The National Portrait Gallery in London will be holding an exhibition – The Great War in Portraits – in early 2014.
The free exhibition will be held from the 27th February – 15th June 2014.
The National Portrait Gallery has stated that “in viewing the First World War through images of many individuals involved, The Great War in Portraits looks at the radically different roles, experiences, and, ultimately, destinies, of those caught up in the conflict”.
The National Portrait Gallery is aiming to provide a variety of different perspectives on the conflict, as it will contrast portraits of national leaders with a press photograph of Gavrilo Princip – the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
“Power-portraits of commanders Haig, Blumer, Foch and Hindenburg, emphasising the trappings of military power, will be displayed together with dignified pictures of their troops by Sickert, Orpen and other war artists; and medal-winners are shown alongside the wounded to represent the bitter-sweet nature of a conflict in which valour and selfless endeavour were qualified by disaster and suffering”.
The exhibition will also consider how artists responded to the First World War. Amongst them, Orpen and Rosenberg “seeking reassurance in tradition and the ‘return to order’”. Others, such as Epstein, Kirchner and Beckman, developing a “new visual language of expressive distortion” will be examined.
Source: National Portrait Gallery website
Images courtesy of Wikipedia
Posted by: Daniel Barry, Centenary News