World War I artworks on show at NGV and Art Gallery of NSW

Two exhibitions reveal the spirit of adventure and patriotic excitement sparked by war — but also the unspeakable horrors.

George W. LAMBERT A sergeant of the Light Horse 1920 oil on canvas 77.0 x 62.0 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1921 From the exhibition: Follow the Flag NGV Australia until 16 Aug To be used in conjunction with exhibition only; not to be cropped, overprinted, altered; must credit

The Gallipoli campaign took place in the vicinity of Troy, the site of the most celebrated and legendary conflict of remote antiquity. And the Trojan War itself owes its fame above all to the genius of the poet who commemorated it, and to the place of his poem as the foundation stone of European literature.

The Iliad remains the unsurpassed epic of war because no one has appreciated the tragedy of men enmeshed in the toils of conflict with greater lucidity and unsentimental sympathy than Homer. He sees with absolute clarity the horror of war, and that no sane man would choose death over life. But he recognises that fate can place us in circumstances that offer no honourable alternative to fighting, even when we know that we are doomed to die.

He has a profound understanding of the ebb and flow of courage and confidence, as one man loses heart and another recovers his strength and resolve; the blind poet could even imagine the excitement, the savage thrill that could seize the warrior, as well as the terror and despair that might overcome him at another moment. But, above all, no one dies in Homer without a recognition of his humanity; few if any men fall without a brief recollection that someone loves them, that they are respected members of some community, that parents or wife or children will never see them again.

It is impossible to commemorate a war without an acknowledgment of such complexities; impossible to think about World War I, for example, without recognising the spirit of adventure, the patriotic excitement and the heroic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the common cause that animated so many young men; and impossible to ignore the failures of diplomacy, the abuses of propaganda, the incompetence, at times, of command and the unspeakable horror of mass killing on the modern battlefield.

Several exhibitions this year recall the Great War, among them one at the National Gallery of Victoria and a smaller one at the Art Gallery of NSW; the Melbourne exhibition is accom­panied by a catalogue, while the Sydney one is not, although the works in the show can be viewed on the gallery website.

The Melbourne exhibition begins with a huge, six-sheet recruitment poster of a young soldier mounted on a horse and the slogan that gives the exhibition its title: “Follow the Flag”. Nearby are other examples of recruitment and propaganda posters, including the famous ones designed by Norman Lindsay: one of these makes ingenious use of the ubiquitous Australian corrugated iron water tank to bring home the message that we must stop the Hun before it comes to this.

The next room, in contrast, presents us with the reality of the war in the trenches, through photographs by Frank ­Hurley, Cecil Bostock and others, drawings and paintings, and graphic work by Lindsay and Will Dyson, who was Australia’s first ­official war artist. Unlike some of Dyson’s more ­direct evocations of the experience of war, his lithograph Compensation (1918) is more ­ambiguous and unusual in hinting at relations between the soldiers and the local population.

George Lambert’s painting A Sergeant of the Light Horse is one of the great images of the war, but it was painted in 1920 and is reflective rather than urgent in tone. As has so often been observed, Lambert seems to rediscover the figure of the settler as celebrated by the Heidelberg School — a motif that had never really engaged him in his youth — now turned warrior.

Arthur Streeton, who had painted a kind of allegory of settlement in his famous Whelan on the Log (1890), saw the connection between the trials of pioneer life and endurance on the battlefield clearly, and wrote that “the fights against flood, fire and drought in the bush all tell in the field here”. He too became a war artist and this exhibition is an opportunity to see his war pictures in a fresh light, with an enhanced sense of their original purpose and meaning.

Boulogne (1918) is an impressive evocation of the immense effort and mobilisation behind the lines. The city — already in Roman times the principal port for navigation to the British Isles — became the most important base for British and Commonwealth troops landing on the continent during the war, and in particular was a centre for medical treatment: the foreground of the composition is entirely occupied by medical vehicles, although fresh troops seem to be marching towards a train bound for the front.

The animation and anonymous bustle of the foreground are made all the more poignant by the large white masses of the city buildings ­beyond and the vast expanse of blue sky above. In contrast to the landscape of the trenches, blasted and churned into a chaos of mud by constant shelling, the city seems hardly touched by war. One imagines cafes and restaurants in the squares where city people are still lunching almost as though it were peacetime.

No author conveys the disconnection of life behind the lines from the experience of those at the front better than Marcel Proust, whose characters continue to attend dinner parties or visit brothels even as the conflict impinges to a greater or lesser extent on their habits. The most unforgettable passage concerns the disagreeable Mme Verdurin, who makes much of her preoccupation with the war but, as she reads of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and exclaims at the terrible loss of life, is in reality filled with the pleasure of a croissant dipped in her morning coffee.

Streeton’s other important painting in this room is a view of Mont Saint-Quentin (1919), the scene of an important Australian victory under the command of General John Monash in ­August 1918 that forced the Germans to withdraw to the Hindenburg line. Unlike so much of the trench fighting during the war, this was a rapid and daring assault that was successfully executed in only a few days. Streeton was taken to the site a couple of months after the event, and presumably is looking up at the hill from the point of view of the attacking army, but where the Germans were so recently dug in only ruins and the charred trunks of trees remain under the sky and clouds. Silence and emptiness reign in place of turmoil and violence, and the impassive movement of the clouds in the sky produces the accidents of light and shade on the ground below.

Other works in this varied and absorbing exhibition fill out the sense of the period with images of the home front, of enemy aliens in detention centres, of the remarkable variety of crafts ­produced by soldiers in the trenches from the byproducts of war, and finally of demobilisation, celebration and the grim reality of permanent mutilation and disfigurement. The exhibition ends with a replica of a war memorial, housing Bertram Mackennal’s fine bronze memorial for the fallen of Eton College and surrounded by wall panels on which visitors are invited to attach ­poppies. What could have been a sentimental indulgence — such as other works in which the audience is invited to pin up messages, wishes and so on — in this case seems a natural way to allow visitors to express some of the feelings that have been elicited by the exhibition.

The losses in the Great War were so un­precedented that memorials and monuments were set up all over Australia, as in other combatant nations. By convention, however, these were not generally signed by the artist, whose identity was often not even recorded in subsequent reference works. A relatively new book, however, Donald Richardson’s Creating Remembrance: The Art and Design of Australian War Memorials (Common Ground, 2013) not only lists and illustrates countless memorials but, importantly, identifies the artists who conceived and executed these monuments. We meet Dyson and Streeton again in the AGNSW exhibition. In Dyson’s Bapaume Church, the kneeling funerary statue of a bishop from the 18th or 19th century survives poignantly among the rubble of the ­edifice itself; in another lithograph, the bitterly ironic Wine of Victory, the ragged, wounded ­soldiers recall, probably fortuitously, those of Jacques Callot in his early 17th-century prints of The Miseries of War (1633). There is another ­impressive painting by Streeton, this time of ­Villers-Bretonneux, the site of the first tank battle in history. Here again the landscape is viewed after all the violence and the horror have fallen silent; the hill in the background and the ruins in the middle ground, grey and lifeless, suggest the aftermath of battle, but in a distant and elegiac mode. Only the foreground trenches, sunlit and painted in almost brutally gestural brushmarks, remind us of the physical urgency of conflict.

Other notable works include Napier Waller’s lithograph of a wounded soldier being carried away on a stretcher: a virtual self-portrait, as the accompanying label points out, for the artist lost his right arm after being gravely wounded at the second battle of Bullecourt. Fred Leist’s Pigeon Loft (1917) records the kind of mobile loft that would be used to keep carrier pigeons, while on the right a courier rides off on a motorbike, ­carrying one or more of the birds to the frontline in a wicker basket. The subject is unusual, but it is especially the Meldrum-like treatment of colour and light that are striking: the livid light on one side of the mobile loft suggests an artificial source of illumination and the whole scene is profiled against a pale, rather sinister sky.

There are evocative views of ruined villages and abandoned trenches by Evelyn Chapman, who visited these sites with her father, a ­member of the New Zealand War Graves Commission; one of these is a picture of trenches around which poppies have sprung up. This was given to the gallery by the artist’s daughter in 1976, and many more of her works, bequeathed by the same daughter, have entered the gallery’s collection this year.

The most disturbing work in the exhibition, however, is George Lambert’s cartoon for a painting, The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek. The agile, fluent and economical but disembodied pencil line conveys an impression of dispassionate objectivity, while the composition reads naturally from left to right as a condensed and pitiless narrative of battle. On the left, figures crouch with eagerness expressed in features and in posture; then they crawl or run forward; and then, with an almost balletic lightness, they seem to leap, to float, to dance grotesquely in the air as they are struck by the bullets of the enemy.

Follow the Flag: Australian Artists and War 1914-45

NGV Australia, Melbourne, until August 16

Mad Through the Darkness: Australian Artists and the Great War

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until October 11