When he left the Slade, Nevinson befriended Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, and the radical writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, who founded the short-lived Rebel Art Centre.

At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French and British soldiers.

Shortly after the end of the war, Nevinson travelled to the United States of America, where he painted a number of powerful images of New York.

In 1920, the critic Charles Lewis Hind wrote of Nevinson that 'It is something, at the age of thirty one, to be among the most discussed, most successful, most promising, most admired and most hated British artists.

There his contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Adrian Allinson and Dora Carrington.

When Wyndham Lewis founded the short-lived Rebel Art Centre, which included Edward Wadsworth and Ezra Pound, Nevinson also joined.

From 13 November 1914, Nevinson spent nine weeks in France with the FAU and the British Red Cross Society, mostly working at a disused goods shed by Dunkirk rail station known as the Shambles.

[9] Nevinson, alongside his father and other volunteers, worked to dress wounds, help clean and disinfect the shed and started to make it habitable.

Although Nevinson would often make much of this time as an ambulance driver, particularly in his publicity material, he only held the role for a week as, due to his poor health, he lacked the strength to steer the vehicle.

Nevinson's Futurist painting, Returning to the Trenches, and the sculpture The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein received the most attention and greatest praise in reviews of the show.

[3][13] After his father received assurances that he would not be posted abroad, Nevinson enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and spent the rest of 1915 working at the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth.

Nevinson married Kathleen Knowlman on 1 November 1915 at Hampstead Town Hall and, after a week-long honeymoon, he reported back to the RAMC but was invalided out of the service in January 1916 with acute rheumatic fever.

[2] Nevinson used his experiences in France and at the London General Hospital as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used Futurist and Cubist techniques, as well as more realistic depictions, to great effect.

The artist Walter Sickert wrote at the time that La Mitrailleuse 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.

[3] When he returned to London in August 1917, Nevinson first completed six lithographs on the subject of Building Aircraft for the War Propaganda Bureau portfolio of pictures, Britain's Efforts and Ideals,[18] and then spent seven months in his Hampstead studio working up his sketches from the Front into finished pieces.

Amid the sarcasm and vitriol of Nevinson's response, he did make the point that the soldiers in the painting were sketched from a group home on leave from the Front that he had encountered on the London Underground.

[20][21][22] In 1918, after some negotiation, Nevinson agreed to work for the British War Memorials Committee to produce a single large artwork for a proposed, but never built, Hall of Remembrance.

Nevinson quickly fell out with the Army minder assigned to him in France, and claimed he was refused permission to visit the casualty stations he wanted to sketch in.

Whilst this produced some favourable reviews, notably in the Daily Express, it also led to articles claiming that the painting was so grim that it was being withheld from the public.

[6] Nevinson, alongside Edward Elgar and H. G. Wells represented British culture at the celebrations of the first anniversary of the Republic of Czechoslovakia in Prague in 1919.

[25] Nevinson first visited New York in May 1919 and spent a month there while his World War One prints were being shown, to great acclaim, at the Frederick Keppel & Co gallery.

This led to Nevinson becoming disillusioned with New York, to the extent he changed the name of his painting New York-an abstraction to The Soul of the Soulless City.

In 1920, the critic Charles Lewis Hind observed in his catalogue introduction to an exhibition of Nevinson's recent work: 'It is something, at the age of thirty one, to be among the most discussed, most successful, most promising, most admired and most hated British artists.

'[2] In September 1920, Nevinson designed a poster for a production, by Viola Tree, of The Unknown by Somerset Maugham which showed bombs exploding around a crucifix.

[2] WAAC eventually purchased two pictures from him, Anti-aircraft Defences and a depiction of a fire-bomb attack, The Fire of London, December 29th – An Historic Record.