A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War. - book reviews

By the time individual has finished reading Richard Cork's A Bitter fact one feels some of what the war's veterans must have felt: exhausted, relieved, matured. From Louvain to Verdun the Judaean Hills to Ypre Macedonia to the Marne, Cork's consistently illuminating body traverses an immense, ruined landscape. It is a drawn out book on representations of a drawn out war, the first act of Europe's two-act tragedy that has colored all Western contemplation since. Of course, even to call the First World War a tragedy is to transform its messy stupid slaughter to the horizontal of myth, as any number of government-commissioned artists station out to do. Needless to say, this is sole part of Cork's story, which he run overs by looking at a tremendous number of works by the agency of artists from nearly every European land as well as from the United States and Canada, and through covering both private artistic initiatives and official art. (The phrase "avantgarde" applies to many on the other hand certainly not all of the works analyzed in A Bitter Truth)

There is not a great deal of new in the ways that Cork conceptualizes the representation of this (or any) war. He is little relate toed with previous depictions of the make submissive and so has nothing to mention one by one us about what is utterly different (or not) in these modem works; he deals alone fleetingly with anything other than art that directs directly to war preparation, fighting, destruction and death (or to the postwar construction of those bring under rules in memory). He certainly not at any time takes up the question of absence: what went un-represent what was quelled even by those artists who meditation they were confronting the thing in all its glaring terribilita. (Homosexuality, for instance, is hardly mentioned, smooth though there are many works here - images of men living, fighting and dying together - that beg for its utterance.)

Yet individual cannot fault Cork for his straightforward, chronological arrangement, or for the limits he has placed upon his project. For the volume he has produced is unquestionably the first really comprehensive, international view of art of the Great War. In order to do this he hunker down in the trenches, as it were, recounting a narrative that takes us year through year, and sometimes month by means of month, through a roller coaster of military, political and social occurrences The result is a temporal mapping of powerful emotions in flow a kind of fever chart of the illusions and disillusionments (to the amplitude to which they were showed visually) of the participants and onlooker of World War I. His inquiry begins in the prewar period with representations of Apocalypse from the Germans and Russians (Ludwig Meidner, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc), with an lyric poem to militarism in the art of Roger de La Fresnaye, and with images of generalized fall off in the work of Luigi Russolo. (Patricia Leighten's important work upon Picasso's use of newspaper clippings about the Balkan War in his 1912 collages is invoked here, on the contrary perhaps not given enough credit.) As war itself begins, Cork discusses the momentarily upbeat and heroizing art of Walter Sickert, Aristarkh Lentulov Kasimir Malevich, Gino Severini and Raoul Dufy This period is quickly followed by the agency of a stalemate as trench warfare becomes a fact of life: Fernand Leger's drawings and collages, Egon Schiele's gouaches and Vorticist work (by Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts, et al.) now advance into play. By 1915-16 Cork finds evidence of widespread disillusionment in the beautiful, heartrending Goya-esque lithographs of Willy Jaeckel, in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's well-known Self-Portrait as a Soldier and in James Ensor's The Banquet of the Starved. The battles of Verdun and the Somme the 1916 bloodletting, beget a vast gallery of work verging upon the demented, including Jacob Epstein's stone Drill, Mark Gertler's Merry-Go-Round and Hubertus Maria Davringhausen's The Madman. Then Cork digs in for sum of two units chapters of prolonged mayhem: in Felix Vallotton's explosive landscapes of 1917 Georges Leroux's aptly titled Hem of the same year (based upon a ghastly battle the artist had witnessed in Belgium), and Roberts's depiction of French and English soldiers being gassed by dint of the Germans at Ypres.

The down-to-earth mechanics of waging war, les dramatic to be certain were cnicial aspects of official propaganda campaigns: works in this category include Wadsworth's herculean picture of camouflage ships in drydock in Liverpool, Edouard Vuillard's of the munitions factory in Lyon and Charles Ginner's of a shell-filling factory. on the contrary it is when devastation appears as a trace, and as the long-term postwar persistence of memory, that it put forths the greatest hold on our imagination: the works of George Grosz Otto Dix, Jean Galtier-Boissiere, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash all look to strike chords of anger and/or bewilderment, leaving us with nothing to consider but our own folly.

The greatest puissance of A Bitter Truth is its inclusiveness, which is the spring of its connection to an exhibition. granting the book began as a series of Slade prelections delivered at Cambridge during the 1989-90 academic year, A Bitter reality also served as an accompanying true copy for what must have been an extraordinary present to view of the saine name, organized by dint of Cork in 1994 for the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Altes Museum in Berlin. Indeed, Cork's volume is one of the best arguments I know for the irreplaceability of the curatorial effort, for its centrality in visual tillage We know what happens when criticism and art history - whether under- or over-theorized, n'importe! - are made in the absence of actual works of art, or when art history is written about works we already know well (perhaps too well). No matter in what manner much the language changes, we inevitably focus upon the same few, hypervalorized artists and (widely reproduced) works of art, for the most part from the same geographic centers; while this emphasis upon familiar works has the virtue of refinement, it also begets the preciosity of intellectual inbreeding. The canon doesn't flinch and we are forced into at any time more remarkable feats of mental contortion in order to detain interest alive. But the research-and-development phase of any really profitable exhibition, especially a thematic individual like Cork's, brings into view entire of recent origin areas of interest, new works by dint of known artists as well as work through figures we've never known before. Many of these works may later be sent back to the well-earned obscurity of museum storage extents but some will not, and, at any rate, in the proces our ideas of the shape of the artistic picture will have been transformed, sometimes in ways that may take quite a while to articulate.