MUIRHEAD BONE'S DRAWINGS OF THE WAR.• WHATEVER may have been
the case with the poets, there is no doubt that the painters have responded very little to the stimulus of the war. This contention is not weakened but rather emphasized by one great exception, for M. Raemaekers stands out as perhaps the one man of genius the war has produced among those not actually fighting. Of course the artists have been greatly occupied with warlike subjects, but, to judge by picture exhibitions, the results have been decidedly poor. The allegorical pictures have merely made plain the fact that an exalted idea does not produce a great picture unless the painter can make a design which is great in itself quite apart from all verbal meaning. The realistic treatment of war has been just as disappointing as the symbolic representations. But here it is not possible to argue that this is because the materials with which the realist has to work are of impossible ugliness and squalor, for the work which is best from the artistic point of view is pre- cisely that which deals most closely with things as they are. We refer, of course, to the wonderful series of drawings and water- colours which Mr. Muirhead Bone has been producing in such numbers, and which display such a remarkable talent. These drawings have been reproduced in several different forms, beginning with the small volumes published in monthly parts, twelve inches by nine, containing twenty drawings. Besides these are published two further series of twenty by fifteen inches and thirty-one by twenty- two respectively. We are inclined to prefer the intermediate size —the twenty by fifteen. The smaller reproductions do not do justice to the delicacy of Mr. Bone's intricate drawings, while the largest size seems to over-emphasize the ruggedness of those works in which he uses a coarse, blunt brush-stroke with such vigour.
Let us take a few typical drawings as shown in the intermediate- sized series and note how wonderful is the way in which the artist makes the scene live. In Part II., Nos. XI. and XIV. are two pure landscapes, the first a panorama from the Scherpenberg looking towards Measines, the second a bend of the Somme near Corbie. The panorama shows us a wide view crowded with small forms of trees and fields. Somehow by the alchemy of art this rather tame landscape is made to convey a sense of the most intense energy and watching suspense. Nowhere is the eye at rest except in the sky, but the transition from earth to sky reveals an uninter- rupted line of smoke-bursts which tell of the death and destruction of the line. With strange power the artist has made this line of faint puffs of smoke the emotional centre of the drawing, and the restless and crowded shapes of the landscape symbolic of the intense life and energy which have for their end and aim—the line. Now if we look at the second of these two drawings we see the absolute peace of the undestroyed country, and may ask how is this difference of feeling achieved. Here the artist has con- structed his design out of large, quiet masses of light and shade, where the sunlight slowly passes into Shadow and the river curves gently past the cornfield. Quite different again is the mounting of a great gun, No. XIX., where pygmy figures and a confusion of small things crowd round the enormous barrel of the gun pointing upward to where the chains, which have dropped it into its place, hang from unseen supports. In this drawing space, power, and ordered strength reign supreme. Very different is the " Erecting Aeroplanes," No. XX. Here inside a shed appear to be collected a vast and chaotic assemblage of giant matches. Against this back- ground of confused straight lines stand out the graceful curves of the propellers.
Enough has been said to emphasize the wonderful versatility of Mr. Bone's art. He is equally at home when drawing with infinite delicacy the intricacies of a Gothic Cathedral, or broadly summarizing the shapeless remains of ruined towns and villages and devastated woods, or portraying battleships. For all these diverse subjects the artist has at command a variety of methods which seem as numerous as they are appropriate.
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