CHRISTOPHER RICHARD WYNNE NEVINSON (1889-1946) Biography
VORTICISM (1914-1918)
FUTURISTS (FUTURISTA) (1910-c.1916)

Literature

T. W. Earp, Recent Paintings by C. R. W. Nevinson, The Studio, volume 100, 1930, page 281, illustrated
Elizabeth Knowles and Ian Jeffrey, C. R. W. Nevinson, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Kettle's Yard Gallery, 1988, page 36, number 51 (the lithograph exhibited; this painting mentioned as 'whereabouts unknown')
Richard Ingleby, C. R. W. Nevinson The Twentieth Century, Imperial War Museum, London 1999, page 132, illustrated, plate 75
Julian Freeman, Nevinson the 20th century, The British Art Journal, Volume 1 No 2, 1999, page 94

Exhibition History

London, Leicester Galleries, Paintings, etchings and lithographs by C. R. W. Nevinson, Sculpture by Alan Durst, (catalogue introduction by T.W. Earp), October 1930
London, J. Leger & Sons, Exhibition of the Works of C. R. W. Nevinson. Painter, April 11th-30th 1931, number 14 (From the Paris Plane).
London, Mall Galleries, The Heatherley School of Fine Art 150th Anniversary Exhibition, 27th February-9th March 1996, number 125
London, Imperial War Museum, C. R. W. Nevinson The Twentieth Century, 1999, number 75
Connecticut, Yale Center for British Art, C. R. W. Nevinson The Twentieth Century, 25th February – 7th May 2000, number 75

Description / Expertise

There is a contemporary lithograph of the subject entitled View from an Aeroplane, 40.5 by 49 cms, an example of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Nevinson stopped producing lithographs in about 1920.

Within Nevinson’s oeuvre height and flight offer extreme contrasts to the troglodyte conditions of the Western Front. It is fitting that his images for the series ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals in the Great War’ (1917) have as a single comparison the superb oil ‘From a Paris Plane’ (1919-20), which pre-dates the New York prints and whose ambitious composition, using the struts of the aircraft, portends the later etching of Brooklyn Bridge. This is as high as Nevinson flies; what follows is sporadic and mostly earthbound. (Julian Freeman)

No European painter excelled C. R. W. Nevinson ARA in creating images of war. He depicted not only the horror of war but also, perversely, its “beauty”. [Mervyn Levy, Royal Academy Magazine, 1989].

C. R. W. Nevinson was a connoisseur of modern times, appalled but at the same time fascinated. He did justice to conditions in the Great War; at least contemporaries thought so. He knew of its suffering at first hand and right from the beginning, but what his pictures emphasise is war as an organized mass movement.

He was attentive to mechanisation, as expressed in the sound of machine-gunning or in the look of automated factory labour, and he imagined a landscape to match - overseen, mapped. Searchlight beams, starshells and aircraft signified the transcendental in his scheme of things, against an earth which was either a mass of mud or a piece of ordnance survey as outlined in this most comprehensive of his aerial pictures.

Nevinson variously reported on the war, on industry, London, New York, Montparnasse and landscape. He found machine-men, Groszian profiteers, sparkling cities and the war overwhelmingly embodied in a giant gun. He was a proto-Warhol who knew that the times might be seized or mastered in some such convulsive symbol as a bursting shell or coal-black torpid townscape. He worked, too, for publication and was almost alone among his contemporaries in realizing that the mass media made a difference; that interviews, scandal and sensation counted; and that the printed image would be seen by millions. The same image would mean that much more if it dealt in whatever was the talk of the moment: barbed wire, Big Bertha, Broadway or the thrill of flight. He was the only British modernist to believe that he could fathom the imagination of the masses and establish an appropriate symbolism. To do the job properly the image had to be striking but at the same time identifiable. Wings, struts and tensioning wires provide him with a modernist armature and at the same time imply organization and control, for he would have mastery at all costs. To succeed, his ambition needed the wherewithal of a national film industry. His true successors were Robert Petshcow and Eugen Diesel in Das Land der Deutschen, Leipzig, 1931, one of photography’s major publications. His insights were also those of the pop artists, although in Britain he had no successors. (Ian Jeffrey, October 1988)