“Make It New”: World War I’s Impact on the Creative Class
The war’s unprecedented destruction brought new art forms to life
It was no coincidence that World War I-era Zürich was home to so many artists and revolutionaries — the biggest city in Europe’s most famously neutral country was a place to escape the horrors of the war. And it is also no coincidence that the artists were revolutionaries in their own way. The unprecedented loss of life and well-being that the war caused undermined the status quo of the European art world, catalyzing visual artists and writers to create new forms from and beyond this time of incredible upheaval. At this crossroads of new forms and old, of representation and absurdism, sits Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 8 through October 9, 2022.
World War I brought mechanized warfare to a previously unimaginable level. Gone were the days of muskets and bayonets, of meeting an opponent on the field of battle. Instead, death came from the horizon, as machine guns, shells, and poison gas were launched from an enemy too far away to be seen. Trench warfare meant stretches of maddening stasis, too little sleep, endless mud, and illness. Soldiers and civilians alike suffered enormously, and the stalemate at the fronts meant that the horror felt unending. Even those who escaped death might not escape extended harm — shell-shocked soldiers came home changed, suffering from headaches, nightmares, anxiety, and trauma.
While the artists featured in Travesties avoided the war, many artists were in the thick of it. Painters and poets translated their experiences into their art. Some, like Otto Dix, did so after the war, taking time to digest their experiences before translating them to canvas. Others, like Wilfred Owen, produced their art in the moment, channeling the fear, violence, and sense of utter waste into their work between battles. In his poem “Futility,” Owen asks over a gravely wounded or already dead soldier, “Was it for this the clay grew tall? / — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth’s sleep at all?” Owen himself was killed in action just a week before the armistice in 1918.
But whether inside or outside the heat of battle, the war set off seismic shifts throughout the creative class. Modernism was already in its infancy before the war; cubism was developed in 1907. But the war expanded and hastened modernist Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “Make it new”; the traditional could no longer explain the new reality.
In modernist literature, writers used tools like stream of consciousness (favored by James Joyce) and multiple perspectives to attempt to mirror or contain the anarchy of life. Modernism was characterized most especially by a desire to break from tradition, to build new ways of translating the world to the page. Where many modernists were utopians before the war, during and after many turned to putting words to the widespread disillusion they shared with the wider population. Among the most famous modernist poems, TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” expresses this turn in its first lines: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Through allusion, symbolism, narrative collage, fragmentary and unrestrained writing, and more, modernists translated the upheaval of the war onto the page.
Visual arts also underwent enormous change. Tristan Tzara and his peers developed the absurdist Dada in Zürich in 1917 as a direct reflection of the war’s meaninglessness. Across the arts and literature, experimentation had been emerging before the war, and then exploded in the years following it. Artists who signed up enthusiastically to fight from a sense of patriotism (and for some the hope that the war would burn down the old world order and usher in a new, more peaceful one) tried to translate their guilt and trauma to the canvas upon their return home. Dada influenced the development of surrealism, a form that attempted to derive psychological and emotional meaning from its bizarre, sometimes nightmarish, images. Representation was insufficient for many artists of the day to fully capture the horror and chaos of the war; new forms were needed to capture it, or at least to try.
Some artists — Picasso included — did return to more traditional forms in the wake of the war, often as a means of staving off the sense of doom and nihilism the war engendered. But for many others, and for the art world at large, creativity and culture would be forever changed by what was supposed to be the War to End all Wars. Perhaps Max Ernst, the painter who moved from pre-war expressionist to mid-war Dadaist to post-war surrealist, put this cataclysmic shift most clearly: “Max Ernst died on 1st August 1914,” he wrote. “He returned to life on 11th November 1918, a young man who wanted to become a magician and find the central myth of his age.”
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Travesties by Tom Stoppard is onstage September 8 through October 9, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
