Amongst the Nerves of the World: C.R.W. Nevinson's Visions of Post-war London: 1919–1929

Abstract

For many, London in the 1920s was all about the Jazz Age and a new cultural wave of Americana. For others, like ex-war artist C.R.W. Nevinson, it was not. From his Hampstead studios he watched in despair at the population conducting an irresponsible dance upon the grave of a once-great civilization during what he knew was only the 'long weekend' between two world wars. Instead, Nevinson's work offered a melancholic vision of a convalescent nation in which a deeply wounded population was unsure how to mourn those who had been killed and nervous about the tastelessness of enjoying itself again. Artists living and working in the capital, wondered how to depict not only the familiar and comforting appearance of London, but more importantly its mood; how to respond to, or cope with, the feeling of disenchantment (a dominant condition of loss), and how to express visually new social fissures, for example, between the nouveau riche (war profiteers) and the nouveau poor (those who had actually fought). After 'The War For Civilization', it was the artist's duty to re-cast the very civilization for which such a heavy price had been paid — but how? The war, it was clear, had driven a wedge between what had gone before, and what had now to be done — there was to be no return to the modernist status quo ante. The standard bearers who had come this far would not necessarily be the same artists who were going to thrive in the peace. Here, indeed, was the dilemma of English society: the flowering of a mass culture, the emergence of the popular political and social myth, and the re-invention of London and Englishness through the conflicting demands of Americana, socialism and Empire. Nevinson's work, through the images discussed in this article, demonstrates both the diversity and the depth of feeling by a 'rebel' artist of the pre-1914 generation, who had come, via the Great War, to this unique and powerful vision of his now unfamiliar home — London.