How Did the First World War Change the Arts?

‘What the war released above all was a spirit of ephemerality’

Mark Polizzotti is Head of Publications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of Why Surrealism Matters (2024)

The 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.

Walking in my Brooklyn neighbourhood, I see the brownstones with their lovely, useless ornamental flourishes. They were built pre-1914, at a time when people believed in permanence, in creations that were made to last. What did they know?

‘New societies dedicated to bringing the arts into everyday life seemed to emerge almost every week’

Emma West is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham

‘The world was to be rebuilt’, the actor and producer Eleanor Elder recalled, looking back on the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The ‘brotherhood so vividly realised in the trenches was never to be forgotten: the benefits to mankind of education, culture and art were to be shared by all’.

In 1919 Elder co-founded the Arts League of Service (ALS), a group of ‘long haired men and short haired women’ endeavouring to rebuild British culture. In the wake of the war, new societies dedicated to bringing the arts into everyday life seemed to emerge almost every week. Democracy and decentralisation were the watchwords: the arts must be brought out of the cities and into towns and villages. For the first time, those living outside major cities could experience modern art, drama, music and performance in their own communities. The ALS travelled around the country in a clapped-out old Crossley lorry; they performed one-act plays and vanguard ballets and loaned modernist artworks to village exhibitions.

Some of their concerns were practical: there were fears that demobilised men returning from France would refuse to return to work on the land, as life was too dull. As one popular song of the day put it: ‘How are you going to keep him down on the farm after he’s seen Paree?’ But this postwar wave of ‘earnest bodies’ was also deeply ideological. They believed that better access to the arts could transform ordinary people’s lives. Money was tight; often non-existent. Many of their most ambitious ideas only came to fruition with the advent of the Second World War, and state funding for the arts via the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA, later the Arts Council), first founded in 1940.

Yet without the valuable ‘spade work’ of organisations like the ALS, those behind CEMA and the Arts Council would not have been able to make the case for art and culture for all. They argued that the arts could play an essential role in social reconstruction. Keir Starmer, with his plans for ‘national renewal’, should listen, and take note.

‘American popular music achieved an international renown that is unthinkable without the war’ 

Jonathan Wipplinger is Associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany (2017)

The First World War radically changed music – both in Germany and around the world. For one, the mass movement of people (and armies) brought disparate musical traditions, in particular popular music, into concentrated contact with each other. One of the most significant examples is the large-scale transfer of Black American musicians and musical forms, especially jazz, to Europe. James Reese Europe and his Harlem Hellfighters are but the best known members of a loose-knit community of musicians whose activities during (and after) the war changed the direction of popular music.

Another consequence of the war was the politicisation of that music. Whereas German authorities began to propagandise against (the wrong type of) dance music, avant-garde artists such as George Grosz, a prominent member of the Berlin Dada, jubilantly embraced the same music as part of their postwar assault on elite culture. (Grosz was particularly fascinated with ragtime music, writing about it in his letters and depicting dancing in his visual works.) The political stakes remained high throughout the interwar era. Dances such as the Charleston and new instruments including the trap drum and saxophone led to repeated flare-ups around popular music, along faultlines largely demarcated by racism and nationalism. In the 1930s the Nazis’ defamation of so-called ‘degenerate music’ continued this trend in an even more extreme form.

The hyperattention paid to popular music in the war’s wake signalled the new significance accorded to American youth culture. Before 1918, American music had been just one variant among many in an international mélange of popular musics. Afterwards – aided by the proliferation of records, the radio and sound film – it achieved an international renown that is unthinkable without the war.  Jazz’s transatlantic success continued to shape popular music for decades to come and set the stage for the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s and hip hop in the 1980s.

‘It transformed our notion of what a war novel should look like’

Ann-Marie Einhaus is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts (2017)

It is hard to overstate the impact of the First World War on literature, particularly in an Anglophone context. In 1975 Paul Fussell described the conflict as a ‘literary war’ in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory. However fiercely debated Fussell’s other pronouncements might be among scholars, few would argue with the notion that the war was a milestone for literature. Not only did it spark an unprecedented outpouring of poetry by people from a variety of different backgrounds, scholars such as Victoria Stewart have argued compellingly that it played a part in bringing about Golden Age detective fiction. The war also briefly boosted the consumption of literature in translation thanks to the craze for foreign war books that followed the huge success of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

The First World War and the literary responses it sparked transformed our notion of what a war poem, and a war novel, should look like: gritty, gruesome, full of sardonic humour perhaps, but fundamentally disillusioned with the notion of war as a glorious pursuit – at least on the surface. Siegfried Sassoon’s anger and Wilfred Owen’s pity permanently supplanted the hold of Tennyson’s Victorian admiration for desperate gallantry à la Balaclava.

But of course, this notion of war writing post-1918 is not an accurate reflection of the reality. The ideas we hold about First World War literature – which still influence how writers revisit the war today – largely stem from a heady period at the end of the 1920s commonly known as the ‘war books boom’, followed by a decades-long process of canonisation. Not all war writing since then has condemned war (plenty of writers continued to celebrate aspects of it), and not all pre-1914 war writing glorified it (one only has to think of Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage). More than changing the way people wrote about war (although it certainly did that too, at least for some writers) the First World War enduringly changed public perceptions of what war writing should be.