UFO Info Week-End

Serious critics believe that it was and that high visual culture in the 20th century has thereafter been far more fragile than literature and

Serious critics believe that it was, and that high visual culture in the 20th century has thereafter been far more fragile than literature, and perhaps any other art form Wisely, I think, Cork avoids such questions But he is wrong to have evaded the crucial issue of Dada. Many artists went into combat as cubists, futurists, expressionists or whatever, and they carried those styles to the theatre of war. Dada, on the other hand, was the direct child of the Great War. Dadaism was born of the conflict yet doesn’t appear in the exhibition and is mentioned in only half a dozen tangential comments in the book.This book is exceptionally well illustrated, and for that reason the exhibition feels like a concentrated and abbreviated version of the written work Concentration is indeed a leading characteristic of war art. The impulse to get things down on canvas or paper as quickly, concisely and brutally as possible led to work of striking brevity. Meditative art tends to come after 1918 but Otto Dix, who is well represented at the Barbican, preserved bellicose fury at least until the mid-1920s.

Beside his Self Portrait as a Soldier, a fierce work in oil on paper, is his War Series of 1924, etchings with aquatint that must count among the most extraordinary prints of the century. They are all the more gripping because we realise that the black-hearted Dix is glorifying his own part in the carnage.There were many other artists who took war as a stirring and exciting theme, prominent among them the Italian futurists. We don’t see a lot of Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carra these days, and now we are reminded of their art and their political views. Both men actively encouraged the Italian government to join the war, ‘the only health-giver of the world’. In addition there’s a painting by Mario Sironi, Composition with Propellor, and a rare early de Chirico, The Sailors’ Barracks of 1914.Britain had one committed futurist, Christopher Nevinson, who in 1915 informed the Daily Express that ‘this war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe that there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness’ He is represented by a handful of paintings.

Mostly they are familiar, but Returning to the Trenches of 1914-15 (borrowed from the National Gallery of Canada) is not a well- known work and is of great interest Stylistically, it is still a futurist work. Emotionally, however, it has begun to criticise rather than glorify patriotic emotions. Cork adds some telling information about Lady Butler, the Victorian battle painter who was still working in 1915 and came to have mixed emotions about a war that she had at one time supported.Lady Butler isn’t in the exhibition, for Cork quite strictly limits his show to artists of the avant-garde. He has also – unusually, these days – kept photographs, documents and videos to a minimum. In their place is an excellent selection of the graphic work that gained such importance as the war went on. Besides Dix, there are impressive German works on paper from George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Erich Heckel. Russian graphics are equally notable, their attitudes complicated by all sorts of references to peasant traditions.