I don't disrespect the skill that went into making war. It is their eyewitness testimony that should be remembered, not the glamour of camouflage. But technology had created far greater than imagined firepower that kept armies bogged down in trenches and turned the landscape into a death machine. The real cause of this nightmarish battle was that no one knew how bad it could possibly get all sides imagined an old-fashioned war. This centenary year has begun with inane media debates that reduced the history of the first world war to "provocative" posturing. Let's brighten them up with groovy camouflage! The fields of mud and blood were soooo depressing. Those dazzling, arty ships are so much nicer to remember than the acrid, honest poetry of Wilfred Owen, or the savage artistic responses of Otto Dix. It responds to calls from some quarters for us to take patriotic pride in this slaughter, and to stop endlessly running down the generals who sent 20,000 British soldiers to theirs deaths on the first day (I repeat, the first DAY) of the Battle of the Somme. Painting battleships in cool modernist designs is quite obviously an invitation to think about the positive side of the first world war. But to turn that into a cool artwork is a bland, apolitical and disturbingly celebratory way to remember the first world war. It is perfectly true that modern camouflage began when the fragmentary styles of modern art were applied to warships. What a whitewash – or if you prefer, a white-with-streaks-of-black-wash. The " Dazzle Ships" in Liverpool and London will evoke what the organisers describe as one of the "exciting" things about visual art in the first world war. As part of the celebrations – sorry, commemorations – two veteran ships are to be redecorated by contemporary artists in the "dazzle" camouflage created during the first world war to break up the visual silhouettes of battleships. So how are the lost artists of the first world war to be commemorated? How are the artistic consequences of this war, which provoked the Dada movement to reject art itself in rage at "civilised" Europe's massacre of its young men, to be remembered?Ĭonsider this. What about the talents destroyed before they had a chance? As Robert Hughes commented in The Shock of the New, if you wonder why there was no British Picasso, the answer probably lies among the first world war graveyards. These famous names are just the tip of the iceberg. The outstanding modern artists Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Franz Marc and Umberto Boccioni were among those who died. A generation of artistic talent was decimated, for a start. Yes, I suppose the war of 1914-18 had culture "associated with it".
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