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Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson ARA (1889-1946) Building Aircraft: Making the Engine, from the series The Great War: Britain's Efforts and Idealslithograph44.5 x 34.5cmThere was little cause for celebration on New Year’s Day of 1917. By this point, Britain had been at war for three years and had witnessed the appalling and unprecedented deaths of more than half a million of its men – many of whom were scarcely more than children. Not six months earlier, the British had suffered what would be their deadliest day of the First World War, losing 19,240 personnel during the Battle of the Somme and by the end of the day on Monday, January 1st, 1917, the public would learn of the loss of at least 125 more lives with the German sinking of British troopship, Ivernia. With no end in sight, national morale was in steep and rapid decline.Early in 1917, the print series, The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals, was commissioned by Wellington House, a covert propaganda arm of the government. Comprising sixty-six prints by eighteen artists, including Augustus John, George Clausen, Muirhead Bone and Frank Brangwyn, the series was divided into two sets of portfolios: Ideals and Efforts. Including twelve full-colour lithographs extolling moralistic maxims of freedom, democracy and justice, the Ideals portfolio aimed to mobilise patriotic sentiment and display the war in a positive light through allegory and symbolism. The Efforts, meanwhile, was concerned with the realities of the war, as permitted by governmental censorship. Presented in monochrome, and on a smaller scale than the Ideals, the Efforts comprised a set of fifty-four prints divided into smaller series of six. Each series was concerned with the industry of war and included topics such as Making Guns, Making Soldiers and Building Ships. War, according to the ‘Efforts’ portfolio, was a constructive and creative process.The present lot, Making the Engine was one of Nevinson’s six lithographic prints from his series, Building Aircraft. Having spent nine weeks in France tending to the wounds of French and British troops and a further year in London working as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, it was thought that Nevinson’s first-hand experiences of the war afforded his works a compelling and persuasive sense of authenticity. Although the futurist prints created by Nevinson for Efforts and Ideals were constructed to present the war in a generally positive light, they stand in stark contrast to many of his other works created during the war, such as La Patrie and A Taube, both of which depict, with disarming and devastating frankness, the horrors of war. The dissonance between the two representations demonstrates the critical role government censorship played in the production of the portfolio.

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