The First and Second World Wars were the catalyst for the best artists of their generation to produce some of their most modern, powerful and beautiful work. Images of the reality of war were repressed and the artists became photojournalists of their age. These images still feel modern today, and this is a group of extreme rarity.

The show will include two of the most stark and memorable works on paper of the First World War, C R W Nevinson’s Returning to the Trenches and The Void of War by Paul Nash. There is also a group of three paintings by Nash done in the trenches in 1917, in which he vividly records a landscape transformed by high explosive, and the result is beautiful and horrific.

Artists include Charles Sargeant Jagger, Paul Nash, C R W Nevinson, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth: all saw active service during the First World War. This first-hand experience gave their work immediacy and brutal honesty. It took a message from the trenches to the firesides at home winning the respect of serving soldiers, and the work was avant-garde and unconventional.

The Nevinson drypoints of 1916 were his first prints of War subjects. He served with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, stretcher-bearer and interpreter, and was faced with the wounded, many of whom died through lack of medical attention, in scenes of unspeakable horror.

Jagger’s The Driver, part of the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner is one of his greatest and most moving sculptures, and a cast of the maquette will be in the exhibition with Wipers, a bronze of a rifleman standing with bayonet fixed.

The large watercolour Gunners pulling cannons at Ypres by William Roberts shows the Vorticist style adapted to action: similarly Edward Wadsworth’s woodcut Drydocked for Scaling and Painting shows a Vorticist finding a subject perfectly suited to his style.

The subjects recorded by war artists in the Second World War were often more mundane than their predecessors in 1914-1918. The deepest horrors of the conflict only came to light after the liberation of the concentration camps, and images from these still affected artists long after the war had ended.

Almost a century after The Fine Art Society showed the famous Nevinson exhibition Britain’s Efforts and Ideals in the Great War, some of the images will be on show there once again.

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Notes to Editors:
The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London W1S 2JT
T: +44(0)20 7629 5116 W: www.faslondon.com