Nevinson, C. R. W.

Nevinson, C. R. W. ( Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson) (1889–1946). British painter and printmaker, born in London, son of the writer and philanthropist Henry Woodd Nevinson. He studied at St John's Wood School of Art, 1907–8, the Slade School, 1908–12, and in Paris at the Académie Julian, 1912–13. At the Slade he greatly disliked his teacher Tonks (who advised him to give up art), later referring to him as ‘that old woman Tonks’ and ‘Henrietta Tonks’ (Nevinson was very touchy and had something of a persecution complex). In Paris he shared a studio with Modigliani and met Marinetti and other Futurists. With Marinetti, Nevinson wrote the Futurist manifesto Vital English Art, published in the Observer on 7 June 1914, and he became the outstanding British exponent of Futurism in painting, finding his ideal subjects during the First World War. He served in France with the Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps, 1914–16, before being invalided out, and his harsh, steely images of life and death in the trenches met with great acclaim when he held a one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1916. Stylistically they drew on certain Cubist as well as Futurist ideas, but they are closer to the work of the Vorticists (with whom he had exhibited in 1915). Returning to the Trenches (NG, Ottawa, 1914–14), depicting a column of weary marching men, is one of his best-known works of this time, its jagged forms creating a feeling of relentless mechanism.

In 1917 Nevinson returned to France as an Official War Artist, and he was the first to make drawings from the air (he also produced lithographs). Some of his work was considered too unpleasant and was censored (he had probably experienced more horror at first hand than any other Official War Artist), but a second one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1918 was another triumph. At the end of the war Nevinson renounced Futurism and the more conventional paintings he produced thereafter are generally regarded as an anticlimax. In later years he mainly painted landscapes and flower pieces, but he continued to produce figure subjects; examples are Any Winter Afternoon in England (City Art Gallery, Manchester, 1930), depicting a football match, and Twentieth Century (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1932–5), an ambitious but rather turgid attempt to portray a world on the brink of catastrophe. In the Dictionary of National Biography, R. H. Wilenski writes of Nevinson: ‘Although at bottom a sensitive neurotic, he addressed himself boldly to the general public and wrote truculently in the newsppers, in the catalogues of his exhibitions, and in his autobiography Paint and Prejudice (1937).’