SOCIALIST UNITY

As I was passing through Paddington station last Saturday I remembered that there is this rather interesting sculpture by Charles Sergeant Jagger there, commemorating the 3312 workers from the Great Western Railway killed during the first world war. Inside the plinth is a casket made at the Swindon works, listing the name of every man who fell.

John Berger once remarked about how over-familiarity with art makes it sometimes impossible to really see it, for example the layers of iconography that have developed around the Mona Lisa makes it very hard to appreciate the painting in its own terms. This is very true of public sculpture that dissolves into the background noise.

Another difficulty is to appreciate a novel work of art in the context that it was originally produced, because what was innovative becomes incorporated into the mainstream. This is certainly true of the political break that the war memorials for the Great War represented, away from what had been the previous traditions of public sculpture.

So to understand the significance of Jagger’s work, we have to understand what went before it.

Sculpture of any sort had never been a major art form in England: before Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth the most celebrated English sculptor was John Flaxman (Who? Exactly!); and Moore and Hepworth were artists of the international school marking a discontinuity from any native tradition. There are a few older public statutes in England that are first rate, for example, John Michael Rysbrack’s equestrian statue of William of Orange in Bristol, but Rysbrack was Flemish.

There was short lived boom in England with the “New Sculpture” in the late Victorian era. The major work that inspired this development was Frederick Leighton’s “An Athlete wrestling with a Python” which caused a sensation. It is interesting to compare this with Rodin’s “Bronze”, in some ways a similar subject (but with no python), that was exhibited in exactly the same year, 1877. Rodin represented the future, Leighton, a particularly English dead end.

The positive aspect of New Sculpture was that it encouraged an anatomically accurate celebration of the human body, and celebrated energy and vitality. The whimsical influence of allegory and myth was emphasized by only some of the sculptors, for example with Alfred Gilbert’s statue of Eros in Piccadilly circus, (cast, incidentally, by the same Basingstoke foundry who made the Arms of Victory memorial for Saddam Hussein).

The prosperity of the high imperial era translated into a number of significant public statues, including some works of genuine merit, like Hamo Thornycroft’s statue of Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament, and his innovative statue of General Gordon on the Embankment (compare the style of Hamo Thorneycroft’s General Gordon with the less naturalistic sculpture of Boudicea by his own father, on Westminster Bridge)

Public statues are very expensive, and so reflect the priorities of those commissioning them, so even a talented artist like Sir Thomas Brock, whose statue of Eve is intimate and moving, could create the terrible monstrosity of the Victoria memorial opposite Buckingham palace.

Within New Sculpture there was a genuine wish to celebrate humankind interacting with nature, and Hamo Thorneycroft produced the first life size statue of a working man in Western Art, with the Mower (1884) but this was exhibited privately, and his public statue of an agricultural labourer, the Sewer (at Kew Gardens), was not displayed until 1929.

Overwhelmingly, public sculpture in England in this late Victorian and Edwardian era is a celebration of the rich and powerful, and even though sometimes tinted with whimsy, it is full of pomp and swagger. This is Empire at the height of its self conceit and confidence.

The war destroyed all that. Four years of carnage that left not a single family, nor a single home, nor a single workplace without loss and grief. An industrial war that did not just send a small professional army to fight in far flung corners of Empire, but that conscripted a generation of sons, fathers, brothers, friends and workmates and churned them through a mincer. Those millions who returned from the war were damaged and altered men.

The savagery of the war changed Art forever. Some perceived the butchery of the trenches as revealing a more raw and fundamental human nature, that was mocked by the shallow conceits of peacetime salon society, and the chattering of the intelligentsia. Although rarely remarked upon now, many of the leading artistic minds of the Anglo-Saxon world turned to fascism: Wyndham Lewis, Henry Williamson, Ezra Pound, CWR Nevinson, and TS Elliot. Others like novellist Evelyn Waugh and the painter Stanley Spencer turned to the mystification of religion. In the early post-war period far fewer intellectuals were attracted to the left in England, and some who were, like Raymond Postgate, became swiftly disillussioned..

The end of the war was also a time when a Kaiser’s crown was worth no more than a bauble. The people were awakened, and the British Empire state was as insecure as it had ever been. It was simply impossible for the Empire to commemorate the war with statues of General Haig and General Kitchener, or Admiral Sir John Jellico.

A tradition had already started with war memorials for the Boer War, with statues of ordinary private soldiers, but the standard of sculpture was exceedingly poor. Most significantly these portrayed soldiers as objectified and depersonalised – with no sign of the man beneath the uniform. They were entirely on the Army’s own terms.

Jagger’s war memerials are entirely different. He was one of the most gifted artists of his generation, winner of the 1914 Prix de Rome, and he studied and worked for two years in France and Italy before the war. He had also seen the fighting at close hand, wounded three times and had been awarded the Military Cross.

In 1933 he wrote a charming book called “Modelling and Sculpture in the Making” that showed in detail how his monumental figurative sculptures were made. He constructed a 15 inch model in clay, using a nude sitter to get the anatomy correct, and then draped muslin to ensure the folds of the costume hung convincingly, before scaling up the model as clay around a wooden frame then casting into bronze.

Jagger draws from the New Sculpture movement the importance of anatomical accuracy, and although the subjects are anonymous - they are everyman, not no man. The detail of the uniform provided verismilitude and familiarity for the generation that wore that same uniform, and suffered in the same trenches, and the uniforms are not in parade ground order, but disordered by the reality of life at the front. What his war memorials do is bring the experience of the front line soldier back, and place him with us in the urban environment.

The Army and the government are going to celebrate the war in remembrance services whatever happens. But this is a contested process. Not only politically contested with those who oppose militarism; but also artistically contested, as illustrated here by the way that Jagger brings great authenticity of the reality of grief into the commemoration, and those who are remembered are real men, not statistics. The soldier in the Great Western Railway memorial is reading a letter from home.

This is even more true of Jagger’s most famous work. The Royal Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner. This is a brutal, modern sculpture for the machine age, where the industrial nature of war is emphasised by bringing a huge marble model of the engine of death, the field howitzer into Central London. Jagger also breaks with tradition by making a statue of a corpse.

Britain still has a substantial and disproportionate military capability, and we are habituated to British troops being posted around the world in perpetual low level warfare. But ever since the First World War, the political battle to win the support of people behind these wars has been couched in terms of this being a necessary and tragic sacrifice for worthy and democratic goals – however deceitful that propaganda might be.

Just a few years earlier, war had been justifed by Jingoistic pride in the military might and pomp of the Empire. Now almost no-one celebrates militarism directly; and the predominant cultural theme surrounding war in England is the experience of grief and loss. (The term “jingoism” comes from the popular song from the Boer war period “we don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, and we’ve got the money too”)

The perception of war had changed, and the shared experience of that common perception is preserved in English culture through not just politics and literature (those war poets we all read at school) but also the visual arts, and in the case of public sculpture has become a permanent part of our urban landscape.