Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

For artists, poets and writers, the idea of ‘Paradise’ is associated with a place of creativity and transformation. It can also reflect the health of a nation and be a symbol of fertility.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, this idea of a creative paradise came under threat from the horrors of mechanised warfare. The First World War was a watershed, not only in people’s lives, but also in politics and culture.

The careers of most British artists were disrupted, and their art reflected the anguish of the time, becoming a metaphor for conflict, terror, tragedy and waste of life. The nostalgic longing to recover a lost paradise, an ancient golden age when humans lived in harmony with nature, became a driving force in their art.

‘This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war’ Richard III, William Shakespeare

Mapping the Territory

Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942) first encountered an aircraft in 1941 at the Royal Navy Air Station in Dundee. He was enthralled and wrote: ‘It was more lovely than words can say flying […] in an open plane, just floating on great curly clouds…’

For his next six months’ duty as a war artist, Ravilious worked with the Royal Air Force, producing some of the most evocative images of the Second World War. In South Coast Beach and Coastal Defences, he showed the vulnerability of the English landscape under threat of invasion. A mesh of barbed wire on the beach is not only a potent symbol of the last war but is also a foretelling of more conflict to come.

Painted just before the Second World War, Train Landscape represents a pastoral landscape on the point of vanishing, seen so briefly, so accidentally, from the carriage window of a passing train. It could be the artist’s last memory of the English landscape before his tragic death in 1942.

The War Comes Home

The Second World War was not just warfare for soldiers, it directly affected civilians too. There were dangers at home and in the workplace, with industrial hazards, the blackout and the biggest threat of all – air raid bombardments.

Aberdeen was one of the most frequently bombed cities in Scotland, with 178 people killed in no less than 34 attacks. Heavily industrialised cities such as Glasgow, which produced ships, munitions and guns for the British war effort, became targets for enemy aerial attack.

On the nights of 13 and 14 March 1941, more than 250 German bombers attacked factories and shipyards on Clydeside, devastating buildings and resulting in a large number of fatalities amongst the civilian population in the town of Clydebank.

Ian Fleming, a Glaswegian artist, served as a reserve policeman before joining the army. He recorded the consequences of war in a series of etchings depicting the Glasgow Blitz in a stark, confrontational and unflinching manner.

Human Condition

In the dark aftermath of war, artists came to depict the city not as a happy ‘Garden of Eden’, but as a soulless denial of humanity. The atmosphere of their works feels dazed, subdued and sombre.

From its 19^th century beginnings, modernity has been identified with the urban scene, and the early 20^th century has been described as the machine age. This was also the period of two major conflicts, when machines changed the nature of warfare.

The urban landscape was distorted, the familiar made unfamiliar, frightening, displaced and destroyed by man-made machines. Many artists responded to the experience of physical and spiritual isolation in their works, often melancholic in mood, and sometimes controversial in meaning.

L.S. Lowry portrays a bleak industrial landscape in the heart of the metropolis while Gwen John’s painting of the solitary female figure represents a psychological portrait of the artist who withdrew from life.

Strains of Paradise

Lost in grief, artists turned to nature for comfort and refuge in the turbulent decades following the First World War.

From the undulating landscape of the South Downs, secluded garden ponds, open meadows, meandering rivers, to the stillness of beech trees, they found a refreshing way to express a deeply felt communion with the peaceful countryside.

Landscape painting of this period gave artists a visual language to express their mourning for a lost paradise. The phrase, ‘green and pleasant land’, from William Blake’s epic poem Milton, became an enduring emblem for the country.

Artists such as Michael Ayrton, John Minton, Paul Nash and John Piper returned to naturalism. Their work was infused with a kind of longing for an impossible reunion with the past, uncontaminated by modernity.

March of Modernism

Modernism is a movement in Western art that emerged in the early 20^th century. It was intimately bound up with the human experience of the First World War.

Vorticism was one form of Modernism that coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. Given its name in 1914 by the poet Ezra Pound, the movement was led by artist Wyndham Lewis. With its harsh, angular, mechanistic style, it was very radical, but also short-lived. Vorticism effectively died in the early days of the war as its key members experienced the catastrophic power of mechanised technology.

On their return from war, the Vorticists could no longer deal with the machine aesthetic with such forceful spirit. For Lewis this meant a return to a figurative style, rendered with a distinctly sombre, classical quality. David Bomberg found refuge and spiritual recovery during his travels in Cyrprus.

Flowers of the Forest

The British Official War Artists’ Scheme was set up between 1914 and 1916 by Charles FG Masterman, head of the British War Propaganda Bureau.

During the Second World War, an equivalent government scheme, the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), was established in 1939 under the guidance of Sir Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery.

The basic purpose of the Committee was to make an artistic record of every aspect of the war. There may also have been a hidden desire to prevent a few of these young artists from being killed.

Not all the exhibits were the result of official commissions from the Committee. Ian Fleming’s war service was first of all in the Police War Reserve in Maryhill, Glasgow, and then in the Pioneer Corps. Although he was not an Official War Artist, he continued to produce art throughout the conflict, recording his first-hand experiences of the war in Europe.

Woodland to Waste Land

Motivating workers at home to contribute to the war effort, during a time of significant industrial unrest, was paramount. Artists were commissioned to record the industrial war effort in mills, factories and shipyards.

Muirhead Bone’s prints show different stages of shipbuilding. Factory workers are turned into antlike creatures, losing their individuality, becoming merely parts of a relentless and grinding war machine. In 1915, a year before Bone produced his prints to raise money for the war effort, 15,000 shipyard workers on the Clyde went on strike, in protest at the compulsory deduction of rent arrears from their pay packets.

War artist Graham Sutherland was sent to record open-cast coal mining in Wales in 1943. Although the pictures he made were documentary, they were infected by a sense of foreboding. The idyllic landscape was now a barren place, reduced to spoil heaps. This ruined landscape recalled the idea of a broken human civilisation, ‘a handful of dust’, as portrayed in T S Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.