Jon Snow TV - James Fox TV - Tate online -
Richard Nevinson was enthralled to the new face of war. His paintings said Bring It On. Jon Snow, The Genius of British Art: War, Channel 4 2010
But the censorship Nevinson suffered makes me think about the moral responsibility of the war artist. Is it to commemorate? Or to question? Or perhaps even to be downright critical? It’s a question war artists themselves had been dealing with ever since. ibid.
He [Nevinson] created a brutally realistic image of corpses face down in the mud and gave it a deeply cynical title: Path of Glory. For the Department of Information this was a step too far. It simply had to be suppressed. ibid.
Nevinson’s mediocre prospects were changed one evening when he was lured to the theatre ... Marinetti reached a new low. Marinetti loved war ... Nevinson was entranced ... On a wave of patriotism Nevinson enlisted, but he would be sorely disappointed ... deemed too weak to fight ... He busied himself making pictures that showed a hero’s view of modern war. Dr James Fox, British Masters, BBC 2011
English painter. Son of H W Nevinson, the war correspondent and author. His formative years as a student were spent at the Slade School of Art (1909–12) in London. The Futurist Exhibition of March 1912, held at the Sackville Gallery, London, proved decisive for his development.
Futurism had by now become a catchword in London for anything new and outrageous, and the British avant-garde grew resentful of its influence. Nevinson continued to make Futurist paintings of machine-age London, celebrating the dynamism of the underground Tube trains, the traffic in the Strand, and a Bank Holiday crowd on Hampstead Heath. The advent of World War I changed his mind. Having gone to France with the Red Cross and been invalided home soon afterwards, he announced that he would be using ‘Futurist technique’ to express the reality of war in his new work. In subsequent paintings Nevinson confirmed that he saw the Great War essentially as a tragic event. Bleak, outspoken and often angry, his paintings of 1915–16 are among the masterpieces of his career, bravely opposing the prevailing jingoistic tendency. By 1919 he had given up Futurism. Retreating instead to a more traditional vision, he painted lively interpretations of New York, which fuse a lingering love of Futurist angularity with a new respect for naturalistic observation. Nevinson was at his best when dealing with the dynamism and vertiginous scale of big-city life. In later years he concentrated more on pastoral scenes and flower pieces, where a gentler mood prevailed. Tate online