An Open Letter to Rust

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (b.1889) – painter, etcher, vorticist, time traveller. Nevinson, often credited as CRW Nevinson, Richard Nevinson or simply Christopher Nevinson, was a Slade school contemporary of Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash et al. Enraptured by the jagged face of mechanical progress, Nevinson enthusiastically marched to war in 1914 only to be injured and return home an invalid in 1915. His health slowly recovered, his Vorticist zeal for mechanised warfare did not. Appointed an official War Artist, his 1915 painting La Mitrailleuse arguably (or certainly in the mind of Walter Sickert) captures the zeitgeist of the conflict better than any of his contemporaries could muster until much later in the conflict.

After the war, domestic depictions of London and New York sat uneasily beside images drawn from his experiences and fear of further conflict, culminating his totemic works The Twentieth Century (1932-35) and The Unending Cult of Human Sacrifice (1934). However, a reputation as a tempestuous braggart and a retreat toward a more conventional style led to diminishing returns. As the first war had broken his modernist resolve, the second would coincide with the decline of his health, and he would die in 1946 in a state of relative obscurity.

Twenty years later, and into a very different world, the Vietnam Combat Art Program was born. The US Army sought to appoint multiple teams of Combat Art Teams (CATs) to chronicle the expanding conflict in Indochina. These artists were given free rein in terms of their subject matter, choice of media and approach - through to the termination of the program in 1970.

Looking at the variety of VCAP images through the lens of Nevinson’s oeuvre highlights some interesting parallels. Nevinson’s etchings often formed studies for later paintings, though several of the VCAP artists choose to render in monochrome or starkly delineated images that bring etching to mind. The frequent use of shocking wounds of colour, imagined as traces of napalm and ammunition through dense foliage, is reminiscent of Nevinson’s earlier Vorticist work where the new machines of war and their effects are depicted in stark, abstract beauty.