Roger Bowdler explores Tate’s Armistice exhibition and discovers how the conflict acted as a catalyst for major changes in art and life
The First World War was a terrible conflict: brutal in its fighting, costly in lives and cruel in its lingering impact on survivors. Like no other war, it drew out a creative response that still gives it an immediacy and relevance 100 years on. Tate Britain is showing ‘Aftermath’ as its offering to the 1918 Armistice centenary. It looks at how art in Britain, France and Germany engaged with the physical and emotional effects of the devastation.
‘Aftermath’ begins powerfully, with a room devoted to the destruction of war, followed by a display on remembrance. One of the first exhibits is Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s poignant bronze sculpture The Fallen Man. Commissioned in 1915 as an early war memorial for his home town of Duisburg, it takes the form of an agonised naked figure crawling on all fours clutching a broken sword. Unsurprisingly, it was rejected. Lehmbruck subsequently served in a military hospital, suffered a breakdown and took his own life in 1919.
Another major German sculptural loan is the flying effigy by Ernst Barlach called The Floating One, from Güstrow Cathedral. Charles Sargeant Jagger’s timeless bronze Tommies from memorials at Paddington Station and Hyde Park Corner show how fine the sculpture of remembrance could be.
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