World War I in popular culture
As Marc Chagall later remarked, "The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe.
C. R. W. Nevinson, associated with the Futurists, wrote that "This war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness.
[6] British marine painter Norman Wilkinson invented the concept of "dazzle painting" -— a way of using stripes and disrupted lines to confuse the enemy about the speed and dimensions of a ship.
Around a hundred posters were commissioned from artists by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee of which two and a half million copies were distributed across the country.
Private companies also sponsored recruitment posters: Remember Belgium, by the Belgian-born Frank Brangwyn and The Only Road for an Englishman by Gerald Spencer Pryse were two notable examples produced on behalf of the London Electric Railways.
[11] His grim poster of a Tommy bayoneting an enemy soldier (“Put Strength in the Final Blow: Buy War Bonds”) caused deep offence in both Britain and Germany.
George Clausen's symbolist allegory Renaissance was the most memorable painting of that 1915 exhibition, contrasting ruins and oppression with dignity and optimism.
The general failure of academic painting, in the form of the Royal Academy, to respond adequately to the challenges of representing the War was made clear by reaction to the 1916 Summer Exhibition.
Although popular taste acclaimed Richard Jack's sentimental Return to the Front: Victoria Railway Station, 1916, the academicians and their followers were stuck in the imagery of past battle pictures of the Napoleonic and Crimean eras.
Arrangements of soldiers, officers waving swords, and cavalrymen swaggering seemed outdated to those at home, and risible to those with experience of the front.
A wounded New Zealander standing in front of a painting of a cavalry charge commented that "one man with a machine-gun would wipe all that lot out.
Orpen's work was criticised for superficiality in the pursuit of perfectionism: "in the tremendous fun of painting he altogether forgot the ghastliness of war".
[10] The most popular painting in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1917 was Frank O. Salisbury's Boy 1st Class John Travers Cornwell V.C.
[10] David Bomberg's experiences of mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches - as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme - permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age.
[19][20] At the 1918 Royal Academy exhibition, Walter Bayes' monumental canvas The Underworld depicted figures sheltering in a London Underground station during an air raid.
[10] Among the great artists who tried to capture an essential element of war in painting was Society portraitist John Singer Sargent.
For the British he painted one of his best known works, A Battery Shelled (1919, Imperial War Museum)(see [1]), drawing on his own experience in charge of a 6-inch howitzer at Ypres.
Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew of Lord Strathcona's Horse cavalry, was awarded the Victoria Cross for leading the attack.
As a war artist, Streeton continued to deal in landscapes and his works have been criticised for failing to concentrate on the fighting soldiers.
The statue on top of the memorial and the bas reliefs on its sides, which were sculpted respectively by Lieutenant Charles Web Gilbert and May Butler-George, were removed by the occupying German Army in 1940.
[31] Iconic memorials created after the war are designed as symbols of remembrance and as carefully contrived works of art.
In 1964, the British Broadcasting Corporation with cooperation from its counterparts with Australia and Canada, has a 26-part series called The Great War.
[41][42] The second season of the British television drama Downton Abbey, which aired in 2011, showed the effects of the war mostly from the perspective of the eponymous estate.
On May 7, 2016, EA DICE revealed Battlefield 1, a first-person shooter video game primarily set in World War I featuring the Harlem Hellfighters, the Red Baron and Lawrence of Arabia.
