Defiant Spirits (31 page)

I'm a judge of ancient and modern Art.

In Art I take the leading part.

Of a great concern I am the start;

For I am the brain, the mind, the heart

Of the great Konodian Army.

Men of genius great and small

Wield their brush at my beck and call

I hire the greatest men in Town;

I raise them up or I dash them down

With a friendly nod or haughty frown

In my great Konodian Army.
42

Konody wished to show Varley the work of some of these “greatest men in Town.” There was certainly much in the London art world that was new for Varley to see. He had left England fewer than six years earlier, but in that time the country's artistic climate had changed dramatically as London became the home of a distinctive avant-garde. In 1916 Ezra Pound wrote that “new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex of London,” bringing about “changes as great as the Renaissance changes.”
43

The best examples of these changes were Italian Futurism and its homegrown English version, Vorticism. The Futurists vehemently rejected all art of the past as “fetid gangrene,” celebrating instead what they called the “overwhelming vortex of modernity,” with its “crowds, its automobiles, its telegraphs, its bare lower-class neighbourhoods, its sounds, its shrieks, its violence, its cruelties, its cynicism.”
44
In October 1913 the Doré Gallery in London hosted the
Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition,
followed in the spring of 1914 by an exhibition of
Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors.
This latter exhibition, which caused a riot, included a poetry recitation by Filippo Marinetti (“peculiarly blood-thirsty concoctions,” in the opinion of one audience member) accompanied by the cannon-like booming of drums.
45

Italian Futurism involved a good deal of ludicrous posturing, but English artists began responding with their own equivalent. Christened “Vorticism” by Pound, its most boisterous adherents were Percy Wyndham Lewis and C.R.W. Nevinson. Just as the painters in the Algonquin Park School claimed the Canadian landscape called for new artistic forms, so Wyndham Lewis believed the “vortex” of a city like London demanded the dynamism of Futurism and Vorticism: a man passing his days “amid the rigid lines of houses, a plague of cheap ornamentation, noisy street locomotion, the Bedlam of the press, will evidently possess a different habit of vision to a man living amongst the lines of a landscape.”
46
The results were paintings with abstracted geometrical images and Cubist-style planes that interlocked like the teeth of sprocket wheels or shattered in violent, clangorous colour. Wyndham Lewis further sounded the murkier fathoms of modern art by creating for a Soho club a sculpture made entirely from raw meat.

Although he wrote books on Raphael and Filippo Lippi, as well as guides to the Louvre and the Uffizi, Konody was sympathetic to new artistic movements such as Vorticism. In fact, he had recruited both Wyndham Lewis and Nevinson into the
cwmf
, along with David Bomberg and Paul Nash, two audaciously talented and experimental young graduates of the Slade School of Fine Art. Like A.Y. Jackson, Konody had realized that the “death and glory stuff” painted by war artists of the previous century was woefully inadequate to capture the intensity of modern industrial warfare. Early optimism about the war's suitability for poetry and pictures—“Oh God! what a lovely war,” wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in “The Cavalier's Farewell”
47
—swiftly faded in the face of the bleak and unromantic reality. Heroic cavalry charges had been supplanted by muddy battles in the trenches. As early as 1915
The Times
published an article entitled “The Passing of the Battle Painter” in which the correspondent lamented how war had been “robbed of its beauty.”
48
Modern war, like modern life, was ugly and impersonal, a vortex of speed, brutality and mechanical paraphernalia.

Konody believed that anyone trying to paint the Great War needed to approach his subject differently from previous war artists. He stressed that he did not want “visions of winged figures with laurel leaves” or “long rows of imaginary battle pictures invented or reconstructed by the professional battle painters in the undisturbed comfort of their studios” (which was, however, exactly what Richard Jack was doing). The
cwmf
was, in his opinion, about art as much as war: he wanted not only a record of Canada's contribution to the war but also “as complete as possible a picture of all the artistic currents and tendencies in vogue at the time of the world's war.”
49
The only painter who could successfully grapple with what he called “the unprecedented conditions of modern warfare” was “an adherent of the modern school.”
50
He therefore took Varley to see the work of other painters under his wing, giving him a viewing of some of London's most progressive art.

An art critic for the
Sunday Times
wrote that by 1917 it was clear that the two artists who had most to say about the Great War, and who said it most eloquently and innovatively, were Nash and Nevinson.
51
When Varley arrived in London, Nash had a solo exhibition,
War Paintings and Drawings,
on display at the Leicester Galleries. The twenty-eight-year-old Nash began his career as a landscapist, producing, in the years before the war, haunting and symbol-charged watercolours of the English countryside. In 1912 he wrote dreamily to a friend that he painted his landscapes “not for the landscape's sake, but for ‘the things behind,' the dwellers in the innermost: whose light shines through sometimes.”
52
Seeing the Home Counties through this idealizing lens was easy enough; the battlefields of Flanders were another matter. Dispatched to the front as a war artist in November 1917, he discovered these dwellers in the innermost, at least at Passchendaele, to be horrifying entities. In a letter to his wife he described the Western Front as “the most frightful nightmare
. . .
unspeakable, utterly undescribable.” His sketches of the nightmarish landscape gave, he told her, only “a vague idea of its horror,” but
The Times
reviewer was astonished at the facility with which Nash captured “utter chaos” and showed “a world dead for a million years, frozen and without atmosphere
. . .
It is waste—a waste of worlds, of ages, which looks as if it had been made by some indifferent world of Nature.”
53

Nevinson, whose work Varley was also shown, arrived back from the Western Front with equally disconcerting images. Likewise only twenty-eight, he had been one England's most notorious artists at the outset of the war, a friend of Italian Futurists such as Marinetti and a former studiomate in Paris of Amedeo Modigliani. With Marinetti he composed a manifesto for English art that (in a long list of pungent dicta) denounced “effeminacy” and the “worship of tradition,” and called instead for a “strong, virile and anti-sentimental” art.
54
His most famous painting,
Tum-tiddly-um-tum-pom-pom,
tried to capture the frenzied motion of a London crowd. In 1914 Nevinson believed that war was “the world's only hygiene,” and that it would be, as he enthusiastically predicted early in 1915, “a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe that there is no beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness.”
55
Service in Flanders as a mechanic and ambulance driver quickly dampened his enthusiasm for strife and aggressiveness, and a nervous breakdown followed. His artistic style remained intact: Futurism offered, he maintained, “the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt.”
56

Nevinson was attached to the
cwmf
in July 1917. The following spring he, like Nash, showed work in the Leicester Galleries at an exhibition opened by Beaverbrook himself. A newspaper reported that Nevinson “stated the facts of the war without the slightest attempt to gloss over the inevitable horrors.”
57
Paintings included
After a Push,
purchased by the Imperial War Museum and described in another newspaper as “a desolate collection of shell-holes filled with water and as large as ponds.”
58
Another of his works,
Paths of Glory,
showing two dead British soldiers facedown in the mud, was deemed too terrible for public viewing. It provoked the ire of the military authorities, so Nevinson pasted over it a sheet of brown paper chalked with the word “Censored” (for which he received an additional rebuke from the War Office: the word “censored,” he was informed, was censored). An art critic managed to peel back enough of the paper to see barbed wire, the butt of a rifle and a khaki cap.
59

Varley was impressed by the efforts of Nash and Nevinson. He realized the necessity of approaching his task with a modern technique similar to theirs. It would not be possible, he wrote to Maud, to produce “lovely tones and lovely colours and lovely drawing and all that bunkum when
. . .
the disembowelled earth is festering and flinging off an abortive stench.” Reiterating what the Algonquin Park School had been saying about the Canadian landscape, he told her that “no art conceived in the past can express the hugeness of the present.”
60
Modern warfare, like the vast and inhospitable landscape of Canada, called for new artistic forms.

VARLEY WAS TAKEN with the work of another artist whose work he saw in London. Jackson was back in London in April, having spent the early spring with an artillery brigade at Liévin, near Lens, in northern France. The sight of the war-ravaged countryside enthralled and appalled him in equal measures. The misty atmosphere and idyllic landscape of this region of northern France were once celebrated in paintings such as Camille Corot's
A Pond in Picardy,
not to mention the work of the École d'Étaples with which Jackson was so familiar. But now it was, he wrote, a “seemingly empty country, cut up by old trench lines, gun pits, old shell holes, ruins of villages and farmhouses.”
61

At one point, in the company of Augustus John, who was glorying in a major's uniform and tackling a huge canvas for the
cwmf
called
The Pageant of War,
Jackson had witnessed an Allied gas attack on the German line. Artists like Apollinaire were able to detach themselves—however briefly and temporarily—from the horrors of warfare in order to appreciate its aesthetic effects. After seeing rocket flares soaring through the night sky, Apollinaire began his poem “Wonder of War” with the lines: “How lovely these flares are that light up the dark / They climb their own peak and lean down to look / They are dancing ladies whose glances become eyes, arms and hearts.”
62
Despite his horrific first-hand experience at Sanctuary Wood, Jackson too was spellbound by the sight of coloured lights coursing through the fog bank of gas. “It was like a wonderful display of fireworks,” he wrote, “with the clouds of gas and the German flares and rockets of all colours.”
63

Back in London, in an attempt to capture this macabre beauty, he painted
Gas Attack, Liévin,
showing an undulating foreground reminiscent of
Terre sauvage
and a sky aglow with flares. Another painting from this period was
Springtime in Picardy,
which presents a tree in bloom against the backdrop of a devastated village through which two soldiers nonchalantly stroll, oblivious to beauty and horror alike. Once again there are poetic analogues. The work features the same juxtaposition of the pastoral and the infernal found in several Great War poems, such as Wilfred Owen's “Exposure,” which describes soldiers hunkered down in foxholes briefly imagining the benevolence of nature: “So we drowse, sun-dozed, / Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.” The same play on the absurdly incongruous fit between mechanized warfare and the beauty of nature can also be found in John McCrae's “In Flanders Fields,” with its roar of artillery set against a shattered idyll of poppies, larks and glowing sunsets.
64

If
Springtime in Picardy
suggests the possibility of peace and renewal, or at least the continuation of the natural cycle despite mankind's devastation, Jackson's most powerful and expressive work from this time offered no such promise. Called
Liévin, March 1918,
it featured a distant watchtower and a foreground of shattered, windowless houses and the slithering lines of a battlefield that included barbed wire and two white crosses. The colours were bloody and brooding—greys, blacks, reds and oranges—and the painting filled with tortuous lines suggesting quagmire and collapse. If some of the English avant-garde painters were expressing the “waste of worlds” with jagged edges and sharp planes—as Paul Nash did in his remarkable
Void
—Jackson, at least in
Liévin, March 1918,
did so with writhing and distorted lines that make their way like tentacles across the picture plane.

Jackson and Varley spent much time together in Jackson's studio. The two men discussed Thomson and plans for future sketching expeditions into the bush, to places such as Canoe Lake. Varley confided to Maud that although Jackson was not “such a man as Tom,” he believed that “we two would manage and pull along well.” His newly favourable opinion came from the fact that he found Jackson changed from the man he last saw more than three years ago. He was now “more sensitive,” chastened by his experiences on the Western Front. “I'm sure if he had to go through the fight anymore,” he wrote to Maud, “he would be broken.”