Oorlog Engeland

Room: 1914 & 1915 (video) | Khan Academy (met youtube film).

In een kleine kamer worden kunstwerken uit de jaren 1914-1915 besproken waaruit de impact van de oorlog spreekt. 

Eén van de werken die besproken wordt is ‘Torso from the Rock Drill’ van

Jacob Epstein: “an extraordinary huge sculpture in which a plaster mechanised robot like figure sat on top of an enormous miner’s drill”.

“By 1915 Epstein was so disillusioned by the war that he couldn't bear the sight of this image of mechanised destruction and he took the figure down and cut it in half, making it this much more ambiguous image with this helmeted machine like head and yet within its torso a small embryo, an image of hopeful renewal in the future. “

For this sculpture, Epstein originally set a plaster figure on top of a real industrial rock drill. This ‘machine-like robot, visored, menacing and carrying within itself its progeny’ was a symbol of the new age. Epstein’s attitude changed, however, as news of the very large number of casualties wrought by the mechanised warfare of the First World War was fully realised. Epstein removed the drill, and cut the figure down at the waist before casting it in bronze. Mutilated and shorn of its virility, the once-threatening figure is now vulnerable and impotent, as much a victim as a perpetrator of violence.

RS. Epstein blijkt zijn beelden te kiezen uit de technologie van de toekomst – de mens als machine. Bij JDB: beelden en metaforen uit de Middeleeuwen...

Verder worden besproken: David Bomberg’s ‘The Mud Bath’ waarbij de modder verwijst naar de loopgraven in België en Franrkijk.

Ten slotte wordt ook Walter Sickerts werk besproken: “a seaside vaudeville act on the Brighton sea front”.

“It's a rather melancholy scene and not one which obviously indicates the war that is going on around it and yet if we look closely we see the deck chairs are mostly empty and there is this rather ominous glowing sunset in the west, a sense of a dying culture perhaps. It seems to continue Sickert’s fascination with the music hall and yet I think within it is this sort of sense of the melancholy that infected Britain during the First World War”

 

Brighton Pierrots

 (zie: Tate)