It was the war to end all wars. In 1914, catastrophe struck Europe as great power diplomacy failed and alliance systems mobilised vast armies against one another in a conflict that dragged on in bloody stalemate for four long years. Nations geared their entire economies towards victory and called up their populations into active service. The intense fighting cost millions of lives and devastated the landscape. British photographers and cameramen were sent to the heart of the action to capture what was happening for the public at home.
But this was also the age of modernism in art. Young painters had been rejecting photographic realism for the expression of emotion and the celebration of the machine age, and the government gave artists extraordinary freedom to depict their experience of the conflict.
What they encountered, the decimated earth and blasted trees of the trenches, devastated cities. Bodies blown to bits were as fragmented and as deconstructed as the most avant garde images painted by cubists and futurists in the preceding decade, and those paintings of the Western Front were some of the most shocking and powerful works of art from any period in history.
In this documentary, historians Stephen Badsey, Rebecca Newell and Gordon Corrigan analyse the impact of World War One on contemporary artwork that depicted the brutal and bloody conflict.
Up Next in World War One
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The Western Front Tunnels
The creation of man-made underground tunnels played a huge role in the outcome of the First World War. They were first dug to mine under enemy positions and detonate bombs or attack in desperate and fierce fights. As the war dragged on, nevertheless, they developed another purpose: providing sold...
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The Western Front
The Western Front, a 400-plus-mile stretch of land weaving through France and Belgium from the Swiss border to the North Sea, was the decisive front during World War One. Despite the global nature of the conflict, much of the world remembers the scars of the Great War through the lens of these ba...
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The Aftermath of World War One
Today Dan is joined by Margaret MacMillan, professor at St. Antony's College at Oxford University and author of Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War. Together they discuss the effects WWI had on the world, and how Europe began to rebuild in the years that fol...
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