The Imperial War Museum finds a deadly place to display first world war masterpieces

The Imperial War Museum has reopened after a major refit and looks pretty dapper, even though it was overrun by hordes when I visited (it was still the school holidays). There’s a new and effective restaurant, inevitably, but also a new sense of spaciousness.

I am not concerned here with weapons of mass destruction, merely with the record of the damage they inflict. They keep the art up on the third floor of the museum, and currently have a major display devoted to the first world war, which they claim is the largest of its type for nearly a century. It’s full of expected names, shown in some detail. But the ambience is wrong: there is something utterly deadly about those third-floor galleries (appropriate in a war museum, I suppose), which kills exhibitions stone-dead. However great the art — and there are masterpieces to be seen — it suffers badly from being shown there.

The display is split into two: one suite of galleries given over to the ‘Truth’ of the exhibition’s title, the other to ‘Memory’, but the division is more of a convenience than a real taxonomical distinction. Each set of rooms contains some 50 works, ‘Truth’ featuring a preponderance of works (both paintings and prints) by the cantankerous but brilliant Futurist C.R.W. Nevinson, including his famous painting of a machine-gun post, ‘La Mitrailleuse’. He was the first British artist to depict man dominated by the machines of war, whereas others, such as Paul Nash, concentrated on beleaguered man in shattered landscape.

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A series of very beautiful, if grim, chalk and watercolour drawings by Nash chart the blasted heath of battlefield, from ‘Chaos Decoratif’ to ‘Sunset: Ruin of the Hospice, Wytschaete’. Then we move into a room of a dozen William Orpens offering a different kind of Edwardian take on the hostilities, in a very cool palette, blond to foetid green.