Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War

Trout

Introduction

PAINTING, MEMORY, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trout

AMERICAN SOLDIERS WHO VISITED PARIS while on leave during World War I brought home paper souvenirs of the experience that are remarkably consistent from individual to individual. The year 1918 stood, after all, at the dawn of a new age of mass tourism marked by the homogenizing and commodifying of travel experience.¹ Such soldiers kept their Metro tickets (many of these men had never been on a subway before), street maps, guidebooks, postcard booklets, and sundry brochures for reading rooms, historical tours, and wholesome theatricals sponsored by the ubiquitous Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), which worked at the bequest of General John J. Pershing to keep doughboys away from the City of Light’s less wholesome attractions. Still unearthed from time to time in dusty corners of attics or storage sheds, their original owners long dead, these hundred-year-old collections of touristy mementos also frequently contain a souvenir booklet for a now-unfamiliar, long-forgotten Paris attraction—the Panthéon de la Guerre, then the largest painting in the world and one of the most ambitious war memorials ever conceived.

At its peak of notoriety in the late 1910s, the Panthéon was a must-see Parisian destination on par with the Arc de Triomphe, the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Folies Bergère. Its creators intended for the painting’s overwhelming imagery to convey the epic grandeur of the Allied war effort; once the Great War ended, the Panthéon would stand—presumably forever—as a monument to victory. Two of France’s senior academic painters, Pierre Carrier-Belleuse and Auguste-François Gorguet, began work on the massive canvas in 1914, shortly after the French victory at the Marne, and with the assistance of no fewer than twenty other artists the duo finally completed the painting in October 1918, just three weeks before the Armistice. As art historian Mark Levitch writes, the project was a quasi-official hybrid.² Funded through subscriptions, but housed within a specially constructed octagonal building located on government-allotted land near the historical Hôtel des Invalides in the 7th arrondissement (prime real estate for any French memory project about war), the Panthéon received the blessing of French president Raymond Poincaré, who, along with other civil and military officials, attended the work’s well-publicized inauguration.³

American troops who dutifully purchased a ticket to see the Panthéon a century ago must have found the experience strange and overwhelming. The panoramic painting, 402 feet long and 45 feet high, was looped end to end to form a gigantic circular image known as a cyclorama. These cycloramic murals had already enjoyed success in the United States as a form of Civil War remembrance and were designed to immerse the viewer in dramatic spectacle (not unlike later developments in cinema or even virtual reality) by providing an uninterrupted 360-degree view of an event. The 1880s saw the completion of several iconic cycloramas depicting the battles of Gettysburg and Atlanta, among others. And by the time of the Great War, the concept was popular enough in Europe (where it had, after all, originated in the eighteenth century) that Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet’s gargantuan canvas actually faced competition from other murals representing the war. For instance, Belgian painter Alfred Bastien’s Panorama de la Bataille de l’Yser, addressed in the final chapter of this collection, offered a bird’s eye view of fighting along the 52-kilometer-long Belgian portion of the Western Front. Bastien unveiled his acclaimed cyclorama in the heart of Brussels in 1921.

However, the Panthéon de la Guerre, a true leviathan of remembrance, dwarfed all of these other projects in both scale and ambition. Indeed, the painting marked the utilization of a then-familiar memory technology in the service of a unique commemorative agenda. Unlike other cycloramic paintings, Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet’s did not place the viewer in the center of an exciting battle scene. Instead, the artists depicted an imaginary setting with the eerie feel of a dreamlike Valhalla, complete with a Temple of Glory and a Monument to the Dead. In this sense, the painting is a metamemorial, a monument covered with depictions of other monuments. Thousands of figures people the canvas’s otherworldly landscape of stone steps, columns, and statuary, and they include the leaders and heroes of every Allied nation. Perhaps the most dramatic section is the Staircase of Heroes that leads up to the Temple. Here, in painstaking detail, the artists reproduced the visages of approximately four thousand French soldiers decorated for valor, enlisted men as well as officers, many of them dead by the time the Panthéon opened to the public. Gazing at these spectral portraits—dizzying in their sheer number—visitors in uniform could see young men like themselves, captured as they once were, aglow with life, before facing the destruction of war.

Ten years after the inauguration of the Panthéon, perhaps the most audacious memory project ever undertaken by a team of painters, the itinerate artist Horace Pippin, an African American veteran of the famous 369th Infantry Regiment (a.k.a. the Harlem Hellfighters), undertook his own painterly mission of war remembrance. Unlike the French creators of the world’s largest painting, Pippin had no formal training, no government recognition, and not even a fully functioning right arm with which to practice his art. In the fall of 1918, German machine-gun bullets had struck him in multiple places, leaving him with permanent nerve damage, and for the rest of his life he could lift a paint brush only with difficulty—and never above his shoulder.

And he faced other handicaps. Barely supported by monthly disability payments doled out by the Veterans Administration, Pippin was desperately poor—his wife worked as a laundress while he decorated cigar boxes that sold for a few pennies apiece—and he lived during a time of grotesque racial inequality on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, inequality embedded even in comparatively progressive Northern communities like the artist’s native West Chester, Pennsylvania. Bigotry had shaped much of his war experience. Attached to the French Army during its combat tour, Pippin’s unit served with distinction and, for a time, enjoyed the approval of black and white America alike, but exaggerated reports of widespread cowardice and incompetence in other African American combat units quickly drowned out the positive press once enjoyed by the Hellfighters. As a result, the leadership of the US Army emerged from the Great War more committed to racial segregation than ever.⁴

Pippin’s very first painting, a battle scene titled The Ending of the War: Starting Home (1930), depicted a moment on the Western Front that he did not experience personally—the collapse of the German Army at the close of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive (Pippin was hospitalized at the time and receiving treatment for his multiple wounds). Nevertheless, the image recorded something that Pippin had witnessed repeatedly—the men of the 369th advancing with tactical skill (for the French Army had trained them well) and determination across a shell-cratered, barbed-wire-strewn landscape of death. The picture’s frame, an integral part of the work and decorated by Pippin himself, tells us something about the violence that the artist summoned from his memory as well as the violence involved in that act of remembering. Hand-carved rifles, grenades, and gas masks spill onto the frame, as if refusing to be contained by the borders of the canvas.

Other war paintings—all of modest, even tiny dimensions—followed, including Outpost Raid: Champagne Sector (1931), Gas Alarm Outpost: Argonne (1931), and Shell Holes and Observation Balloon: Champagne Sector (1931). The products of a talented but untrained eye, these deceptively simple images all manifest a modernist quality; through their semiabstraction, they further unsettle the already unfamiliar world of war. And although their commemorative function is far less explicit than that of the Panthéon de la Guerre, they all grapple with collective memory—with the faulty, overly selective memory of white America, that is. Through his memorializing of black troops as capable and disciplined combatants, Pippin gave lie to stereotypes that informed the US military’s racial policies until the Truman administration.⁵

The contrast between the Panthéon de la Guerre, a mobilization of artistic talent and resources on a truly wartime scale, and Horace Pippin’s miniature canvases, intimate scenes of memory created in solitude by a physically and socially disadvantaged artist, sets the stage for this essay collection, which considers war paintings both large and small, conventional and controversial, academic and modernist, official and unofficial. Consisting of fourteen different case studies and representing cultural activity in twelve different nations—Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Turkey, and the United States—Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War focuses specifically on the intersection of painting, much of it tied to various programs sponsored by wartime governments, and remembrance. In this way, the volume makes a one-of-a-kind and, we hope, welcome contribution to both art history and memory studies and adds to the rich body of research on First World War visual art already offered by scholars such as Jay Winter, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Annette Becker, Robert Cozzolino, James Fox, Pearl James, Anne Classen Knutson, David Lubin, and Sue Malvern.⁶

What the stories behind the Panthéon and Pippin’s early canvases demonstrate is that war painting continued to matter in the early twentieth century, its perceived aesthetic and representational value as yet undiminished by the growing popularity of photography and cinema, media that supposedly recorded and preserved history with absolute veracity. At least for a time, Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet’s cyclorama beat out other Parisian attractions—and other memory technologies—to become essential viewing for American soldiers on leave as well as visitors from a host of other nations. And Pippin’s war scenes, undertaken initially with little hope of an audience, marked the beginning of a successful painting career often focused on historical subjects; by the time of his death in 1946, Pippin enjoyed relative financial security and widespread critical recognition—albeit recognition all too often anchored in reductive assumptions about the primitive nature of African American art.

The War to End All Wars was arguably the last major conflict to inspire truly iconic representation on canvas. Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (The War) (1929–32), John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1921), Paul Nash’s The Menin Road (1918) and We Are Making a New World (1917–18), C. R. W. Nevinson’s Paths of Glory (1917) and Harvest of Battle (1919), George Leroux’s Enfer (Hell) (1921), Wyndham Lewis’s A Battery Shelled (1918–19), Will Longstaff’s The Menin Gate at Midnight (1927), Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1928–29), and Harvey Dunn’s The Machinegunner (1918) and Street Fighting (1918)—the number of familiar, widely reproduced paintings tied to the memory of the Great War far exceeds any comparable list of influential artworks from World War II or later conflicts. Although official artists programs sprang into existence again between 1939 and 1945 and even during later conflicts (such as the American war in Vietnam or the British Falklands War), the impact of the images produced under these schemes on a memory of these wars has simply not been as significant nor, arguably, as enduring.⁷ Thus, the First World War represents something of a last hurrah for war painting as a culturally prominent form of wartime testimony and postwar memorialization. Not every painting intended to help shape collective memory achieved that goal. Most, in fact, did not—for reasons outlined in many of the case studies that follow. Nevertheless, painting in general proved a powerful talisman of memory and, given its technological competitors, a surprisingly resilient medium for depicting and commemorating a conflict like no other.

The richness of wartime visual art had, of course, much to do with the modernist revolution already underway before 1914. Prewar avant-garde movements like cubism, futurism, and vorticism, to name just a few of the competing modernist isms that made the art scene of the early twentieth century so dynamic, provided wartime artists with a new visual vocabulary, one well suited to the conflict’s own strangeness and overwhelming, often terrifying sense of the new. Visual modernism and martial modernity intersected throughout the conflict—in the razzle-dazzle paint schemes of troop ships, for example, or the abstract appearance of aerial reconnaissance photographs.⁸ However, these modern styles coexisted with more traditional modes of artistic representation that persisted during this period, as seen in the academic, neoclassical style of the Panthéon de la Guerre cyclorama. In some instances, the traditional style and subject of such images proved more popular with the public than their modernist counterparts.

The relationship between modernism and tradition in First World War art, both literary and visual, has proved a fertile subject for scholars.⁹ Less thoroughly examined to date are the complexities inherent in the notion of paintings as vehicles for public remembrance. This collection explores a number of questions: How significant a part did war paintings play in the formation and perpetuation of a shared memory of the war within various nations after 1918? How was the role of painting in memory construction different from that of photography or film, media that supposedly offered greater verisimilitude and a more direct link to history? And how, in turn, did conflicts over collective memory, pervasive during the 1920s and 1930s in nearly every former combatant nation, affect even the most personal and idiosyncratic renderings of war experience in two-dimensional art? The iconic stature of particular First World War paintings raises questions of its own. How does an image become shorthand for a specific historical event? And what do now-forgotten paintings (the majority, by far) tell us about the dynamics of public memory in connection with the Great War and, more broadly, about the politics of remembrance?

To set the stage for the fourteen case studies that explore these questions, this introduction offers two sections of background and orientation. The first briefly considers the cultural advantages enjoyed by early twentieth-century painting over its mechanical rivals as well as the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the various official artists programs sponsored by most wartime governments. The second offers definitions of key terms, such as collective memory and remembrance, followed by summaries of individual chapters.

Painting, Photography, and Government Sponsorship of War Art

Painting flourished during the Great War and during the wave of remembrance that came afterward by satisfying cultural needs that photography and moving pictures, for all their ubiquity, simply could not address on their own. As art historian James Fox explains in his analysis of the imagery market in wartime Great Britain, the public’s demand for scenes of trenches, ruined villages, and other day-to-day realities of war on the Western Front quickly exceeded supply. Photographers could not produce such images fast enough, and they could not yet carry their equipment into the heart of battle—the space that curious civilians most wanted to see. Even when photographers were able to make it to the fighting front, they had trouble capturing the scale of the war with their cameras. Frank Hurley, one of Australia’s official photographers, famously spent several frustrated days attempting to capture shell blasts on the Western Front in 1917. His composite images, created by layering single photographs over one another to represent a sense of the fighting front, are infamous for being dubbed fakes by Charles Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent.

Painters quickly responded to the shortage in images, and a relatively new innovation in printing technology insured that their work was reproduced and distributed on an unprecedented scale. The development in the 1880s and 1890s of the halftone process, which simulated continuous tone imagery with a series of black dots arranged at various densities against a white background, meant that paintings could now appear in the widest possible range of paper publications, including postcards, posters, magazines, newspapers, and books.¹⁰ An international golden age of illustration resulted, led by artists known more for their paintings and drawings in magazines and books than for formal pieces in galleries—artists like France’s Georges Scott (examined in the third chapter of this collection), whose career with the celebrated news weekly L’Illustration stretched over four decades, and America’s Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell.

Because scenes of frontline action were beyond the capabilities of early twentieth-century photography and cinema, military violence quickly became the special province of wartime painters. As we will see in several of the chapters that follow, some of these artists took an academic approach to battle scenes, invoking conventions from nineteenth-century war art; others rendered the fighting from a modernist perspective. Both approaches produced images that, at least in some cases, enjoyed enthusiastic receptions during the war and prominence afterward through their alignment with various (and often competing) bodies of collective memory. However, as Fox observes, painting’s engagement with violence was not the only reason for its popularity. Theories of visual representation operative during the 1910s tended to take a (to our twenty-first-century eyes) naive view of photography, asserting that the medium possess[ed] a direct, causal connection to its subject, a perfect alignment, if you will, of the signifier with the signified.¹¹ Put simply, photographs could not lie because the camera’s mechanical gaze—unlike human optics—did not interpret or distort; it merely recorded. (The notion that photographs can and do lie all the time would, of course, gain widespread currency later, well before the advent of Photoshop.)

However, if photography was, for most consumers of early twentieth-century cultural imagery, trustworthy, the truth it presented was decidedly lower-case, the product of a mechanism, rather than a mind, that captured surface appearances only. Paintings, in comparison, achieved an upper-case Truth through aesthetic selection and arrangement, emotional depth, and overt didacticism—or so painters and their many advocates argued. Ironically, it was the seeming artlessness of photography that damned it (at least for a time) as a lesser medium, even though its verisimilitude remained on a superficial level largely unchallenged.

The cultural prestige attached to painting versus photography—even in countries like Britain where the traditional fine arts seemed to have little impact on day-to-day life and snapshots were all the rage—led to the creation of various official artists programs during the war as well as the establishment of art displays in official galleries and museums afterward. As this collection of essays demonstrates, nearly every wartime government concluded that visual art had tremendous motivational (that is, propaganda) value, as well as an important documentary function. Thus, painting became yet another form of cultural activity pulled into the voracious maw of total war. However, schemes to place artists in combat zones and to facilitate the reproduction and distribution of their work, in ways that would presumably inspire enlistment and investment in war bonds, proceeded more quickly in some nations than others. Organized by the national propaganda bureau initially known as the Wellington House, Britain’s war-art program, for example, did not start up until 1916, well after similar initiatives were underway in France and Germany. The Ottoman Empire was likewise slow to mobilize its artists. As Gizem Tongo notes in her contribution to this volume, the Turkish government waited until the fall of 1917 to enlist Ottoman painters for its war effort.

Two points are important to remember about these official programs. First, as art historian Sue Malvern has shown in her detailed study of modern British painters and the Great War, government sponsorship often proved far less restrictive in terms of the style and content of the commissioned work than one might assume. After all, nearly every iconic British depiction of the Western Front now considered explicitly antiwar—from Paul Nash’s We Are Making a New World (1917–18) and The Menin Road (1918–19) to C. R. W. Nevinson’s The Harvest of Battle (1919)—came from an official artist. Indeed, even John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918), a massive depiction of war-inflicted suffering and blindness (and perhaps the best-known, most consistently remembered painting of the entire conflict), would never have been created without cooperation from British authorities. Known for his high-society portraits—and a proverbial fish out of water when it came to war painting—the expatriate American, then sixty years old, reached the British sector of the Western Front via upper-class connections. As Philip Beidler notes, Sargent received a commission from the quasi-official [British] War Artists Memorial Committee, followed by a personal letter of request from Prime Minister David Lloyd George to go to the front as a government war artist.¹²

Sargent’s fellow countrymen in the United States’ official war artists program also created work that, for the most part, bore little resemblance to the fanciful imagery of bestial Huns and chivalric Doughboys emblazoned on propaganda posters. The Eight, as the American artists in uniform were collectively known, roamed the battlefields largely free to record whatever they liked. One of these painters, Wallace Morgan, maintained the anything-but-official-sounding position that the Eight had a duty of showing up fraud and pomposity and to get across human frailty, perhaps not quite what the War Department had in mind.¹³ Another, Harvey Dunn, created what is arguably the single most powerful painting to emerge from the American war-art program—Prisoners and Wounded (1918), a brutally frank depiction of the human flotsam produced by the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the bloodiest battle in American history. Nothing could be further from the positive spin ordinarily associated with propaganda. Dunn’s remarkable canvas portrays wounded doughboys, swathed in gore-stained bandages, staggering away from an invisible battlefield under a sullen gray sky. Pressed into service as stretcher bearers, prisoners march beside them. Only the color of the Germans’ uniforms distinguishes them from the other men; the pain and exhaustion that Dunn vividly renders are universal to all.

Like the Panthéon de la Guerre, paintings such as Sargent’s Gassed and Dunn’s Prisoners and Wounded did more than document (as if any kind of representation can only document): through a kind of temporal double vision, they memorialized the experience of war before the conflict was even over, testifying to the present while also considering what should be remembered in the future. Indeed, Dunn believed so strongly in the commemorative dimension of his work that he petitioned the US Army to extend his status as an official war artist beyond the Armistice. He hoped to complete dozens of new paintings based on half-finished studies and battlefield sketches, thereby creating a true multicanvas memorial to the American Expeditionary Forces, a visual rendering of what the Australian novelist Frederic Manning called the myriad faces of war.¹⁴ The army turned him down. In the rush to return to normalcy, the military discharged all eight of the official artists early in 1919, and their works—with the exception of Dunn’s—quickly fell into obscurity, thus forming part of a larger failure by the US government to construct a coherent national memory of the Great War.

In contrast, in Britain and its dominions, official or semiofficial organizations cultivated the link between wartime painting and memory. If anything, politicians and military leaders in these nations eagerly encouraged the kind of painterly remembrance project that Dunn unsuccessfully proposed to the US War Department (although, as we will see, few artistic schemes tied to memory went according to plan). Organized by Lord Beaverbrook, head of the British Ministry of Information, the War Artists Memorial Committee that commissioned Sargent’s Gassed also solicited paintings of specified dimensions from other artists, all intended for postwar display in a suitable memorial space. Over Beaverbrook’s objections, that space ultimately became the newly created Imperial War Museum in London, the chief citadel of British war memory to this very day and home to more than five thousand art objects tied to the Great War.¹⁵ As Malvern notes, the War Arts Memorial Committee drew its inspiration from an earlier program, also involving Beaverbrook, that commissioned works depicting Canadian contributions to the war effort.¹⁶ Ironically, the memorial gallery in Ottawa for which these paintings were intended was never built, a not-so-unusual outcome, as readers of this book will discover. And by the war’s end, Australia and New Zealand had established similar missions to secure eyewitness paintings for their own anticipated sites of national memory (only one of which was actually constructed).

The historian John Bodnar draws a useful distinction between official and vernacular acts of remembrance.¹⁷ Completed with the cooperation and assistance of the French government and imbued with the kinds of patriotic and celebratory themes often associated with state sponsorship and propaganda, the Panthéon de la Guerre illustrates the former. Horace Pippin’s subversive canvases exemplify the latter, a kind of remembrance born of firsthand experience and intimate familiarity with the events being commemorated. So, are Gassed and Prisoners and Wounded, each a product of firsthand observation facilitated by a government program, examples of official remembrance? Or do they represent the vernacular variety? The answer is, perhaps both. Or perhaps neither. Indeed, Malvern’s painstaking examination of the wartime careers of British modernists such as Paul Nash and C. R. W. Nevinson complicates the entire issue of state sponsorship in wartime. Even propaganda, she notes, was a fluid concept, which did not necessarily produce the kinds of outcomes (or proceed from the kinds of assumptions) that we might expect.¹⁸ Consider, for example, the case of Paul Nash’s We Are Making a New World (1917–18). Among the most iconic—and, per its title, ironic—paintings of the Great War, Nash’s seemingly postapocalyptic canvas presents a Western Front landscape of ghastly devastation and emptiness. The shell-churned ground in the picture looks diseased, as if covered in boils, and the dozens of stark black tree trunks—what used to be a forest—have hardly any purchase left on the tortured earth. In the background, a pallid sun—whether rising or setting, we don’t know—is about to disappear behind an incoming cloud bank of sinister red.

Created, in Nigel Viney’s words, by the artist equivalent of Wilfred Owen, Nash’s painting is one of the greatest of all artistic indictments of industrialized warfare, a vision of man-made hell no less chilling than the French artist Georges Leroux’s far more dramatic L’Enfer (Hell) (1921).¹⁹ In the latter, ant-like French soldiers in gas masks struggle to cross a treacherous moonscape—the cratered hecatomb of Verdun, presumably—lit by orange explosions and framed by overhanging Gothic arches of smoke. As with Stanley Kubrick’s later depiction of a doomed French attack across no-man’s-land in the film Paths of Glory (1957), there are no enemy soldiers in sight. Leroux’s painting pits its miniscule poilus not against the Imperial German Army, which is invisible, but against the battlefield itself, an Inferno of impersonal destruction.

For all its grotesquery, however, L’Enfer inspires a perverse fascination in its viewer; perhaps Leroux incorporated more than a little of the Romantic dark sublime into an image clearly designed to deliver shock and awe. In contrast, We Are Making a New World is all the more disturbing because it offers the viewer comparatively little to look at. It’s a defiantly bleak, semiabstract image, utterly lacking the perverse allure of Leroux’s more literal (and diabolically theatrical) rendering of hell on earth.²⁰ And yet, remarkably, Nash’s painting served as a kind of propaganda image. In 1918, it appeared on the cover of part three of British Artists at the Front, a series of wartime booklets ostensibly published by the magazine Country Life but, in fact, designed and produced by Wellington House. As Malvern explains, the publication of such a despairing image served a propagandistic agenda of sorts by reassuring the British public that participants in the official artists program functioned as free agent[s], untrammeled by the demands of patriotic indoctrination.²¹ In other words, to operate effectively as a source of wartime motivation, via images whose authenticity and truthfulness would not be questioned, the program had to maintain the appearance of absolute openness to whatever its artists wanted to depict. The official had to accommodate—even merge with—the vernacular. In actuality, however, some subjects were off the table—as C. R. W. Nevinson learned when authorities notoriously censored his painting Paths of Glory (1917), which had the audacity to depict British (rather than German) corpses in no-man’s-land.

Moreover, Malvern even goes so far as to suggest that at least part of Nash’s audience in 1918 perhaps interpreted We Are Making a New World quite differently than scholars do today. Depending on their attitudes toward the war, viewers a century ago may have regarded the scarlet cloud bank in the background of the painting as a symbol of the blood sacrifice of young men, who will bring new life to the nation—make a new world, in other words—just as the rain promised on the painting’s horizon will restore the shattered landscape left behind by war.²² From the moment of the work’s inception, Malvern argues, possibilities for contradictory, even contested meanings, were present—a reminder that as sites of social remembering these canvases have many meanings imposed on or derived from them.²³

This emphasis on the messiness of interpretation over time brings us to the second point to bear in mind when considering paintings produced by official artists: government backing or endorsement did not necessarily ensure a work’s longevity or relevance. What we might call memory shifts or memory fractures often consigned official works to cultural oblivion, followed in some cases by (typically ironic) resurrection. The postwar history of the Panthéon de la Guerre, detailed in Mark Levitch’s book-length study of the painting, is a case in point. In 1927, the gigantic panorama, whose outmoded idealization of Allied heroes and leaders no longer resonated with visitors in Paris, embarked on a journey that would have been unthinkable ten years earlier. A team of American businessmen purchased the painting, dislodged it from the heart of the French capital, and shipped it to the United States, where, ostensibly as a symbol of Franco-American unity, it traveled from city to city, appearing in such carnivalesque venues as Madison Square Garden and the Chicago Century of Progress 1933 world’s fair.²⁴ With the advent of the Second World War, the Panthéon went into storage, where it remained until 1952, when it was sold at auction for the whopping sum of $3,400.²⁵ Eventually, the artist Daniel MacMorris obtained the canvas for the Liberty Memorial (today the National World War I Museum), a gigantic remembrance complex in Kansas City, Missouri. Cut up (bits and pieces still surface on eBay), touched up (by Morris), and rearranged with American figures now serving as the focal point, the painting, or what’s left of it, remains on display today in the Memorial’s Hall of Remembrance.

If, as the legal scholar Sanford Levinson has argued, all monuments are efforts . . . to stop time, then the story of the Panthéon de Guerre is perhaps the ultimate cautionary tale for would-be architects of commemoration, a poignant reminder that agents of memory, such as war paintings, are also acted on, often in unpredictable and ironic ways.²⁶ Many of the chapters in Portraits of Remembrance illustrate this dynamic, tracing the often surprising twists and turns in the social life of an image, its ever-shifting relationship with the ever-evolving cultural forces that surround it and define its meaning. Thus, we see paintings that once received official sanction retitled to serve a different agenda, or left unfinished, or moved from their original, supposedly permanent, locations, or physically altered, or condemned to storage in forgotten museum vaults (in some cases because their intended venues for display were never built), or suppressed by a shift in political leadership, as seen most dramatically in the establishment of the Soviet Union, which immediately consigned artistic depictions of the Imperial Russian Army to near oblivion, a memory shift if ever there was one.

As Levinson demonstrates in his study of Public Monuments in Changing Societies, remembrance is written not in stone, but in sand. Many of the case studies in this collection confirm this truism by focusing on what we might call mnemonic losers, works whose potential contribution to collective memory simply never happened or whose message was redefined in ways that the artist could never have anticipated. For example, Sandrine Smets’s chapter, a fitting close to this volume, recounts the story of a World War I panorama that was actually bombed in World War II, an irony nearly as grotesque as the fate of the Panthéon de la Guerre. Laura Brandon’s contribution examines an unfinished mural by the Welsh painter Augustus John, originally part of the Canadian war art program (an irony in itself), that shares little with the dominant cultural memory of the Great War operative in Canada today. And Caroline Lord’s and Margaret Hutchison’s respective chapters both focus on forgotten commemorative paintings—abject memorials, if you will—that were never displayed (except online).

At the same time, however, some images achieve an extended shelf life in cultural memory for reasons that can be just as revealing as those that push other paintings out of sight. As noted, Malvern’s examination of Nash’s Wilfred Owenesque We Are Making a New World complicates considerably what we may think we know about this iconic work. And scholars Philip Beidler and David Lubin have recently done the same thing for Sargent’s Gassed, one of the few paintings from the First World War to enjoy uninterrupted public prominence for an entire century.²⁷ As we will see in more detail, several contributors to this volume address remarkably tenacious images, which have been slow to release their hold on the popular imagination. For example, Steven Trout details the way in which one particular wartime image from among the hundreds created by French illustrator Georges Scott has lived on in American culture, albeit with its French origins largely forgotten. Marguerite Helmers focuses on Fortunino Matania’s sentimental but enduring Goodbye, Old Man (1916), which depicts one of the Great War’s literally millions of equine casualties and traces the painting’s legacy right up to the long-running stage play War Horse (2007) and beyond. And Martin Bayer examines Otto Dix’s triptych Der Krieg (1929–32), part of a body of work that (mostly) survived the vicissitudes of Nazi rule as well as the label of degenerate art to become one of the most celebrated oeuvres of twentieth-century war painting.

War Painting and Memory

Terminology in the field of cultural history can be tricky, especially when it comes to such well-worn and slippery concepts as collective memory and remembrance. Thus, a few necessarily broad definitions are in order with the caveat that not all fourteen of the authors included in this collection will necessarily use this terminology in the same way. Simply stated, this book examines the role of war paintings in the formation of what is variously termed collective, cultural, or public memory—shared memory, that is, that exists beyond the individual. Jay Winter and other noted scholars of collective memory have described this phenomenon as a fluid, multilayered process.²⁸ However, as Steven Trout has argued elsewhere, it is perhaps useful to think of memory in this context as a cultural product, rather than a process, and to reserve the term remembrance for the various methods by which cultures construct and perpetuate shared visions of the past.²⁹ Such methods, which form part of most people’s day-to-day experiences (and thus sometimes hide in plain sight), include civic holidays and rituals, museums and monuments, streets and parks named after celebrated individuals, literature and cinema, websites, and, of course, visual fine art. Through these forms of remembrance, and many others, cultures large and small make sense of the past—or, to put it differently, construct a version of the past that meets their needs.

Several points are worth underscoring in any discussion of collective memory. First, while cultural models of the past inevitably change over time, just as forms of remembrance do (consider, as already noted, the memory revolution represented by photography and moving pictures), the groups doing the remembering rarely see any room for revision. No matter how divorced from historical fact, shared memories within a group typically take on the aura of the sacred and for their adherents form an integral part of identity—hence the contentiousness inherent in most acts of commemoration or, worse, commemoration removal, as seen in the ongoing Confederate memorial debate in the southern United States. We are, after all, what we remember, even when what we remember is obtained vicariously. Second, collective memory may form at the national level (as several contributors to this volume demonstrate), but it can just as easily serve as a cohesive force within more specific, smaller-scale communities, such as veterans organizations, pacifist movements, or groups of artists. The memory shifts or memory fractures that sometimes render various memorials irrelevant or susceptible to redefinition—as in the case of the Panthéon de la Guerre—result from the ongoing friction or outright conflict between various cultural groups or what we might call memory constituencies, a process that produces mnemonic winners and losers over