Arthur Streeton: the art of war, National Gallery of Australia
Arthur Streeton’s images of the war are unrivalled in the vivid impression they give of military life and consequences of conflict.
Art has a long relationship with war: often it has been called on to celebrate victories, commemorate a great leader or mourn the dead. The Hellenistic city of Pergamum even set up a monument to its victory over the neighbouring Gauls, which was essentially a tribute to the courage of its defeated opponents. The greatest image of a historical battle that survives from antiquity is the extraordinary mosaic of Alexander the Great’s battle against Persia’s Darius III, found in Pompeii in 1831 and now in the Naples Archeological Museum.
In the Renaissance, the two most famous paintings of historical battles were never completed. In 1504, 10 years after the expulsion of the Medici, the republic of Florence commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a fresco of the Battle of Anghiari on one of the walls of the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, while Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina on the opposite wall.
Michelangelo did not get further than designing a magnificent cartoon, while possibly significant fragments of Leonardo’s painting were later plastered over and repainted decades afterwards.
In later periods, war artists were used systematically by monarchs such as Louis XIV to document and record military campaigns. Interestingly, however, because these pictures were documentary in nature, they never enjoyed the status of history painting, which generally dealt with subjects from scripture, ancient history or mythology.
It was only with Benjamin West and others at the end of the 18th century that subjects such as The Death of General Wolfe (1770) came to be treated with the seriousness — and thus the artificiality and conscious painterly composition — of history painting. These generic distinctions broke down to some extent in the 19th century, with its appetite for documentary realism, and many paintings were made throughout Europe commemorating victories and sometimes tragic defeats, such as Napoleon’s retreat from Russia. By the time George Lambert was attached to the Australian Light Horse and commissioned to record the famous cavalry charge at Beersheba, he was working within a long and complex tradition.
Arthur Streeton’s case was somewhat different partly because, unlike Lambert, he was not a figure painter but a landscape artist. Thus he does not paint soldiers in military engagements, although some of his pictures do include small figures seen from a certain distance.
Yet Streeton’s images of the war, as revealed in this remarkable exhibition by Anne Gray at the National Gallery of Australia, are unrivalled in the vivid impression they give of military life and of the consequences of conflict.
Perhaps our first impression is what an exceptional painter Streeton is. Not that we are surprised to find that Streeton is a great painter, but it is perhaps unexpected, if we are mainly familiar with his oil paintings of the Heidelberg period, to discover that he is also a great watercolour painter. Time and again we are astonished by his dexterity, confidence and subtlety in capturing complex effects of light and colour, indeed in reducing what to most of us would seem a shapeless mass of visual information to a meaningful, economical, intelligible and therefore beautiful image.
Look closely at the shattered houses in his view of Peronne with Mont Saint-Quentin the background and consider what is entailed in painting these rooftops and ruins. To give just one example: most of us, if asked to paint these structures, would see the grey slate roofs and think of greyness. We would start to mix black and white to what we think is the appropriate greyscale ratio of slate, as though we had a tile on the table beside us to match.
But what does Streeton do?
He understands the real optical effect of these grey roofs in their particular setting and under their particular light conditions and instead mixes a grey-violet wash that vividly and economically conveys the sense of a slate roof within the harmony of all the other chromatic elements in a coherent scene.
What Streeton is doing in this case, and what a real painter does, is not only to see what he is actually seeing instead of what he expects to see; it is also to see with and through his intimate knowledge of the pigments available to him. A writer thinks in words: a wider repertoire permits a wider range of nuances and more accurate expression. But as we have perhaps seen, words can be an impediment for an artist.
A painter thinks in pigments, and it is only the mastery of their specific media, their ability to mix hues and tones with speed and dexterity, that allows them to perceive and to capture the effects of nature.
And because there is no simple and mechanical one-to-one matching in painting, because equivalences are always relative and, as with language, significant within semantic fields of hues and tones, there are always elements of abstraction, of risk and daring in the art of painting. This is what is so exhilarating and perhaps unexpected in Streeton, to find his evocation of poppies blooming in the trenches painted with such boldness but also with such sureness of touch. It is not surprising to see that a detail of this sheet was chosen as a poster for the exhibition.
The subjects he chooses to record include many pieces of equipment used for the first time in the new war: tanks and planes, as well as cannon, trucks and other more familiar things. Many of these things represented technological innovations of the previous few years, and had not existed in the artist’s youth. He paints them with a freshness of observation that is striking even now, a century later and when they have all become obsolete.
Streeton’s images of buildings and ruins are particularly striking, many of them produced during his second tour in France, in the autumn of 1918. Most are of houses in Peronne, where as he writes, not a single roof remains intact. Walls gape and roofs are missing or in tatters, collapsing rafters and bearers make crazy silhouettes against the sky. In one case a spiral staircase survives, suspended in the void.
Most important, of course, are the landscapes for, with their low and otherwise unimpressive hills, these were the scenes of great battles, unimaginable slaughter and sometimes remarkable victories. (I should mention in this connection that an exhibition of contemporary Australian artists who visited these sites on the Somme, at Peronne, Mont Saint-Quentin and elsewhere, is about to open at Armidale regional gallery and will tour around NSW. I also must declare an interest in that one of these painters is my wife and that I contributed an essay to the catalogue on the experiences of my two grandfathers on the Western Front.)
There are watercolour studies of the battlefields, made on the spot, and oil paintings finished later in London. Among the latter there is a painting of The 8th August advance, in which the foreground is a peaceful and almost idyllic river landscape, while the space beyond is a desert denuded of trees and in the far distance plumes of smoke represent the barrage of shelling that would precede an infantry assault on unseen enemy positions.
Another remarkable painting is of the site of Villers-Bretonneux, which Streeton painted only months after the town had been retaken by Australian soldiers on Anzac Day, April 25, 1918; more than 1200 men had died in the assault. A few days later, my paternal grandfather Arthur Samuel Allen, acting lieutenant colonel at only 24 years old, led the Australian attack, in conjunction with the French army, on Monument Wood a little farther on.
Looking up from the trenches to the devastated hill, the scene is almost disconcertingly quiet, for the result of the successful action had been to push the German frontline back about 3km, beyond the hill. The trench was disused when Streeton saw it; but he could hear the shelling on the front as he sketched, and he evokes the violence of the battle — whose date is included in the picture’s title — through the vigorous, almost savagely bold brushstrokes that represent the earth thrown up either side of the deep cut, like a wound, gouged in the field. And on the right, a terrible detail: the shins and knees of a dead soldier, silhouetted against the sky.
Another famous battle — one of the most remarkable victories in the war — came a few months later in August 1918, when the Australian corps under General John Monash defeated the Germans at Mont Saint-Quentin, the main German defensive position that stood in the way of the crossing of the Somme River. Two months later, Monash, an educated man who appears to have had a good knowledge of art history, took Streeton by car to visit the site, and the artist was able to make sketches and watercolours on the spot. One of these is a beautiful, spare and spacious impression of the scene, which captures trenches and the debris of war in the foreground. Another is a careful topographic sketch in one of the sketchbooks that lie open in a display case. This scene was, presumably later, developed into a full watercolour view of the scene on two sheets of paper, inscribed: “Mt Saint Quentin / a sketch record for Sir John Monash”, and presented to the general as a gift.
Mont Saint Quentin, as the site of one of Australia’s greatest feats of arms, is memorialised in a monumental oil painting, 161cm x 253cm in size. Here again we can admire Streeton’s mastery as a painter, for it was not easy to make such a bland and characterless landscape into a painting of any kind, let alone one charged with drama and feeling.
Comparison with the watercolour for Monash helps us to see what the artist has done. Above all, he has used the shadows cast by passing clouds — what were known in classic art theory as “accidents” of light — to produce a dark foreground, which gives depth as well as mood to the picture: the hill itself, in full light, becomes more prominent, and although only 100m in altitude, it takes on the epic appearance of a nearly impregnable stronghold.
The foreground shadows are relieved by patches of light, one of which picks out a ruined farmhouse.
Behind, the blue sky is peaceful but the two masses of clouds recall the smoke of battle. In this northern land, usually so wet and green, the war-ravaged landscape in late summer takes on an uncannily Australian appearance. Every detail, as we can see from the watercolour, is accurate; only lighting has been managed, in a completely plausible way, to give the picture compositional shape and expression: as so often, artifice is needed for truth to be revealed.
https://www.salientwesternfront.com/
Arthur Streeton: The Art of War
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Until April 29.
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