Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War

Description

Interdisciplinary collection of essays on fine art painting as it relates to the First World War and commemoration of the conflict   Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of paint­ing played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public’s appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet pro­vide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes.   Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding pan­oramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public’s understanding of the war.   Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contribu­tors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume’s overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.   Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Painting, Memory, and the First World War - Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trout 1. En Souvenir: Albert Herter’s Le Départ des Poilus, Août 1914 at Paris - Est-Mark Levitch 2. Romaine Brooks’s La France Croisée: Allegory, Androgyny, and Appropriation - Elizabeth Richards Rivenbark 3. A “rush frénétique”: Representation, Memory, and Georges Scott’s La Brigade Marine Américaine au Bois de Belleau - Steven Trout 4. An Ambivalent Patriot: Namık İsmail, the First World War, and the Politics of Remembrance in Turkey - Gizem Tongo 5. Albin Egger-Lienz’s Die Namenlosen 1914: Vienna Painters and the Great War - Philip D. Beidler 6. Russia, Memory, and the Great War: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s In the Line of Fire - Andrew M. Nedd 7. The Canadians Opposite Lens: Augustus John’s Unfinished First World War Canadian Masterpiece - Laura Brandon 8. Sacrifice, Grief, and National Memory in George Edmund Butler’s Butte de Polygon - Caroline Lord 9. Gatekeeper of Memory: The Australian War Memorial and Charles Bryant’s HMAS Australia on the Way to Her Doom - Margaret Hutchison 10. Fortunino Matania’s Goodbye, Old Man - Marguerite Helmers 11. James Clark’s The Great Sacrifice - Peter Harrington 12. Maksimilijan Vanka’s Our Mothers and the Croatian Memory of the First World War - Heidi A. Cook 13. Der Krieg: Otto Dix’s War Triptych, Memory, and the Perception of the First World War - Martin Bayer 14. From Propaganda to Remembrance: Alfred Bastien’s The Panorama of the Yser Battle - Sandrine Smets Afterword. The Owl of Minerva: Reflections on Art, Memory, and the Transformation of War, 1914–24 - Jay Winter Bibliography Contributors Index