Largest exhibition of British First World War art for a century goes on show at York Art Gallery

What's more, York will be the only gallery other than the Imperial War Museum in London to play host to Truth and Memory, a major retrospective of more than 60 works, reconfigured and reinterpreted by senior curator of art Richard Slocombe since last year's show at IWM London to mark the centenary of the outbreak of The Great War.

Whereas London was chronological, the York exhibition – spread across the gallery's ground-floor galleries – is divided into themes, such as The Forgotten Front and Sacrifice and Redemption, and accommodates works from York Art Gallery’s permanent collection, selected by Slocombe, namely Richard Jacks’ Return To The Front and Passing Of The Chieftain and Sydney Carline’s The Trail Of War.

“York Art Gallery has given us a fantastic and very different space to present this exhibition, allowing us to show some of the larger works together for the first time since the Royal Academy of Art's show, The Nation’s War Paintings, in 1919," he says.

"Throughout, I have looked for links to tie the works more closely to Yorkshire, whether this be the painting of the casualties from the Battle of the Somme arriving at Charing Cross Station, which was painted by Huddersfield artist J Hodgson Lobley, or works shown in the Paul Nash retrospective at Temple Newsam in Leeds in 1943.”

On display are some of the most iconic images to emerge from the First World War and its immediate aftermath, including paintings by Paul Nash, Percy Wyndham Lewis, CRW Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and William Orpen, as well as lesser known, yet significant works, by Anna Airy and George Clausen.

The exhibition's mission is to assess both the immediate impact and the legacy of British art of the First World War by showing how artists of all ages, traditions and backgrounds strived to represent the war's unprecedented, epoch-defining events.

Slocombe notes how art in Britain at the turn of the 20th century held a position and status in society different from today, being regarded as having a social function. Images of warfare imparted notions of identity, culture and morality, enshrining these as the "truth". However, in a conflict where the soldiers themselves were the "artists", a different idea of war emerged.

Consequently, the exhibition's first rooms focus on works by artists who experienced life on the front line first-hand. In their quest to comprehend and give meaning to a modern and unfamiliar war, young British "serving" artists challenged established ideas of war and redefined notions of the "truth" in art. The new truth was now the psychological truth.

Before the war, artists such as CRW Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis embraced the energy and violence of the modern age, but their wartime experiences soon changed this world view. Their depictions of trenches and soldiers were reduced to a series of angular shapes, as definitions between human flesh and heavy artillery become intentionally unclear.

By way of contrast with the constraints of the Imperial War Museum building, the redevelopment of York Art Gallery comes into its own in being able to hang such a profusion of large works, in particular Paul Nash’s interpretations of the Western Front landscapes, wherein his despairing view of war has an accumulative impact. This peaks with We Are Marking A New World, 1918, and The Menin Road, 1919, both so harrowing in damning the cost to humanity.

Other rooms consider how British art met the challenge of commemorating the First World War and how this helped form the collective memory of the war that prevails today. Slocombe's selection focuses on both official and independent works produced during the war and immediately afterwards, highlighting early attempts by British artists to convey the tragedy of the war and to build a lasting memorial to the nation’s sacrifice.

One work stands out by dint of its contrasting subject matter: George Clausen’s Youth Mourning, 1916, motivated by the death of his daughter’s fiancé. Painted when in his sixties, it is far removed from his nostalgic impressions of rustic English life, instead taking the allegorical form of a young woman bent double in a desolate barren landscape, bearing the weight of (feminised) grief.

The exhibition also presents artworks created in response to activities on the home front and in particular the contribution of women in works such as Anna Airy’s images of war production – commissioned by the Ministry of Munitions – whose fierce heat of industrial labour still has you standing back. This new exposure for Airy's depiction of the chaos and dangers of the factory floor is one of the principal reasons why Truth And Memory is the best show at York Art Gallery in many a year.

The exhibition's main section, The Greatest Expression Of The Day, focuses on recalling the ambitious plans of Lord Beaverbrook’s British War Memorials Committee and the Imperial War Museum to build an artistic record of the nation’s war in the form of a Hall of Remembrance. Slocombe has re-created Gallery 3 of the 1919 exhibition, hence key commissioned paintings, such as Nash’s aforementioned, newly restored The Menin Road, are displayed alongside important sculptural works, Jacob Epstein’s The Tin Hat among them.

Most striking of all is William Orpen’s progression from his propagandist, granite-jawed portraits of a new form of hero, the aviator, to his emotionally scarred, post-war disillusionment with the machinations of the triumphant Allied leaders in his controversial commissioned work, To The Unknown Soldier In France, where "he went for the jugular", says Slocombe.

Originally it featured the shadowy figures of two emaciated soldiers. Only after Orpen decided to remove them did the Imperial War Museum accept the painting in 1928, although the light at the end of Orpen's hall of mirrors does suggest the hope of redemption. Cling to that hope, as we always must, when war looms again.

Charles Hutchinson

Imperial War Museum's Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War, York Art Gallery until September 4. Opening hours: 10am to 5pm, Monday to Friday; 10am to 6pm, Saturday; 11am to 4pm, Sunday. Entry is included in the gallery admission price; free to York Museums Trust Card holders.

Did you know?

The Royal Academy of Art's show, The Nation’s War Paintings, in 1919 presented no fewer than 925 works.