01 Work, The Art of War, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson's La Mitrailleuse/ The Machine Gun, with footnotes

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson 1889–1946

La Mitrailleuse/ The Machine Gun, c. 1915

Oil paint on canvas

610 × 508 mm

Tate

Christopher Nevinson identified with the Italian futurist art movement. They celebrated and embraced the speed and efficient power of the modern age. Nevinson’s experience as an ambulance driver in the First World War, however, changed his view of the potential of a mechanised world. In this painting, soldiers fighting in France are reduced to a series of angular planes and grey colouring. They lose their individuality and even their humanity as they seem to fuse with the machine gun, which gives this painting its title. More on this painting

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (b London, 13 Aug. 1889; d London, 7 Oct. 1946) was a British painter and printmaker. As a student at the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1912–13 Nevinson met several of the Futurists and he became the outstanding British exponent of their style. His work included landscapes, urban scenes, figure compositions, and flowers, but he found his ideal subjects during the First World War. He served in France with the Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps, 1914–16, before being invalided out, and his harsh, steely images of life and death in the trenches received great acclaim when he held a one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1916. Stylistically they drew on certain Cubist as well as Futurist ideas, but they are closer to the work of the Vorticists (with whom he had exhibited in 1915).

In 1917 Nevinson returned to France as an Official War Artist, and he was the first to make drawings from the air. Some of his work was considered too unpleasant for public viewing and was censored, but a second one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1918 was another triumph. At the end of the war Nevinson renounced Futurism and his later, more conventional paintings are generally regarded as an anticlimax: an example is Twentieth Century (1932–5, Laing AG, Newcastle upon Tyne), an ambitious but rather turgid attempt to portray a world on the brink of catastrophe. More on Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others. Some Images may be subject to copyright

I don't own any of these images - credit is always given when due unless it is unknown to me. if I post your images without your permission, please tell me.

I do not sell art, art prints, framed posters or reproductions. Ads are shown only to compensate the hosting expenses.

If you enjoyed this post, please share with friends and family.

Thank you for visiting my blog and also for liking its posts and pages.

Please note that the content of this post primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.