Aftermath Exhibition at Tate Britain

This was one exhibition I did not want to miss and I'm so glad I didn't. This is a sobering but brilliant exhibition covering the years 1916-1932 and features artists not only from England but Germany and France and others. What struck me was for all those artists the impact of being on the front was the same. It was interesting to see these picture alongside each other. What they saw and experienced came out through their art work, sometimes quite disturbingly. A few could never get over those experiences. At least one committed suicide.

Some of my favourite painters had work here - Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Christopher Nevinson but I found others I admired, especially William Orpen. These paintings really brought home the destruction of war.

Eight rooms made up the exhibition - the first was Remembrance: Battlefields and Ruins where the real cost cries out from the bodies of soldiers to the stark landscape of wire and burned stunted trees and graveyards. The second room looked at war memorials and society. Here is featured the cenotaph and a painting by William Orpen of the coffin of the unknown soldier draped with the Union Jack. Walking into the third room (Traces of War: Wounded Soldiers) you encounter what war does to the body and flesh. Henry Tonks trained as a surgeon but was also an artist and taught at the Slade. He worked as a plastic surgeon doing facial reconstruction, very much pioneering work then. He painted pictures of the faces of the soldiers with their horrific injuries. I've seen these before yet it's still a shock seeing them again. This part of exhibition overlaps into the next room Dada and Surrealism. Here especially you encounter the harsh reality of living without limbs and the madness it could cause. Unsettling and disturbing are the only words I can use here. Limbs and body parts are part human, part machine. In the next room is The Print Portfolio where propaganda and anti propaganda works could be sold to wider audiences. Room six is Return to Order where artists returned to classic themes and traditional genres . The final two rooms were on Imagining Post-War Society through people and The New City.

This exhibition ties in with the free one running at Tate Modern on Magic Realism that I visited not long ago which features German art from after the war. Some work done by war artists were actually censored at the time. In suppose the government did not want the general public to know what it was really like out there at the front. I think it was Nevinson who when he eventually exhibited his painting put a banner over it saying censored!

This is definitely one to see. It runs at Tate Britain until 23rd September.