A.Y.Jackson's painting "A Copse, Evening" showing the blasted forest, and water filled shell holes with soldiers wearily passing through on the duck boards
Photo Credit: Beaverbrook Collection

Canadian War Museum marking the First World War

Canada’s national War Museum  (CWM) is marking the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, starting with two art exhibitions.

Canada was the first country to establish and official war art programme,  This effort which saw artists sent to record impressions of the war, often near or at the front, was known as the Canadian War Memorials Fund. It was established by Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere under the aegis of the Canadian War Records Office of the Canadian Army during WWI.

That programme which ran from 1916 to 1919 involved some 60 artists. They were not only Canadian but also included Australian, British, Belgian and Yugoslavia artists who produced works on canvas, paper, and in sculpture

The first of the Canadian War Museum shows is called “Witness” draws on the large Beaverbrook collection. Many of the works have not been displayed for decades.

Along with that however, are a dozen works done privately by soldiers, displayed for the first time.

The second exhibition, “Transformations”, traces the art of two renowned artists who fought on different sides of the conflict: Canada’s A.Y. Jackson and Germany’s Otto Dix.

“We knew they had both experienced in the trenches, at the front, what it was they were depicting,” said museum art historian Laura Brandon. “So, we could look across no-man’s land, so to speak, and see what happened to them before the war, during the war, and after the war.”

Jackson and other artists were deeply affected by the war with its muddy alien landscape  of shattered buildings, forests, and bodies.  This is displayed in later works by Jackson and the other Canadian artists in the Group of 7 with their haunting images of Canadian landscapes

Author Maria Tippett wrote that, “Nothing came to symbolize the war for the artist and the combatant as much as the land upon which it was fought….Pock-marked with gaping water-filled craters, strewn with bones, metal, and all the refuse of modern warfare.” (Tippett, p. 58)

Jackson and others felt that the romantic-realist styles were now out of place in this broken world.

Both exhibitions,Transformations, and Witness, will be on display at the Canadian War Museum until Sept. 21, 2014.

The museum will be presenting a number of other special exhibitions throughout the centenary years of the 1914-1918 war, such as the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 2017

Canadian War Museum- Canada and WWI

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