Overturning decades of scholarly orthodoxies, James Fox makes a bold new argument about the First World War's cultural consequences.

Interdisciplinary collection of essays on fine art painting as it relates to the First World War and commemoration of the conflict Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of painting played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public's appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet provide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes. Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding panoramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public's understanding of the war. Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contributors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume's overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts. Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the military came into existence during this period. Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the State Art Collections Dresden. Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.

The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britains leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange. Throughout these years, the pursuit of the real was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the romantic, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.

The War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) were responsible for the production of some of the most iconic images of the Second World War. Despite its rich historical value, this collection has been poorly utilised by historians and hasn't been subjected to the levels of analysis afforded to other forms of wartime culture. This innovative study addresses this gap by bringing official war art into dialogue with the social, economic and military histories of the Second World War. Rebecca Searle explores the tensions between the documentarist and propagandistic roles of the WAAC in their representation of aerial warfare in the battle for production, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the bombing of Germany. Her analyses demonstrate that whilst there was a strong correlation between war art and propaganda, the WAAC depicted many aspects of experience that were absent from wartime propaganda, such as class divisions within the services, gendered hierarchies within industries, civilian death and the true nature of the bombing of Germany. In addition, she shows that propagandistic constructions were not entirely separate from lived experience, but reflected experience and shaped the way that individuals made sense of the war. Accessibly written, highly illustrated and packed with valuable examples of the use of war art as historical source, this book will enhance our understanding of the social and cultural history of Britain during the Second World War.

German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4” x 6” cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, Postcards from the Trenches is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the “degenerate” artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

The bold graphic images made by artists affiliated with Vorticism, British Futurism, and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art capture the optimism and anxiety of early twentieth-century Britain. This richly illustrated volume features rare British prints from the Leslie and Johanna Garfield collection dating between 1913 and 1939—a period marked by two world wars, a global pandemic, the Great Depression, and the rise of Fascism and Communism, but also new technologies, women’s suffrage, and a growing focus on public access to art. Essays explore how artists turned to printmaking to alleviate trauma, memorialize their wartime experiences, and capture the aspirations and fears of the twenties and thirties. At the heart of the catalogue are the colorful linocuts made by artists associated with London’s celebrated Grosvenor School. The visually striking compositions by Sybil Andrews, Claude Flight, Cyril E. Power, and Lill Tschudi, among others, convey the vitality of quotidian life during the machine age.

This is the first book to bring together an interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and global perspective on the First World War through the lens of historical and cultural geography. Reflecting the centennial interest in the conflict, the collection explores the relationships between warfare and space, and pays particular attention to how commemoration is connected to spatial elements of national identity, and processes of heritage and belonging. Venturing beyond military history and memory studies, contributors explore conceptual contributions of geography to analyse the First World War, as well as reflecting upon the imperative for an academic discussion on the War’s centenary. This book explores the War’s impact in more unexpected theatres, blurring the boundary between home and fighting fronts, investigating the experiences of the war amongst civilians and often overlooked combatants. It also critically examines the politics of hindsight in the post-war period, and offers an historical geographical account of how the First World War has been memorialised within ‘official’ spaces, in addition to those overlooked and often undervalued ‘alternative spaces’ of commemoration. This innovative and timely text will be key reading for students and scholars of the First World War, and more broadly in historical and cultural geography, social and cultural history, European history, Heritage Studies, military history and memory studies.

It has been contended that femininity was disrupted, constructed and reconstructed during World War I, but what happened to masculinity? Using the evidence of letters, diaries and oral histories of members of the military and of civilians, this book explores the impact of the Great War on the male body.