Some disasters could not occur in this age of instant communication. The first world war is a case in point: 9.7 million soldiers died, 19,240 British on 1 July, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, alone. If all that had been seen on social mediaand rolling news threads, public opinion would have shifted immediately.
A hundred years ago, however, the sheer awfulness of what was happening took more time to sink in. Aftermath, an exhibition at Tate Britain, deals not so much with the art of the war itself as with the shocked and grieving era that followed the cataclysmic conflict: post-war art.
The horrors of the fighting continued to haunt artists on all sides, but not with equal force in every combatant country. In Britain the images were more softly elegiac than across the Channel. There was little appetite for even muted dreadfulness. The story of William Orpen’s ‘To The Unknown British Soldier In France’ (1921–28) is revealing in that regard.
Orpen was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to paint three pictures of the Paris Peace Conference.
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