How can the past understand if they had never experienced anything similar? And if the past cannot understand, then they cannot explain. They would isolated in a new frontier with no map to guide them. To the British, this was a frightening thought. Yet to the Germans, that was all they wanted. (continued below image)
For the Germans they walked away and never looked back. What bred in the chaos present in post-war Germany was an idea of complete separation. They cut themselves from the past, because the past - they grudgingly realized- was helpless to guide them. What they had faced was a violence that the earth had never seen before. And so they the witnesses were left to build in its wake. Thus we begin to see modernism escalating to radical reaches. Continental Europe bred several new movements. Each one straying farther from reality. Expressionism. Surrealism. Dada. All in response to the great Violence. Each becoming more incomprehensible than the last. Maybe they tried to record the incomprehensible violence - an attempt to hold a mirror back to that enigma. For the Germans, a flurry of artists blossomed in the wake of the war that committed themselves to the movement known as Expressionism. One such artist was Max Beckmann. In his iconic painting Die Nacht (The Night), Beckmann reflected the violence and depravity of the War... without depicting it. What we see in his piece is three men objectively unrelated to the War, but afflicting a violence that would be no stranger to the War's victims. Terrifying. Violent. Depraved. These are not humans. If the British tried to empathize with their realism, the Germans attempted a dehumanization. The twisting limbs and the distorted figures separate these figures from us. But why?
Maybe because in holding the mirror towards the war, we also avoid our reflection. It allows us to leave the tremendous violence where we think it belongs - the past. We can then deny that it was us - that we the people committed that Violence. Deny that we are capable of such things. Deny that the evil lives in us.
Art gives a distance to observe our actions through a lens - like a scientist looking through a microscope - that allows us to slowly comprehend what we have experienced. We seek this separation. It comforts us. But why? From what the British and German artists showed - as well as our ancestors - it protects us from facing the horrifying realities head on.
Maybe because in holding the mirror towards the war, we also avoid our reflection. It allows us to leave the tremendous violence where we think it belongs - the past. We can then deny that it was us - that we the people committed that Violence. Deny that we are capable of such things. Deny that the evil lives in us.
Art gives a distance to observe our actions through a lens - like a scientist looking through a microscope - that allows us to slowly comprehend what we have experienced. We seek this separation. It comforts us. But why? From what the British and German artists showed - as well as our ancestors - it protects us from facing the horrifying realities head on.