The Art of World War IAll Quiet on the Western Front – Ch. 8

Merry-Go-Round is a large oil on canvas painting made by Mark Gertler in 1916, when he was 24 years old.

It is perhaps his most famous work, and depicts men and women (many in uniform) on a merry-go-round ride. The painting (and another 1915 painting entitled Swing Boats, now lost) may have been inspired by a ride at the annual fair on Hampstead Heath.

The painting was included in the London Group exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in 1917. It was interpreted as a deliberately "modern" and decorative work at the time, but is now seen as Gertler's visceral reaction to - and protest against - the First World War, perhaps triggered by the possibility that Gertler could be conscripted into the British Army. Gertler was a conscientious objector.

British marine painter Norman Wilkinson invented the concept of "dazzle painting" -— a way of using stripes and disrupted lines to confuse the enemy about the speed and dimensions of a ship.

Wilkinson, then a lieutenant commander on Royal Navy patrol duty, implemented the precursor of "dazzle" on SS Industry; and in August 1917, the HMS Alsatian became the first Navy ship to be painted with a dazzle pattern.

When exhibited in the spring of 1916, Eric Kennington's portrayal of exhausted soldiers The Kensingtons at Laventie, Winter 1914 caused a sensation.

Painted in reverse on glass, the painting was widely praised for its technical virtuosity, iconic color scheme, and its ‘stately presentation of human endurance, of the quiet heroism of the rank and file’.

Kennington returned to the front in 1917 as an official war artist.

At the 1918 Royal Academy exhibition, Walter Bayes' monumental canvas The Underworld depicted figures sheltering in a Tube station during an air raid. Its sprawling alien figures predate Henry Moore's studies of sheltering figures in the Tube during the Blitz of World War II.

Among the great artists who tried to capture an essential element of war in painting was Society portraitist John Singer Sargent. In his large painting Gassed and in many watercolors, Sargent depicted scenes from the Great War.

British painter John Nash believed that "the artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe, and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye." The artist's most celebrated war painting is Over the Top (oil on canvas, 79.4 x 107.3 cm), now hanging in the Imperial War Museum in London. In this painting, the artist presents an image of the 30 December 1917 Welsh Ridge counter-attack, during which the 1st Battalion Artists Rifles (28th London Regiment) left their trenches and pushed towards Marcoing near Cambrai. Of the eighty men, sixty-eight were killed or wounded during the first few minutes. Nash himself was one of the twelve spared by the shellfire in the charge depicted in the painting. He created this artwork three months later.

Australian painter Arthur Streeton was an Australian Official War Artist with the Australian Imperial Force, holding the rank of lieutenant. He served in France attached to the 2nd Division. Streeton's most famous war painting, Amiens the Key of the West shows the Amiens countryside with dirty plumes of battlefield smoke staining the horizon, which becomes a subtle image of war. Streeton aimed to produce "military still life", capturing the everyday moments of the war. Streeton observed that, "True pictures of battlefields are very quiet looking things. There's nothing much to be seen, everybody and thing is hidden and camouflaged."

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described how, in his youth, he wanted to become a professional artist, but his aspirations were ruined because he failed the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Hitler was rejected twice by the institute, once in 1907 and again in 1908; the institute considered that he had more talent in architecture than in painting. Later, when he used to tint and peddle postcards featuring scenes of Vienna, Hitler frequented the artists' cafes in Munich in the unfulfilled hope that established artists might help him with his ambition to paint professionally.