Survivors at Arras

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946), was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I.

Nevinson studied at the Slade School of Art  under Henry Tonks and alongside Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler. When he left the Slade, Nevinson befriended Filippo Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, and the radical writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, who founded the short-lived Rebel Art Centre. However, Nevinson fell out with Lewis and the other 'rebel' artists when he attached their names to the Futurist movement. Lewis immediately founded the Vorticists, an avant garde group of artists and writers from which Nevinson was excluded.

At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French and British soldiers. For a very brief period he served as a volunteer ambulance driver before ill-health forced his return to Britain. Subsequently, Nevinson volunteered for home service with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He used these experiences as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used the machine aesthetic of Futurism and the influence of Cubism to great effect. His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote at the time that Nevinson's painting La Mitrailleuse, 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.' In 1917, Nevinson was appointed an official war artist, but he was no longer finding Modernist styles adequate for describing the horrors of modern war, and he increasingly painted in a more realistic manner. Nevinson's later World War 1 paintings, based on short visits to the Western Front, are considered by some art historians as lacking the same powerful effect as those earlier works which had helped to make him one of the most famous young artists working in England.

This drypoint print is a view of bomb-damaged buildings seen from the cobbled stone street in Arras, in northern France. These were the only two houses not to have been completely destroyed by bombs or shells in World War One. These then are the 'survivors' (ironically there are no human survivors evident), although the roofs either side of the tobacconists in the centre are all but destroyed. In another irony, one of these houses was the birthplace of the highly destructive French revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94), architect of the Reign of Terror. Are the stains on the cobbled street the blood of war casualties? The probable, mundane answer is that they are, on the contrary, horse droppings. But this does not compromise the bleak message of the print. When it was illustrated in the first volume of the publication series British Artists at the Front in 1918 which was exclusively devoted to Nevinson, the brief commentary noted that 'the rest of Arras after the War will have to be built again'.

See:

Campbell Dodgson and C.E. Montague (eds), British Artists at the Front, 1 (New York, 1918)

Tate, 'Survivors at Arras', http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nevinson-survivors-at-arras-p11049

Wikipedia', 'Christopher R.W. Nevinson', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._W._Nevinson

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018