War and Peace - the career of C.R.W. Nevinson

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A recent exhibition in London gave Julian Freeman a chance to reflect on the very varied work of an important British artist

The exhibition ‘C.R.W. Nevinson: A Printmaker in War and Peace’ (24 September–18 October 2014) was a tour-de-force, and no mistake, a first for London's Osborne Samuel gallery and a first also for Nevinson in the post-war world, for there had never been so large an exhibition solely devoted to his prints.

More than that of any other artist of the Great War, Nevinson’s work in all media was greeted with expectancy on its first solo exhibition in 1916, largely because of his importance as the British ambassador to Futurism.  Although in recent years his artistic and personal reputations have been subjected to penetrating scrutiny (The Cult of Violence, Michael K.J. Walsh) and to fictional alteration (Toby’s Room by Pat Barker), this exhibition makes a distinguished stand for its author, as good, if not better, than anything delivered since the 1970s: arguably, even before that.

Osborne Samuel has joined forces with Dr Jonathan Black of Kingston University to celebrate Nevinson’s oeuvre as a printmaker, against the backdrop of the centenary of the Great War, and, as part of that celebration, the publication of a catalogue raisonné of Nevinson’s printed work. Black contributed the opening essay of the catalogue to the last major Nevinson show in London, the Imperial War Museum’s ‘C.R.W. Nevinson: The Twentieth Century’ (1999–2000), and he is also the author of the catalogue essay to the Osborne Samuel show. This latest exhibition included several paintings by Nevinson in private hands, unseen since that IWM retrospective, and brought in to offer context, particularly to Nevinson’s early (1916) drypoints. Yet the paintings offered only the smallest frame of reference, for they were few, and Nevinson’s prints derived from absent oils numbered many more.

Sixty-eight years after his death in 1946, Nevinson’s place in early modern British art is a matter of fact. As one who courted recognition (and gained some notoriety in the process), posterity welcomed him as warmly as his supporters had in the first flush of his wartime triumph. That initial reputation sufficed to sustain him until the early 1940s, when he was too unwell to work.

Nevinson himself was nothing if not unconventional, from his upbringing to his personal opinions, and his painting, with his outspoken commentaries on art, did much to guarantee him a public during his own lifetime. In 1964, the 50th anniversary of the Great War stimulated a resurgent interest in Vorticism  and Futurism and reintroduced him to a new and welcoming public. In the 1970s, thanks to the efforts of the Arts Council and others, Nevinson’s paintings were again much admired: La Mitrailleuse (1915), La Patrie (1916)and the diminutive Returning to the Trenches (1914) became amongst his most familiar works. Then, the painting was almost everything: the prints, though present, were not the focal point, and faced with Osborne Samuel’s extraordinary collection, one has to wonder why, not least when Nevinson’s earliest drypoints of 1916 include powerful versions of On the Road to Ypres and French Troops Resting (both 1916). They are a world apart from the realism of the later The Road from Arras to Bapaume (1917), or the leviathan Harvest of Battle (1918), and they tell a different tale about their author.

Nevinson’s reputation as a pre-eminent artist of 1914–18 is largely based on his paintings. Of all his contemporaries, he was the most easily able to synthesize personal and emotive responses to events witnessed, largely because of his exposure to Futurism before the war. His reversion to figuration, as far as it went, was arguably inevitable following his appointment as an Official War Artist in 1917, with the pressure upon him to execute new work quickly. The need to document did not permit considered abstract works, but many of the early wartime prints clearly incorporate abstract marks derived from Vorticist sources. The size and range of Nevinson’s printed output has never been so fully documented until now, and so no clear evaluation of his evolution as a printmaker has been presented. Salaman’s decision (1932) to include Nevinson in his ‘Modern Masters of Etching’ series  was most fortunate: it is a bridge of sorts from the past to the present.

The Nevinson presented by Osborne Samuel was not an unfamiliar figure; rather, he was enlarged, and what was different here lies in the manner of his appearance, not least because of the arrival of Black’s catalogue raisonné. The speed at which Nevinson absorbed his most effective printmaking techniques has never before been clearly remarked, but it all evolved in around three years, from 1916–19, and he never looked back, as this splendid display demonstrated. His magnetic early Great War transcriptions from oil paint to drypoint were all present, with the following and absorbing lithographic sextet ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals’ (1917).

Nevinson’s range of style and subject from 1917 until the Armistice, and in a range of settings in England and New York soon afterwards, make a mockery of later assertions that by 1917 his work had somehow become vitiated by his inability to sustain his pre-war abstract delivery. Rather, at his best, he was until the 1930s the sum of all his acquired parts: an authoritative artist whose muscular approach to his chosen subjects enabled him to execute topographical and landscape works with their own peculiar sense of place and atmosphere. The differences between Looking through Brooklyn Bridge (1921), Westminster from a Savoy Window (1924-6) and Sunday Evening (1924-7) are only three very different subjects that demonstrate Nevinson’s increasing confidence and familiarity with his chosen graphic methods.

Not every print was a good one, but the best outweigh their weaker counterparts, and to compare the oils and prints of Nevinson’s last decade of sustained activity is to observe a marked ability to work equally effectively across both sets of media. If there were ever a recent London show created to create a meaningful counterpoise to a fought-over and evolving mid-century reputation, this would be it.