Armistice Day Meditation: “The Great War” as Artists’ Spur and Cross

November 11, 1918—“All quiet on the Western Front” became the order of the day as European civilization ceased the suicidal conflict that upended monarchies, fractured empires, killed 9.7 million servicemen and 10 million civilians, and left 21 million with wounds that, figuratively and often literally, never really healed.

Over the 10-plus months I’ve written this blog, I’ve yearned for a chance to write more on two subjects: art and World War I. This post represents an opportunity to redress this failure, at least partially.

In its weekend edition, the Financial Times of London ran an excellent article by art critic and historian Richard Cork, “In the Front Line,” on the toll that the “Great War” (named not because the conflict was so wonderful but because it was so immense) took on avant-garde artists. Sculptors and painters such as Henri Gaudier-Brezeska, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, C.R.W. Nevinson, Jacob Epstein, and Paul Nash expressed their horror in paintings and sculptures—and often fell victim themselves, either in combat or from a breakdown of their spirits.

The artist-poet Isaac Rosenberg gave voice to what might seem at first like hyperbole: “”What is happening to me now is more tragic than the ‘passion play.’ Christ never endured what I endure. It is breaking me completely.”

When I first read this, I felt annoyed at the self-pitying tone, not to mention the audacity of likening oneself to Jesus crucified. But the more I contemplated the situation of Rosenberg (who was killed not long after penning those words), and the more I learned about the suffering and tragic fate of so many artists during these years, I reconsidered. I came to feel that, in some way, Christ was a brother in spirit to every human being who suffered loss during those four years of hell and collective madness.

Art came to play a role in the readjustment of society after the war, in two ways I’d like to highlight. The first came through the profusion of memorials created on both sides of the Atlantic, both small community monuments as well as larger national ones. In her novel The Stone Carvers, the Canadian novelist-poet Jane Urquhart wrote of sculptor Walter Allward’s creation of the Vimy Memorial—and of the transience of it and so much other outdoor public art, despite the exacting labors of its creators:

“The larger, the more impressive the monument, the more miraculous its construction, the more it seems to predict its own fall from grace. Exposed and shining on elevated ground, insisting on prodigious feats of memory from all who come to gaze at it, it appears to be as vulnerable as a flower, and its season seems to be as brief.”

The second way art furthered the halting readjustment of a wounded society came in the form of one of the most bizarre aspects of the war I’d ever come across—one I first heard about on a PBS documentary on the First World War from a European perspective (the title escapes me now, and I can’t find it on the Web at the moment).

In storming well-entrenched positions, soldiers put their faces over trenches, only to end up shot and horribly disfigured. The wounds were so hideous that for the rest of the war and after, civilians didn’t want to be reminded of this and the wounded soldiers ended up isolated. In the postwar period, sculptors such as Anna Coleman Ladd created cosmetic masks that called for paint applied so carefully that the soldiers’ wounds would not be so apparent, at least at first glance. These advances helped to pioneer plastic surgery.

You can read more about this unusual aspect of the war that literally wounded an entire civilization in this NPR report as well as this piece on “Prosthetic Mask Makers of World War I.”