The Great War in Portraits, National Portrait Gallery - exhibition review

Moving photographs of teenage Tommies lost at war and medical paintings of reconstructed faces speak louder than self-important portraits of the great and the good in a small but important display
8 April 2014

It was not a King or Kaiser, a general or politician, who tipped Europe into the Great War a century ago, though they stood in expectation of it on the borders of their seething continent, but Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian boy in far-off Sarajevo. Bosnia had for centuries been a province of the Ottoman Empire but, released from the Turks by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, it was immediately transferred to the dominion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when its people would rather have been united with neighbouring Serbia, made a sovereign state by the same treaty. Young Princip was a member of The Black Hand, a nationalist organisation devoted to achieving independence from Austria for all South Slav nations, and he it was who, on June 25, 1914, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the ancient imperial throne of Austria, and his Archduchess. Within days, two warring blocs had formed — Austria, Germany, Turkey and Bulgaria against Serbia, Russia and France, joined by Britain on August 4, and later by Japan, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Greece and the United States of America.

Princip was tried in October 1914 and, at 19 too young to suffer the death penalty (which would have been kinder), was sentenced to 20 years in an Austrian prison. He survived three years of ill-treatment and starvation, but died in the last year of the war in which so many other late adolescents were to die by bullet and bayonet, shrapnel and shell, in ice, snow and blazing desert, in quagmires of mud, blood, shit and body parts, 10 million killed and 20 million wounded a conservative estimate of casualties across all theatres of war. Young Gavrilo, locked in his cell, never knew the dreadful consequences of his two astonishingly accurate revolver shots.

A blurred half-tone reproduction of a photograph of Princip, perhaps taken for police records, is one of the least noticeable exhibits in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition The Great War in Portraits. His face is expressionless, or — rather — into this expression one may read anything one wishes. Wryly, the boy has something of the Imperial Hapsburg family’s jutting lower jaw. This trifle, worthless in itself, is the most telling of all the exhibits, for without this young man’s luck — the revolver the most unreliable of weapons — there might have been no war, even though the German Emperor, Kaiser Bill, was itching for it. Princip was the inadvertent Hamlet of this tragedy.

It is this image and photographs of other young men that lend unbearable pathos to this exhibition. John Travers Cornwell was 15 when he joined the Navy, and 16 when, on HMS Chester, he was mortally wounded in the Battle of Jutland, his quiet heroism earning him the Victoria Cross. Ivor Evans too enlisted at 15, fought at Gallipoli and with the Gardeners of Salonika, and at 18 was killed in France. William Cecil Tickle, grinning broadly in his photograph, volunteered a month after the Declaration of War, aged only 16, and 22 months later was killed on the third day of the Battle of the Somme, his body one of many thousands never found. Alec Reader too was 18 when he became one of the 600,000 Allied soldiers killed on the Somme — “War is a rotten game,” he wrote on a postcard to his mother.

At 18, Leslie Wilton Andrew came from New Zealand to volunteer, and was 20 when he earned the VC in the fight for Messines Ridge, an immediate preliminary to the Battle of Passchendaele and its 240,000 casualties, Albert Ball, pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, was 21 when killed, his tally of enemy aircraft then 44, the VC his reward. And Maxwell Dalston Barrows, commissioned at 19, won the Military Cross and was killed at 20, five weeks before the Armistice.

These images and others of their generation — of nurses, a Quaker conscientious objector, and of Harry Farr, at 25, one of the shell-shocked, witless and terrified soldiers shot for cowardice — confront us in ways beyond the reach of formal portraiture. Compare these snapshots with the life-size presence in oil on canvas of the King, the Kaiser and the aged Emperor of Austria, stern in their various panoplies of office, compare them with the slick, shallow and ill-considered portraits of the great, the good and the ordinary bloke by William Orpen (of which there are far too many in this exhibition), and ask which are the speaking likenesses, which tell the truer tale.

Art is all but irrelevant in this exhibition of portraits. Sickert, Nevinson and Epstein make points in other genres than portraiture and are too remote, too arty. The Dead Stretcher-Bearer by Gilbert Rogers is a brilliant evocation of all the anonymous dead in the trenches of the Western Front but it is in no sense a portrait, though it tells a graceless truth. Even grave Henry Tonks, drawing in pastels the ghastly facial wounds that the young surgeon Harold Gillies hoped to repair (and of which he needed a coloured record), could not help, as an artist, making them beautifully hideous — and of these there are far too few — but for the unvarnished truth of the shattered face, the crumpled nose, the lidless sockets eyeless, we must turn to photographs bleak and pitiless, of which there should be 10 times as many. After these, at the boastful portraits of himself by Orpen (irrelevances all), and his portraits of Field Marshal Haig and General Sir Hubert Plomer, the one idealised and immaculate, the other, with folded hands and ridiculous moustache resembling an indignant walrus, the sensibilitous visitor may feel inclined to retch. Two German portraits, however, by Lovis Corinth of a fellow artist turned soldier, and by Ernst Kirchner of himself with amputated hand and naked prostitute, speak of spiritual unease and crisis, and perhaps of sex and self-disgust (sex and war are inseparable but disconcerting bedfellows).

Though it is far too cramped and small, playing second fiddle to a once fashionable photographer — David Bailey in this case, but my objection applies to every other who might have been so honoured, so foolish is this misjudgment of priority. I am grateful to the NPG for this exhibition. It falls between too many stools and concentrates on only one campaign, the long-drawn Western Front, but it is to some degree a reminder of the horrors inflicted by war. My diminishing generation needs no such reminder; in my childhood before the Second World War, on every street in London I could see the living wreckage of the Great War, men limbless, eyeless, dreadfully damaged, selling matches and bootlaces for a penny, or, in hope of a penny, singing (often rather well), playing the accordion, the saw (outside St Mary Abbots, Kensington) — yes, the saw — and a harp outside Tattersalls in Knightsbridge. The fortunate legless might have a wicker chair on wheels, the unfortunate a simple wooden chassis paddled along with the hands. A curious child, I wonder how such damaged beings emptied their bowels and bladders, where they slept, how they could eat. Now I see them only in my memory and in the dreary northern paintings of Laurence Lowry. The Great War did not create a world fit for heroes — it threw them on to the street.

Gavrilo Princip [Photographer unknown?], 1914 Photograph, [dimensions?] Imperial War Museums Following the assassination of Archduke Franz

It did, however, establish lasting loyalties and affections. Only once did my stepfather speak of that war, though he fought throughout it — in France, the Balkans, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia and the Holy Land — and that was when I unwisely developed an interest in Lawrence of Arabia (who is among the many not included in this exhibition) whom, I learned, my father had good reason to think “a boastful little shit”. But his loyalty to those with whom he fought was quite extraordinary and to be found in no other of his interests; he joined his soldier peers once a month for dinner, even in the blackouts, the Blitzes and the Buzzbomb Summer of the Second World War, until his death in 1962. I experienced something of that loyalty as a National Serviceman with not an enemy in sight — but had there been an enemy, that loyalty would have been much more intense and lasted longer.

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But these are the maunderings of an old man in melancholy mood inspired by the pathos of the young so early dead. As the experience of war in any form, in the armed forces or as a civilian, is now the privilege of very few in Britain, I doubt if many will share my powerfully empathic response to this exhibition but I beg them to try. Having done so, having watched the film clips (cramped and uncomfortable) and perhaps having gleaned something of the inglorious sufferings of the soldier, cross the road towards Pret A Manger and, glancing to the left, spare a moment for Edith Cavell, nurse, executed by the Germans in October 1915, for there is her monument, “Patriotism is not enough”, the inscription — her last words, we are told. And it is not, but how now are we to interpret this Delphic utterance when young Gavrilo Princip’s patriotism proved to be so much too much?

The Great War in Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (020 7306 0055, npg.org.uk) until June 15. Open Sat-Wed 10am-6pm, Thur-Fri 10am-9pm. Free.

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