Tate’s  survey of the impact of the First World War on art opens with a series of iconic images of conflict. There is Jacob Epstein’s Terminator-like torso in bronze from his ‘The Rock Drill’ of 1913-14, as unnerving as ever. There are photographs of shattered cathedrals, actual helmets dented by shrapnel, and post-war Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battlefields of France. There are Henry Tonks’s unforgettable pastel drawings showing facial injury cases before treatment. Less familiar will be German works such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculpture ‘Fallen Man’, made for the cemetery of his hometown of Duisburg – humanity crawling away on all fours to die.

The first two or three rooms of ‘Aftermath’ admirably convey art’s role in the official memorialization of 1914-18, although in truth there’s not much here that you won’t see on a visit to the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum. What I didn’t come away with was much sense of the personal response of artists to the war.

Take the case of Paul Nash, who like many artists was psychologically scarred by his experiences on the Western Front. Nash spent the early 1920s recovering from ‘war strain’ at Dymchurch on the edge of Romney Marsh, where he painted a series of bleak, despairing landscapes. There are stories of him staring fixedly out to sea for hours on end, often at night, before trudging home to his tiny cottage on the seafront. On the whole, I’d rather have seen one of those Dymchurch seascapes than another vitrine filled with trench paraphernalia.

And how about taking the opportunity to remember the artists who lost their lives in the conflict? The best-known cases are the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the German painters Franz Marc and August Macke, and the British painter-poet Isaac Rosenberg. Marc in particular, like Macke a co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter and only 36 when he died at Verdun in 1916, was a huge loss to art. Yet none of these names are even mentioned in the Tate show.

In Room 4 (of eight) there’s an abrupt change of gears and the rest of the show is a whistle-stop tour of the main movements in post-war art, from the angry counterblasts of Dada & Surrealism to the considerably more lyrical mood of the so-called ‘Return to Order’. In the last two rooms there’s an equally breathless attempt to chronicle the war’s impact on society by looking at Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), Bauhaus and life in ‘the New City’.

Unfortunately, all the blood and gore in the early rooms makes the classicizing trend of the 1920s seem shallow and trite, which it most certainly was not. More generally, ‘Aftermath’ feels like two exhibitions rather awkwardly sandwiched together: on the one hand, a didactic lecture on the ‘war is hell’ theme, on the other a rather pedestrian survey of post-war art.

In either case, it’s the Germans who stand out here, whether it’s the mordant satire of Grosz and Dix, the existential angst of Beckmann and Kollwitz, the sinisterly decadent portraits of Christian Schad or the weird geometric automata of Oskar Schlemmer. The post-war upheavals in German society, far more thoroughgoing than in either Britain or France, seem to have provided better take-off points for art. Or perhaps they were better artists. Germany may have been defeated on the battlefields but culturally it was the undoubted victor. Until the Nazis showed up, of course.

NM

‘Aftermath’ at Tate Britain (to 23 September 2018)

Header image: Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), Torso in Metal from “The Rock Drill” 1913-14 bronze 705 x 584 x 445 mm, Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein