C.R.W. Nevinson

C.R.W. Nevinson is one the most acclaimed war artists of WWI. He has created iconic images of WWI. These images range from mechanical soldiers to unsetting industrial landscapes. He became iconic by the fact that he saw and captured the world was torn apart by war.

Early on in his work, he once joined the Friend’s Ambulance Unit so that he could capture and experience looking after the wounded French soldiers, which would inspire his work.

He worked very closely with Italian Futurists and even followed the Vorticist movement. He created a new artistic language which made him believe that 'our Futurist technique is the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence and brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields of Europe'.

No artist or any other person during this time had never before witnessed this kind of war on scale from the battlefields of France to the medical attention that was needed at that time. It brought a lot of attention to the fact that so many young men would march to their death as this is felt in the 1914 work of ‘On the way to the Trenches.’

He was able to capture the horrors of this Modernity. His 1915 work ‘La Mitrailleuse’  was being described by the artist Walter Sickert as 'the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting'.