A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War. - book reviews

Art in America, Sept, 1995 by Kenneth E. Silver

By the time one has finished reading Richard Cork's A Bitter Truth, one feels some of what the war's veterans must have felt: exhausted, relieved, matured. From Louvain to Verdun, the Judaean Hills to Ypres, Macedonia to the Marne, Cork's consistently illuminating text traverses an immense, ruined landscape. It is a long book on representations of a long war, the first act of Europe's two-act tragedy that has colored all Western thought since. Of course, even to call the First World War a tragedy is to transform its messy, stupid slaughter to the level of myth, as any number of government-commissioned artists set out to do. Needless to say, this is only part of Cork's story, which he tells by looking at a tremendous number of works by artists from nearly every European country, as well as from the United States and Canada, and by covering both private artistic initiatives and official art. (The phrase "avantgarde" applies to many but certainly not all of the works analyzed in A Bitter Truth.)

There is not much new in the ways that Cork conceptualizes the representation of this (or any) war. He is little concerned with previous depictions of the subject, and so has nothing to tell us about what is utterly different (or not) in these modem works; he deals only fleetingly with anything other than art that refers directly to war preparation, fighting, destruction and death (or to the postwar construction of those subjects in memory). He certainly never takes up the question of absence: what went un-represented, what was repressed even by those artists who thought they were confronting the thing in all its glaring terribilita. (Homosexuality, for instance, is hardly mentioned, even though there are many works here - images of men living, fighting and dying together - that beg for its utterance.)

Yet one cannot fault Cork for his straightforward, chronological arrangement, or for the limits he has placed on his project. For the book he has produced is unquestionably the first really comprehensive, international survey of art of the Great War. In order to do this he hunkers down in the trenches, as it were, recounting a narrative that takes us year by year, and sometimes month by month, through a roller coaster of military, political and social events. The result is a temporal mapping of powerful emotions in flux, a kind of fever chart of the illusions and disillusionments (to the extent to which they were represented visually) of the participants and onlookers of World War I. His study begins in the prewar period with representations of Apocalypse from the Germans and Russians (Ludwig Meidner, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc), with an ode to militarism in the art of Roger de La Fresnaye, and with images of generalized revolt in the work of Luigi Russolo. (Patricia Leighten's important work on Picasso's use of newspaper clippings about the Balkan War in his 1912 collages is invoked here, but perhaps not given enough credit.) As war itself begins, Cork discusses the momentarily upbeat and heroizing art of Walter Sickert, Aristarkh Lentulov, Kasimir Malevich, Gino Severini and Raoul Dufy. This period is quickly followed by a stalemate as trench warfare becomes a fact of life: Fernand Leger's drawings and collages, Egon Schiele's gouaches and Vorticist work (by Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts, et al.) now come into play. By 1915-16 Cork finds evidence of widespread disillusionment in the beautiful, heartrending Goya-esque lithographs of Willy Jaeckel, in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's well-known Self-Portrait as a Soldier and in James Ensor's The Banquet of the Starved. The battles of Verdun and the Somme, the 1916 bloodletting, beget a vast gallery of work verging on the demented, including Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill, Mark Gertler's Merry-Go-Round and Hubertus Maria Davringhausen's The Madman. Then Cork digs in for two chapters of prolonged mayhem: in Felix Vallotton's explosive landscapes of 1917, Georges Leroux's aptly titled Hem of the same year (based on a ghastly battle the artist had witnessed in Belgium), and Roberts's depiction of French and English soldiers being gassed by the Germans at Ypres.

The down-to-earth mechanics of waging war, less dramatic to be sure, were cnicial aspects of official propaganda campaigns: works in this category include Wadsworth's huge picture of camouflage ships in drydock in Liverpool, Edouard Vuillard's of the munitions factory in Lyon, and Charles Ginner's of a shell-filling factory. But it is when devastation appears as a trace, and as the long-term, postwar persistence of memory, that it exerts the greatest hold on our imagination: the works of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Jean Galtier-Boissiere, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash all seem to strike chords of anger and/or bewilderment, leaving us with nothing to ponder but our own folly.

The greatest strength of A Bitter Truth is its inclusiveness, which is the result of its connection to an exhibition. Though the book began as a series of Slade lectures delivered at Cambridge during the 1989-90 academic year, A Bitter Truth also served as an accompanying text for what must have been an extraordinary show of the saine name, organized by Cork in 1994 for the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Altes Museum in Berlin. Indeed, Cork's book is one of the best arguments I know for the irreplaceability of the curatorial effort, for its centrality in visual culture. We know what happens when criticism and art history - whether under- or over-theorized, n'importe! - are made in the absence of actual works of art, or when art history is written about works we already know well (perhaps too well). No matter how much the language changes, we inevitably focus on the same few, hypervalorized artists and (widely reproduced) works of art, mostly from the same geographic centers; while this emphasis on familiar works has the virtue of refinement, it also begets the preciosity of intellectual inbreeding. The canon doesn't budge, and we are forced into ever more remarkable feats of mental contortion in order to keep interest alive. But the research-and-development phase of any really good exhibition, especially a thematic one like Cork's, brings into view entire new areas of interest, new works by known artists as well as work by figures we've never known before. Many of these works may later be sent back to the well-earned obscurity of museum storage rooms, but some will not, and, at any rate, in the process, our ideas of the shape of the artistic picture will have been transformed, sometimes in ways that may take quite a while to articulate.