Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson
British, 1889–1946

Self-Portrait, 1915
oil on canvas
24 x 18 1/8 in.

SBMA, Gift of Mrs. Sam Lewisohn
1953.19.4



C.R.W. Nevinson with his Red Cross armband during the War

“We hear a great deal about the terrors of modern invention. The wireless has made dictatorship possible… Nowadays (1938) the Duce, the Fuhrer, and the President can speak in every home every day if he wants to. If he has what they call a wireless personality, he can wipe out all opposition and permit no one else to speak…” (pg. 268).

“We must accept our own age as it is. Our business is to beautify mechanical invention in every possible way, so that it will cease despoiling our lives, as it had done ever since we discovered a use for steam. The Greek ideals, which have influenced the world, are not dead, and man will demand something better than quick transit and hygienic comfort. Even America no longer idealizes the plumber as the symbol of civilization.” (pg. 268)

“After all my agonizing experience, I can now reach a definition of beauty. Prettiness is caused by the under-accentuation of form, the under- statement of scene or character, and the modification of color. Ugliness is caused by over-accentuation, distortion, or lack of proportion. And Beauty is the exact tightrope act between the two.” (pg. 284)

- C.R.W. Nevinson, Quotations from Paint and Prejudice, 1938

COMMENTS

Nevinson studied at St. John’s Wood School of Art and later at the Slade School in London, then in Paris where he shared a studio with Modigliani. He was busy copying the masters at the Louvre at the same time that Matisse and Picasso were doing the same thing. Later Nevinson was to write in his autobiography, “Paint and Prejudice” (1938) that this was a “useless form of training, as most of the time was spent trying to imitate a patina which nothing but age can give.”

In 1914 armed conflict engulfed the European continent, and disagreement engulfed the world of English art. Nevinson, along with Italian Futurist, F.T. Marinetti, issued “a Futurist Manifesto”. Using very strong language to condemn English art, it proclaimed against its tradition, sentimentality, and mania for immortality. “Immortality in Art is a disgrace”, he declared in his autobiography. “They sit in their grandfather chairs and forever dominate our creative agonies with their marble frowns…” Later he wrote with sadness of his association with Italian Futurism, which ultimately ended in Fascism in the hands of Mussolini.

Early in his career, Nevinson embraced the movement of Vorticism, a term coined by Ezra Pound in 1914. He saw the vortex concept as an expression of his desire for a whirling force which synthesized energy. Some critics of this period felt that the image of a vortex flatly contradicted the rigid, angular, diagonally oriented language with which the movement is associated.

Nevinson began to paint using a simplified form which accentuated planes. Cubism was just one step beyond this. He became interested in plastic form, movement, and also in the possibilities suggested by the use of the new camera. He found that the imperfections of the images made by the camera, as it registered blurred images of an object in motion, pointed the way for the Futurists. He noted that by painting a series of images of an object, each image of the object in a slightly different position, depicting action on canvas became possible. Nevinson used this technique in several painting in 1913-1914. This vocabulary of movement, together with a deep admiration for Goya, was to provide him with his essential “plastic” language for recording his responses to war.

Nevinson was a man of many interests. Unable to pass the physical for the Army, Nevinson taught himself auto mechanics and enlisted in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. Ever the artist, however, he made sketches of the soldiers at the Front to be used later for paintings. In 1915, while on leave, he married Kathleen Knowlman. Later she wrote: “Women are said to be by nature promiscuous. I solved this by marrying six men at one ceremony. I knew my husband to be a painter, writer, mechanic, carpenter, and cook as well as an expert on birds and flowers”.

After their honeymoon trip, returning to London with two days’ leave still remaining, he painted “La Mitraillleuse” and “The Deserted Trench on the Yser", which became two widely acclaimed war paintings. The following year, Nevinson was invalided out of the Red Cross Service. At this time he had the first one man exhibition of war paintings at the Leicester Galleries to mixed reviews. He was the first painter to evolve a new approach to war, expressing the special horrors of war rather that the old concept of the glory of war.

The war raged on, and in 1917 Nevinson returned to the Front as an official War Artist. He made rapid short hand sketches on the Front line, behind the line, above the line in observation balloons, and over the line in airplanes. He attempted neither to glorify war nor use its horrors for pacifist propaganda, but tried to keep the balance between a detached spectator and an artist with a definite journalistic bent. He portrayed war as an ugly bloodthirsty machine and showed that the ordinary soldier was no longer an individual in this machine; he was just one nameless, numbered, cog in the mighty war machine. While many of the English critics still regarded war as a “glorious adventure”, Nevinson stated “Strife be a necessity for man, as some say; but nevertheless I consider the struggle to tolerate a neighbor as something more heroic than his destruction. I could not glorify war.” (Paint and Prejudice, 1938, pg. 163) Nevinson was accused of believing that man no longer counted. “They were wrong. Man did count. Man will always count. But the man in the tank will, in war, count for more than the man outside.” (pg.117). An exhibit of his war paintings certainly could serve as a deterrent to war.

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Slade School trained radical Nevinson experimented with various styles of painting before enthusiastically allying himself with the Italian Futurist painter Marinetti and signing the first English Futurist Manifesto. This self-portrait shows him at the height of his powers and at his most confident. As a conscientious objector he served as an ambulance orderly during the early years of World War I before being commissioned as an Official War Artist. However his experience of the bloody reality of warfare -- dealing with stretcher- cases and the severely wounded -- disillusioned him, negating the bombastic spirit of Futurism. Apart from a spell in New York in 1919 his painting and print-making never again regained the confidence or conviction of his work of the early war period.

- British Modernism from Whistler to WW II, 2016

In 1908 Nevinson joined the Slade School in London, where he was part of the gilded generation that included Adrian Allinson, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler, among others. Cocky and self-opinionated, he did not get on with Professor Tonks, and left to continue his studies in Paris. On his return to London he teamed up with Wyndham Lewis and the Italian painter Marinetti, with whom he published the English Futurist Manifesto. In 1913 one of his paintings was chosen as the poster for the Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition at the Dore Galleries. The outbreak of hostilities in 1914 gave him his greatest opportunity, as Futurism lauded the machine and hailed war as a purgative. Although his experiences as an ambulance orderly were to disillusion him, he painted and etched some of the most enduring images of World War I. This self-portrait shows him at just that moment; arrogance tinged with self doubt.

- SBMA label, n.d.