How Did the First World War Change the Arts?
Surrealism – as formulated in André Breton’s manifesto a century ago in October 1924 – is regarded as one of the First World War’s artistic legacies. What are the others?
T he First World War and its aftermath are often paired with the rise of modernism, that moral and aesthetic juggernaut that so deranged our senses. But the stirrings of modernism, and some of its primary artefacts, were in place well before Franz Ferdinand quaffed his last Sekt.
Was it nihilism and defeatist anomie that the war ushered in? Arthur Rimbaud was already there in 1870, observing of the Franco-Prussian conflict: ‘My nation is rising up! ... Personally, I’d rather it stay seated.’ Dada, which was born of the Great War by those seeking to avoid it, seemed to corner the nihilism market; the ‘nothing, nothing, nothing’ that blared from its manifestos, echoing down the decades into British punk, is inseparably linked with it. But even nothingness has its antecedents: think Nietzsche, think Turgenev, think Kierkegaard. Dada’s frère ennemi surrealism is also credited to the war, the horror it inspired, the new ideas it exposed; but surrealism, too, trailed a long past, as André Breton was quick to point out in his 1924 Manifesto. It is not so much that the war created these attitudes as that it gave them licence to run shouting through the streets.
Perhaps what the First World War released above all was a spirit of ephemerality. Perhaps it was the notion of artistic durability that then began its long, slow death, leaving in its wake ‘a heap of broken images’ (Eliot, 1922) that flashed forward into the transience of performance and conceptual art: Jean Benoît’s The Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade (1959), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), Banksy’s pre-programmed shredding (2018) of Girl with Balloon... Even when we retain the assumption of objectness, the objects themselves have built-in obsolescence – Duchamp’s readymades of the teens and twenties now exist mainly as replicas, the ‘originals’ having been destroyed or thrown away; many ‘surrealist objects’ that the group produced in the 1930s were constructed from fragile materials and are now lost.
