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Creator:
C. R. W. Nevinson, 1889–1946
Title:
The Wave
Former Title(s):
The Blue Wave
Date:
1917
Materials & Techniques:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:

Signed and dated in blue paint, lower right: "C.R.W. Nevinson. | 1917."

Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1997.10
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
foam | marine art | movement | ocean | rough | symbolism | texture | war | water | waves (natural events) | world war | World War, 1914-1918
Access:
Not on view
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:5519
Export:
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IIIF Manifest:
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Christopher Nevinson served in the Friends Ambulance Unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War and as an official war artist. His unsentimental representations of active conflict on the Western Front made a great impression on the British public when first exhibited in late 1916. According to one critic, he was the first artist to offer a “really profound and pictorial solution to the emotions aroused by the War.” Despite initial enthusiasm for mechanized conflict—fostered by his interest in Italian futurism—Nevinson was left severely traumatized by his experiences. It was during one of several periods of recuperation in St. Ives that he painted The Wave. On the one hand, this heavily stylized seascape can be seen as an homage to the great Japanese printmaker Hokusai; on the other hand, it is an oblique reflection on the engulfing destructive power of the war.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016



Nevinson was one of the most trenchant of those British artists who painted the horrors and desolation of World War I, which he experienced at first hand as a volunteer with the Red Cross and then as an official War Artist. The origin of The Wave was probably a visit he made to the coast of Cornwall while recuperating from his first punishing period of service at the front. Its immediate subject is the violence of natural rather than military forces, but the work remains essentially a war painting. With the waves filling almost the whole picture surface, and their movement extended by swinging abstract lines into the sky, it represents the war symbolically as a cataclysm, inundating the whole world like the biblical Deluge.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2008



Nevinson was one of the most trenchant of those British artists who painted the horrors and desolation of World War I, which he experienced at first hand as a volunteer with the Red Cross, then as an official War Artist. The origin of "The Wave" was probably a visit he made to the coast of Cornwall while recuperating from his first punishing period of service at the front. Its immediate subject is the violence of natural rather than military forces, but the work remains essentially a war painting. With the waves filling almost the whole picture surface, and their movement extended by swinging abstract lines into the sky, it represents the war symbolically as a cataclysm, inundating the whole world like the biblical Deluge.

Gallery label for Doomed Youth The Poetry and the Pity of World War I (Yale Center for British Art, 1999-06-22 - 1999-09-26)
Nevinson's painting of a furious wave crashing in on itself is, above all, a haunting and powerful image of war. Executed most likely in early 1917, while he was recuperating in Cornwall from a severe rheumatic fever that had led to his discharge from active service in France, the work reflects both his changing artistic vision and his growing disillusionment with the war raging in Europe.
He uses insistent, repetitive circular forms, loaded brushstrokes, and heavy impasto to evoke the rhythmic movement of the water, which writhes and extends like taut sails to the sky, permitting no escape from its cyclical inundation and violence. Nevinson's abstracted waves bring to mind the image of the unending streams of young men sent to their slaughter at the front. Directly opposed to the celebratory visions of the sea in which marine painters of previous centuries had heralded British military might, this work invites comparison with scenes of sublime destruction and cataclysm, especially the biblical Deluge.
Nevinson's feisty temperament and his attraction to radical movements (he was, after all, the son of a suffragette) had led him to embrace wholeheartedly the European avant-garde movement known as Futurism. Allied closely with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (they co-published a manifesto of English Futurism in 1914), he had initially considered war an exciting, even necessary manifestation of modernity, declaring boldly in 1915, "this war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe there is no beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness."1 But his punishing, even devastating experiences on the front as an ambulance driver, first with the Red Cross and later as a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, broke down his optimism and belief in the violence of war. His faith in machines had begun to wane as early as 1915, and the splintered Cubist forms of Futurism he used in his early war paintings infused them with a foreboding atmosphere, conveying his increasing conviction that the war had become "dominated by machines and that men were mere cogs in the mechanism."2 During his first tour of duty, he transformed his style and his consequent fusing of geometry and naturalism evokes both his growing despair and his awakening respect for human emotion.
Nevinson avoided painting explicit war subjects during his stay in Cornwall, but The Blue Wave is arguably the last of his Futurist war paintings. As a subject from nature, one that eschews the glorification of technology-airplanes, engines and the like-the painting reflects his increasing dissatisfaction with the Futurists' praise of machinery as a means to progress. Here the dynamic, repetitive, and abstracted forms of Futurism show not the power of man but instead his impotence before nature. This work stands at the turning point of Nevinson's artistic and theoretical-almost moral-transition from Futurism to the more conventional, emotive, and realistic style he would call his own when he returned to the front as an Official War Artist in the spring of 1917.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 188, no. 78, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)

Behold the Sea (Yale Center for British Art, 2003-06-14 - 2003-09-07) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Revisiting Traditions [BAC 20th century painting & sculpture] (Yale Center for British Art, 2002-04-30 - 2005-05-18) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Bloomsbury Contemporaries (Yale Center for British Art, 2000-05-20 - 2000-09-03) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

C. R. W. Nevinson (Yale Center for British Art, 2000-02-25 - 2000-05-07) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

C. R. W. Nevinson (Imperial War Museum, 1999-10-28 - 2000-01-30) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of South Australia, 1998-09-16 - 1998-11-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Queensland Art Gallery, 1998-07-15 - 1998-09-06) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998-05-01 - 1998-07-05) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Behold, the sea itself, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2003, verso of cover, V 1308 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Jonathan Black, C.R.W. Nevinson : the complete prints, Lund Humphries, Burlington, 2014, p. 120, NJ18.N397 A12 B53 2014 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

C.R.W. Nevinson, 1889-1946, retrospective exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints. , Kettle's Yard Gallery, Cambridge, 1988, p. 33, no. 44, NJ18 N397 A12 1988 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Catalogue of an exhibition of paintings and water-colours by C. R. W. Nevinson, Ernest Brown & Phillips, Leicester Galleries, London, 1928, p. 8, No. 30, Not at Yale [OCLC]

Matthew Hargraves, "Yale Center for British Art joins Art UK", ArtUK, 24 June 2019, Available online https://artuk.org/discover/stories/yale-center-for-british-art-joins-art-uk [Website]

Richard Ingleby, C.R.W. Nevinson, the twentieth century , Merrell Holberton, London, 1999, p. 31, pl. 74, NJ18 N397 C2 1999 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden : Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 188, no. 78, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 1, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]


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