Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1889-1946

• Biography

  Attribute	Value
  Biography	CRW Nevinson was born in Hampstead where he studied at St John's Wood School of Art (1907-8), the Slade (1908-12), where fellow students included Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer, and in Paris at the Academie Julian (1912-1913), where he shared a studio with Modigliani. He took up journalism for a while. Nevinson's early paintings were mildly impressionist. However, exposure to Marinetti and the Italian Futurists had a deep effect on him. He exhibited with other Futurists in 1913 and in 1914 co-wrote with Marinetti `Vial English Art: A Futurist Manifesto'. The critic Frank Rutter remarked: 'I do not know of any other English artist who was so profoundly influenced by the Italian Futurists.' In the autumn of 1914 he volunteered for the Red Cross but was discharged unfit in 1916 when he had his first one-man show in London exhibiting his Futurist images of war on the Western Front. He was among the first painters to shock London with uncompromising paintings and prints of the First World War. Indeed the first significant war pictures were exhibited by him at the London Group exhibition in 1915. Frank Rutter recalled the impact of Nevinson's three war pictures in that show: 'These paintings, "Ypres after the Second Bombardment", "Taube Pursued by Commander Samson", and "Returning to the Trenches", were the first war pictures to create a stir. They were topical, they were new things shown in a new way.' By 1917 he was attached as an artist to the Bureau of Information. During the War he had been secretary of the London Group, but in 1920 he quarrelled with Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury artists in the London Group and he subsequently resigned from the Group. He described his decision to resign in the "New Statesman" in 1931: 'Twelve years ago I resigned from the London Group as a protest against the doctrinaire and "studiotic" formula that was killing all experiment in an art that is incapable of exact definition and still less of aesthetic recipe. I foresaw that mass-production would be its dismal end.' His post war subjects included English landscapes, Paris and New York. He later worked in a variety of styles which were no longer abstract or experimental, and refused to become part of any particular movement. In September 1920 his poster for a play by Somerset Maughan "The Unknown" was banned by the Underground because the crucifixion looked like a naked woman. Associated with Wynham Lewis and Vorticism, he contributed to the second issue of "Blast" and in 1920 he exhibited at Lewis's Group X exhibition. In 1937 he wrote his autobiography "Paint and Prejudice", and in 1939 was elected an ARA. (Green 1990)
  Place of birth	Hampstead, London, United Kingdom
  Education	St John's Wood School of Art, 1907-1908 The Slade School of Fine Art, 1908-1912 Academie Julian, Paris, 1912-1913
  Employment	Designed posters for the Underground Group and London Transport, 1921-1939
  Role	Artist,