Portraits of Remembrance
Portraits of Remembrance
Painting, Memory, and the First World War
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.
The editors deliver on the promise that ‘behind any commemorative artifact one will inevitably discover controversy (for such is the nature of collective memory)—and a good story.’ The paintings selected are not necessarily the most famous of the period but instead convey the larger intent of illustrating the elements that make a work of art an iconic memory. . . . For experts and novices alike, Portraits of Remembrance will deepen an appreciation of war art and remind the viewer of the power that images can have on our memories well after the event itself. The thoughtful introduction broadens its accessibility beyond art scholars and the format is also suited to the reader who wants to jump around as each essay stands on its own. It is also a thought-provoking aid for military museum guides, and anyone involved with commissioning commemorative art.’
— Military Review
‘Portraits of Remembrance is a welcome addition to scholarship on commemoration and memory of the First World War.’
—Pearl James, author of The New Death: American Modernism and World War I
This collection of 14 essays analyzes the role of painting in commemorating WW I and distills how memory and identity anchor collective understandings of wartime from a century ago. Together, the chapters discuss the creation, context, reception, and exhibition histories of paintings that captured the experience of soldiers foremost, as well as those who made sacrifices or who witnessed the aftermath of the war. Such dramatic and realistic visual depictions garnered emotional responses from veterans and those associated with, but not engaged in, wartime activity. With case studies analyzing war remembrances in 12 nations and their ties to literature, context, and meaning, this volume will be of interest to those broadly researching WW I, as well as memory studies and early 20th-century history and art history. Recommended’
—CHOICE
Steven Trout is chair of the Department of English and codirector of the Center for the Study of War and Memory at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He is author of Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War and On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941 and coeditor of World War I in American Fiction: An Anthology of Short Stories.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Painting, Memory, and the First World War
Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trout
Chapter 1. En Souvenir: Albert Herter’s Le Départ des Poilus, at Paris-Est
Mark Levitch
Chapter 2. Romaine Brooks’s La France Croisée: Allegory, Androgyny, and Appropriation
Elizabeth Richards Rivenbark 000
Chapter 3. A “rush frénétique”: Representation, Memory, and Georges Scott’s La Brigade Marine Américaine au Bois de Belleau
Steven Trout
Chapter 4. An Ambivalent Patriot: Namık İsmail, the First World War, and the Politics of Remembrance in Turkey
Gizem Tongo
Chapter 5. Albin Egger-Lienz’s Die Namenlosen 1914: Vienna Painters and the Great War
Philip D. Beidler
Chapter 6. Russia, Memory, and the Great War: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s In the Line of Fire
Andrew M. Nedd
Chapter 7. The Canadians Opposite Lens: Augustus John’s Unfinished First World War Canadian Masterpiece
Laura Brandon
Chapter 8. Sacrifice, Grief, and National Memory in George Edmund Butler’s Butte de Polygon
Caroline Lord
Chapter 9. Gatekeeper of Memory: The Australian War Memorial and Charles Bryant’s HMAS Australia on the Way to Her Doom
Margaret Hutchison
Chapter 10. Fortunino Matania’s Goodbye, Old Man
Marguerite Helmers
Chapter 11. James Clark’s The Great Sacrifice
Peter Harrington
Chapter 12. Maksimilijan Vanka’s Our Mothers and the Croatian Memory of the First World War
Heidi A. Cook
Chapter 13. Der Krieg: Otto Dix’s War Triptych, Memory, and the Perception of the First World War
Martin Bayer
Chapter 14. From Propaganda to Remembrance: Alfred Bastien’s The Panorama of the Yser Battle
Sandrine Smets
Afterword
Jay Winter
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
