Programme 10: World War I

The Art Works

Title: Zonnebeke
Artist: William Orpen
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1918

Zonnebeke is a bleak painting, showing a countryside laid waste by the destructive force of war. It is a more or less featureless landscape of mud, water and a cloudy sky painted in a limited range of colours: the greys and browns help to create its grim atmosphere. There is a dead soldier lying on his back in the right foreground, almost as if he has carelessly been left there, just part of the detritus scattered across the mud.

William Orpen (1878–1931) had established a reputation as a society portrait painter by the time he became an official war painter. The values of the comfortable world he was used to painting are here turned on their head, with a human life apparently having been thrown aside.

Title: Bird Swallowing a Fish
Artist: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Medium: Bronze
Date: c.1913-4 (cast 1964)

The sculpture appears to be as simple as the title suggests – a bird is swallowing a fish. Both are stylised, the bird with its legs tucked up under its wings, eyes bulging and beak wide open. The fish is more geometrical, mechanical, looking perhaps more like a torpedo than a fish.

The French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) was living in England at the outbreak of World War I when this work was made. It may reflect the forebodings that led up to war, the predatory instinct of a larger nation about to overtake a smaller one. But if the fish is seen as a potentially destructive force, the outcome may not be what we would initially expect.

Gaudier-Brzeska felt obliged to fight for his country in the war, and was killed in the trenches in 1915 at the tragically young age of 24. The sculpture was originally modelled in plaster and wasn’t cast in bronze until 1964, many years after the artist’s death.

Title: Carnival
Artist: Max Beckmann
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1920

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) fought for the Germans during World War I, but was invalided out in 1915, the same year that Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed. His painting Carnival shows that for many in the years after the war there was no release from worry. The two standing figures are dressed as clowns, happy-go-lucky characters who should bring fun and laughter, but they are clearly depressed. They are cramped in a claustrophobic room, objects tilting and falling over, the downward movement leading our eyes to a third figure writhing on the floor in an animal mask. This figure, which Beckmann claimed was a self-portrait, is looking at the world upside-down. For many this is how things seemed – the established order had been overturned, but there was nothing secure to replace it.

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