The First World War
In 1916 Roberts enlisted in the Royal Artillery as a gunner, serving on the Western Front. Having been told that artists were being chosen to do war paintings for the Canadian War Records Office, he applied, and in 1918 was 'loaned' to the Canadians for six months as an official war artist. He was subsequently also commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, for whom he painted A Shell Dump, France (1918–19; Imperial War Museum, London). His experiences at the front – touched upon in his memoir '4.5 Howitzer Gunner' – shifted the direction of his work, and significant pieces from his wartime output, such as the powerful Canadian commission The First German Gas Attack at Ypres (1918), dramatically depict the horror of war and are possibly the most acerbic produced by any of the British artists employed under the government’s schemes. Indeed they are bitter enough to rival the social realism of the German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz, and are possibly in a class of their own for their portrayal of the arduous – and occasionally deadly – life in the firing lines.
Read more about this topic: William Roberts (painter)
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)