Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (13 August 1889 β October 1946) was an English painter. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W. Nevinson, and was known as Richard.
Early life
Richard Nevinson was the son of the famous war correspondent and journalist Henry Nevinson and the suffrage campaigner and writer Margaret Nevinson. Educated at Uppingham School, which he hated, Nevinson went on to study at the St John's Wood School of Art. Inspired by seeing the work of Augustus John, he decided to attend the Slade School of Art, part of University College London. There his contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. Gertler was, for a time, his closest friend and influence, and they formed for a short while a group known as the Neo-Primitives, being deeply influenced by the art of the early Renaissance. However, Gertler and Nevinson subsequently fell out when they both fell in love with Carrington. Whilst at the Slade, Nevinson was advised by his Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, to abandon thoughts of an artistic career.
Career
On leaving the Slade, Nevinson befriended Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, and the radical English writer and artist Percy Wyndham Lewis, who founded the short-lived Rebel Art Centre, whose members included Edward Wadsworth and Ezra Pound. However, Nevinson fell out with Lewis and the other 'rebel' artists when he attached their names to the Futurist movement. Lewis immediately founded the Vorticists, an avant garde group of artists and writers from which Nevinson was excluded (though he is said to have coined the title for the Vorticists' famous magazine, Blast).
At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit with his father, and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French soldiers. For a brief period he served as a volunteer ambulance driver, before ill health soon forced his return to England. He used these experiences as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used Futurist technqiues to great effect. His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote at the time that Nevinson's painting 'La Mitrailleuse' (now in the Tate collection) 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.'[1]
Subsequently Nevinson volunteered for home service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, before being invalided out; he was eventually appointed as an official war artist, though his later paintings, absed on a short visit to the Western Front, lacked the same powerful effect as those earlier works which had helped to make him one of the most famous young artists working in England. A large collection of his work can be found in the Imperial War Museum in London.
Shortly after the end of the war, Nevinson travelled to New York, where he painted a number of powerful images of the city. However, his boasting, and exaggerated claims of his war experiences, together with his depressive and temperamental personality, made him many enemies, in both the USA and England. Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group was a particularly virulent critic. In 1920, the critic Lewis Hind observed in his catalogue introduction to an exhibition of Nevinson's recent work: βIt is something, at the age of thirty one, to be among the most discussed, most successful, most promising, most admired and most hated British artists.β[2] His post-war career, however, was not so distinguished.
Nevinson was credited with holding the first cocktail party in England in 1924 by Alec Waugh. [3].
Notes
References
Bibliography
- Haycock, David Boyd (2009). A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War. London, Old Street Publishing. ISBN 978-1-905847-84-6.
- Walsh, Michael J.K. (2002). C.R.W. Nevinson: This Cult of Violence. London: Yale University Press.
- Walsh, Michael J.K. (ed.) (2007). "A Dilemma of English Modernism: Visual and Verbal Politics in the Life and Work of C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946)." Newark: University of Delaware Press.
- Walsh, Michael J.K. Hanging a Rebel: The Life of C.R.W. Nevinson, The Lutterworth Press (2008), ISBN 9780718830908.
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