War Artists: Paul Nash, C R W Nevinson and the Great War

Wednesday 1 April 2015 at 2.00 pm

Dr David Boyd Haycock

David Boyd Haycock read Modern History at the University of Oxford and has an MA in the History of Art and a PhD in British History. He is the author of a number of books, including ‘Paul Nash’ (2002) and ‘A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War’ (2009); he has lectured widely at galleries and museums in the UK, including Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Watercolour Society and Pallant House. He was formerly a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and at UCLA and was Curator of Maritime and Imperial History at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. He is now a freelance writer and lecturer.

Paul Nash and C.R.W. Nevinson were two of the most significant artists to paint the soldiers and battlefields of World War One. Walter Sickert described Nevinson’s painting La Mitrailleuse (‘The Machine-Gun’, 1916, Tate Britain) as probably ‘the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on war in the history of painting’. Another contemporary wrote that Nash’s shattered landscapes seemed to have been ‘torn from the sulphurous rim of the inferno itself.’ This lecture explores the artistic development of both men and their distinct but related responses to representing an extraordinary, horrific and very modern war in paint.

David has his own blog which provides lots of information.