The Centennial of the Great War, August 1914-2014

Today on 1 August 1914 the Great War started for Canada, we entered the war on the side of Britain and the Empire. Canada sent 10% of its population to war, some 620,000 men, poorly equipped and trained. At the end of the war some 61,000 Canadian soldier will be dead and another 18,000 will be missing never to be found buried in the mud of the Western Front.

Rightly so the Canadian people would ask ''For What ?'' a question the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden had no answer.

Look at this map of Europe in August 1918 and note how the old Continent looked then. Four great Empires would collapse, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Turk. Britain despite the armistice in November 1918 very nearly collapsed. This war would change the world and Canada.

In 1919 Europe would see new countries emerge which did not exist previously, created from nationalistic grievances. The Paris Conference would create many new problems and the final Treaty of Versailles will plant the seeds for a new war even more devastating some 20 years later.

Canada would emerge as a great power and would become an independent country, leading to renewed prosperity until the great economic depression of 1929.

Who knew that August one hundred years ago what was about to happen to the old order.

Europe today looks again very different since 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain and Communism.

The ceramic poppies planted around the Tower of London and on show now until November.

Some 888,000 poppies represent the sea of blood this war provoked, no one won, ending in an armistice, a war that cause much misery and no resolution.

28 June 1914 a fateful day.

The 28 June marks the Centennial of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. A fateful day and one that will shape much of what will happen in the XXth Century.

The Great War would start on August 1 and would transform the world. Canada's contribution was great and should be remembered, 10% of the population went to war (620,000) of that number 10% were killed. Many returned badly wounded to a Canada transformed by the war. New measures also such as Personal Income Tax, women voting, a move from a rural to an urban setting, industrialisation, social change in the work place, workers riots in Winnipeg and elsewhere and the harsh response of the Conservative Government of Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen.

The Great War would bring the fall of 4 Empires and would create more economic and social problems which would lead just 20 years later to the Second World War. What is also known today is that no one actually lost the war, it became clear at the end of 1917 to all involved that the war was un-winable. An armistice on 11 November 1918 was declared, it was the allies at the Peace Conference in 1919 who declared that Germany was guilty and France sought and got harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles. European leaders in my view are all guilty in this case given that many were sleeping at the wheel and did not realize the danger of a World War.

This exhibit is currently on at the Canadian War Museum until 21 September 2014

Dresdner Triptychon, Der Krieg by Otto Dix

The Dresdner triptych on should not be confused with a similarly named one by Jan Van Eyck painted in 1437 for the MarienAltar which can be found today in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister  in Dresden. This triptych was created for the celebrated Giustiniani Family of Genoa, Italy. This family has a Saint in the person of Lorenzo Giustiniani who was Cardinal in Venice.

Between 1929-1932 Otto Dix the celebrated German painter and father of German Realism painted a triptych in memory of the Great War 1914-1918. He being a veteran of this war had strong memories of the horrors he witnessed on the battlefields and regrets, the war experience had transformed him. If before 1914 Dix in a self-portrait presents himself almost like Albrecht Durer, who he admired. After 1919 Dix now presents himself in a new self-portrait as Mack the Knife, the character of the Three Penny Opera of Bertold Brecht. Dix laughs and denounces Bourgeois society and its conservative values, the hypocrisy, the lies, he sets himself against that very society of the Weimar Republic. His world is that of the Cabaret, the Cafés, the Brothels and its prostitutes. As a painter and artist he will enrage Hitler who also a veteran of the Great War cannot understand why Dix rejects what Hitler see as glorious, the army, family, discipline and order.

Here is a YouTube documentary in German and English on this masterpiece. I am very happy I had the opportunity to see it in Dresden. It was one of the highlight of our visit. See the web site of the museum: http://www.skd.museum/en

Witness (part two)

In part one I wrote about the painting exhibit called Transformations at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. It is dedicated to a comparison of two men's views, War artists, on the First World War, AY Jackson and Otto Dix.

The other exhibit running now at the Canadian War Museum is WITNESS. It is a different exhibit made up of large canvases and small sketches, all done by soldier-artists, many of the smaller works was done for family back home in Canada to illustrate often in a comic fashion life in the trenches. At the time the only means of communication with Canada was by postal service and newspapers carried the news of the day, but in rural Canada the only people who read the newspapers were the well educated, so the letters and littles sketches from the Western Front were the only means of keeping the family informed of what was going on. Soldiers were careful to not alarm their parents or siblings, so the sketches are in general amusing or show mundane aspects of life. Some are quite beautiful and they are meant as much as a memento as information on what life was like, very valuable today, 100 years later to help us understand the life of Canadians at the Front.  There is often a quiet dignity about them, values were different, maybe even sometime romantic in that early XX th century way. We have their names, Captain George Sharp, Thurston Topham, Alan Beddoe who in 1965 worked with Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson on the final design of the new Canadian Flag, and many others.

John McQueen Moyes, Cleaning up,preparing for duty, 13th Battalion, Royal Canadian Highlanders

The larger canvases some of them are giant 4 X 5 meters were first executed as small sketches by artists of the Canadian War Memorial Fund, people like Alfred Munnings, Alfred Bastien, C.W. Jefferys, David Milnes, Daniel Sherrin, S.Chatwood Burton, Arthur Lismer, Arthur Nantel, Frederick Varley and many others. Once back in London they would go on to transfer the sketches and notes to large oil canvases we see today.

Witness as the name implies is a live archival record of the war done by eye-witnesses, participants in those battles. The art is more poignant because some of the soldier-artists did not make it back, others were gravely wounded. This is their legacy as Canadians.

Gyrth Russell, White Chateau, Liévin 

Canadian soldiers repairing railway tracks surrounded by the corpses of dead German soldiers.

by Innes Meo 

Our visitors to both exhibits have been numerous, many are families, some veterans, students or adults. There is a lot of interests and questions, unfortunately I find that the Second World War (1939-1945) often overshadows the First World War. People have better memories of more recent events and the Great War is passing into history with no one alive to speak about it. Context has to be given, history explained, 100 years is far away for too many people and their knowledge of history is sketchy at best. Though many leave far better informed afterwards with a better appreciation for the events. Some visitors had a great uncle who participated and they recall stories told. With the average age of Veterans of the Second World War around 90 years of age now, it won't be long before that conflict also pass into distant memory. Luckily we still have some volunteers at the CWM who served in that conflict and they are our eyewitness. They are often useful because they remember family members talking to them about events of the Great War and can relate stories. 

The War Art Program continues today and is now under the hospices of the Government of Canada, we no longer have the spontaneous sketching and painting we saw with the Canadian War Memorial Fund of 1914-1918.  The Government now wants purpose driven art serving a political aim, it can be a little stale and no criticism can be implied or suggested as was the case in the past when artists painted what they saw, despite the fact that the government of Sir Robert Borden tried to suppress it afterwards.  If you have a chance to come and visit the CWM in Ottawa this summer please do, the shows run until 21 September.

Transformations 1914-2014

I started a few weeks ago to work at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Capitale, as an interpreter for the exhibit of paintings of the Canadian War Memorial Fund of Max Aitken Lord Beaverbrook.

Lord Beaverbrook who was the first Press Baron in London was immensely wealthy, a Canadian from New Brunswick, he moved to London and was elected to Parliament and became a Minister in the British Government. Canadians could do that then, since we were British Subjects and part of the Empire.

When the Great War started in August 1914, Canada was automatically at war and 10% of our population went to war some 650,000 men. We also produced the ammunition for Britain and for ourselves and supplied Britain with millions of tons of food to avoid famine in the British Isles.

Canadian Soldier called a Tommy, on his shoulder a red patch and a blue half moon, insignia indicating he was a Canadian Army soldier 14th Battalion, also on his sleeve a yellow bar indicating he was wounded in action. This poster was designed by Gunner Ross Wiggs of Montreal. In 1969 Wiggs described this cartoon as the humorous side of the Great War.


This enormous Canadian contribution needed to be remembered and so Lord Beaverbrook took it upon himself to set up a group of 116 artists who would be on the battlefields of the Western Front (Belgium-French border) to document the Canadian soldiers at war. Some 400 paintings were produced and they are now today at the National Gallery of Canada and at the Canadian War Museum. It is worth noting that the Government of Sir Robert Borden was not at all interested in documenting what Canadians were doing in Europe.

My job is to help visitors to the exhibit understand what they are looking at, explain who the painters were and how they got involved with the program, I also have to explain the different schools of painting and the evolution painters went through as part of their experience of the horrors of the Front. Something difficult for us to understand one hundred years later.

One exhibit (the other is called Witness, I will write about it later) Transformations features two artists of very different character and origins, one is Alexander Young Jackson better known as AY Jackson of the Group of Seven Fame, the other is the famous German Artist of the XXth Century Otto Dix. The two men were very different, Jackson was from Montreal and spent his life painting, at first he went to Europe, France and Italy to study the European style of painting and many of his landscapes were then in the Impressionist style favoured by Claude Monet.

Otto Dix was from Gera a small town near Dresden in Saxony. Born in a poor worker family, Dix loved the countryside and was troubled by the rapid changes brought upon by industrialisation. He was fascinated by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, he was also influenced by modern artist like Klimt, Van Gogh. By 1913 he was following the Futurist and Expressionist movements in painting, Ludwig Meidner with his dramatic apocalyptic paintings was a source of inspiration.

Of the two painters I find Dix far more complex than Jackson. There is a certain maturity in his paintings and his thinking totally lacking in Jackson who was painting, charming pictures to use his own words on his work of the period between 1882-1914.

Dix sought to depict the transformation of society through the violence done to the Earth and the countryside around him and equated this to the violence done to women. Mother Earth, women, regeneration, life death cycle is present in his paintings and sketches. Did Otto Dix oppose the war or the motives of going to war, that is not clear, he did say that he joined the German Army to experience death at a close range. Dix at age 22 was put in charge of a machine gun which at the time was a brand new weapon and could with its spray of bullets kill hundreds of men in a few minutes.

From 1914 onwards we see how his battlefield experience has affected-transformed him. He wants to believe in regeneration of life. Whereas Jackson who joined the Canadian Army will fight on the Front but is injured in 1915 convalescing in London he meets with Lord Beaverbrook who offers him the opportunity of returning to the Front not as a soldier but as an artist. Jackson will also meet with Paul Nash and will change gradually his style of painting to a more Surrealist and Symbolist Style leaving behind the earlier Impressionist style he followed. However Jackson made clear that he would not paint like Lismer or Varley depicting the horrors of war. He preferred to do landscapes trying to convey a message of desolation and emptiness created by the bombardment and battles.

Jackson presents a reflection on violence and on societies at war with each other, a more subtle approach to how he viewed the Great War. The landscapes shows trees like a chorus of Greek mourners, there is something terribly disturbing about the skeletons of trees where you should see green fields covered in flowers with great leafy trees, you see emptiness thus accurately portraying the violence of this first industrial war. In a sense I prefer the work of Canadian artist Frederick Varley 1881-1969 or Arthur Lismer 1885-1969 who have no such reticence to show things as they were and ask through their paintings direct often aggressive questions of the viewer. They also reflect as the years wore on the anger in Canada of Canadians who by 1918 wanted to know what this war was all about. Canada had 66,000 war dead and 175,000 gravely wounded, a very high social cost for a country with a population of only 7 million people at the time. In fact Canada had more war dead than the USA who joined the war in early 1918.

After the war both Jackson and Dix return home. AY Jackson is now an established artists and will help create the Group of Seven which will be active in Canada from 1919 to 1935, the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg north of Toronto is the repository of their collective work. In this sense Canada owes Lord Beaverbrook an immense debt, because of his idea to finance and promote Canadian artists, he helped Canadian painters and other artists to come of age and gain valuable experience which propelled forward Canadian art scene.

Dix not so lucky returns to a broken country, the German Empire has collapsed, the Kaiser left for exile in Holland, the economy is gripped by hipper inflation, millions of veterans are without money or work, many are horribly disfigured and maimed. On the German Art scene a new movement DaDaist or painting of the absurd is all the rage, Germans are searching for a way out in a climate of near Civil War. This is where the National Socialist Ideology will take root gradually, promising work, a stable economy, industrial development and to make Germany a great country again. The promise of work and social reform is seductive and crafted carefully by Hitler and the men around him. He promises the reform of Socialism without the excesses of Communism now all too apparent in Russia. Dix like many German artists will resist the Siren call of the Nazi Party. He becomes a professor at the Art Academy of Dresden a post he will occupy until 1933. As he becomes more and more famous he is setting himself up as a known opponent of Nazism and the ideology which sought to impose on German society one artistic style and one school of thought on Culture, Education, etc.

Otto Dix, Shell burst in battle,  

Things are not much better in Canada in 1919, socialist causes and Trade Unions are now everywhere, there is lack of work and inflation. Veterans are often left to fend for themselves or families are asked to care for them. The Borden Government is unable to answer the social demands  to rapidly changing country, also transformed by the Great War. The great Winnipeg General Strike will happen in May 1919. The Government of Sir Robert Borden panics fearing Bolchevism and orders the RCMP to shoot on the strikers. Canadians are asking what was this war all about and general dissatisfaction grips the Country. Borden a man of another age is completely overwhelmed by this new Canada, the old order he knew of the ruling class who dominated national discourse was gone.

The great Canadian War Memorial collection of Lord Beaverbrook is a burden for the Borden government who does not know what to do with 400 paintings depicting Canadians at war. Borden does not like them and tells his wife in a letter. They are put in the care of the National Gallery in a storage facility where they will remain for 90 years. The Museum to house them will never be built despite Lord Beaverbrook providing plans and drawings.

Despite this important artistic legacy Canadians will not know about their experience and officially we are told of the British, French and American contribution as if ours was not that important. Transformations the exhibit wants to set the tone and correct perceptions so that the Canadian public can see what our ancestors did and how the Great War forever changed Canada from a social point of view from rural to urban, women by the thousands joining the workforce giving them a new role and a new voice politically with the introduction of the vote in 1917 and for Canada political independence as a country.

This citation from Paul Nash who influenced the work of AY Jackson is appropriate for the Exhibit Transformations.
He wrote in a letter to his wife in November 1917; I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.

A.Y. Jackson,  A Copse, evening 1918.  Beaverbrook Canadian War Art Collection.