The Waste Land: C.R.W. Nevinson & London in the 1920s: the artist C.R.W. Nevinson makes an appearance in the first draft of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, written in 1921. As Gul Inanc and Michael Walsh explain, his presence there was appropriate: Nevinson's postwar paintings of London depict a modern city heavy with memories of war, and apprehensive about the future

Apollo, Feb, 2008 by Gul Inanc, Michael Walsh

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Something had altered them. They were subject to queer moods and queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily moved to passion where they lost control of themselves, many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening. (1)

C.R.W. Nevinson's meteoric rise to prominence began in his Parisian student days in 1912; was catalysed when he was England's only Futurist in 1913-14; (2) and then consolidated when he proved himself to be a war artist par excellence, both freelance and official, on the fronts of Picardy and Flanders during the Great War. (3)

When the war finished, far from spent, he had gone in search of a new modernity in New York City, completing two trips, and two exhibitions there by Christmas 1920. (4) Such was his celebrity at the start of the 1920s that he was chosen to represent British art at the Festival of Freedom in Prague, standing confidently alongside Edward Elgar (representing music) and H.G. Wells (representing literature). But, for all this, he was, first and foremost, a Londoner, and he knew that it was there, not in New York, Prague or Paris, that his future lay. This article, therefore, ignores the officially commissioned and high-profile war works to look instead at his diverse painted reflections and commentaries on the nature of this deeply wounded, and changing, postwar capital city. (5)

Art history has been selectively unkind to Nevinson, sidelining his postwar work to the point that it is now almost forgotten. Writers such as Charles Harrison, Richard Cork and William Wees, for example, have claimed conclusively that Nevinson wandered rudderless from the Armistice in 1918 to his death in 1946. This conclusion was a result of the debate in (or certainly about) the interwar years, between 'formalists' (who regarded art as autonomous and self-reflexive) and 'functionalists' (who argued that art had a direct economic, social and spiritual function), a debate that was won by the former. The triumph of such art-history writing created little space for the values of individualism and personal conviction on the part of a committed 'modern' (although attributes so vital to modernism itself), preferring doctrinal adherence to the formal qualifies of the finished canvas. Such an approach regards a return to realism as, therefore, an irrefutable sign of retreat, and the artistic eclecticism that characterises Nevinson's later work is taken to be only a lack of conviction or focus. An alternative perspective, which downplays Clive Bell's 'otherworldliness' in preference for the tangible 'residues of the day'--the artist's experience, and a flexibility in subject matter and technique in response to an ever-changing society--might allow Nevinson's ethos of 'art rules the artist' to be taken more seriously.

Physically, London may have avoided the ravages of the first industrial war (with the exception of a few Zeppelin raids), but its inhabitants had not. There was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the Bright Young Things of the postwar generation and those who had been young only four years before, but were now prematurely old and bitter. C.F.G. Masterman observed:

   [it was] as if a table was suddenly tilted slanting
   and all the little dolls and marionettes were sent
   sliding on to the floor. Some cling wildly to the
   edges, some get their feet into crooks and
   crannies and retain their hold for a moment; but
   in bulk the whole mass, despite resistance, is
   falling through the bottom of the world. (6)

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Artists were no exception, and wondered how to mourn those who had been killed in this ghastly struggle and when, if ever, it would be appropriate to get back to the prewar experiment. How long would it take for patriotic fervour and 'Englishness' to die down and allow the return of 'foreign' cultural influences in the capital? How could the artist capture, then express, the contradictory moods in the country; respond to, cope with and encapsulate postwar sentiment? The nation, they understood, had to confront overwhelming and often contradictory emotions of mourning, memory, victory, guilt, reflection, relief and euphoria. But was painting up to the task of addressing anger and disenchantment? Could it visually relate to new social fissures between the nouveaux riches (war profiteers) and the 'nouveaux poor' (those who had actually fought); communists and capitalists; trade unions, suffragettes and those who embraced America and the excesses of the Jazz Age so soon after the guns fell silent? Nevinson himself wrote:

   In the artistic muddle I now found myself to be
   in, I decided that the only thing possible for me
   to do was to break from all studiotic theory and
   find my way as best I could. (7)

The Morning Post saw no such 'muddle' and gave Nevinson a resounding pat on the back for abandoning his quixotic course of old: 'He is still venturesome, as becomes one of his mental activity, but instead of tilting at windmills set on Cubistic heights, he has cast aside his blunted lance.' (8) The writer went on to claim that if anyone could escort art from war into peace, and in so doing capture the mood of London, it was C.R.W. Nevinson. (9)