Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the painter CRW Nevinson proclaimed that “there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness”. Other avant-garde artists shared his view but in the light of the destruction that followed, such bombast came to seem not simply crass but offensively ill-judged.
The work of Algernon Newton (1880-1968) stands as a direct refutation of Nevinson’s stance. During the war Newton served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and then with the Royal 1st Devon Yeomanry. He was invalided out of the army in 1916 when he contracted double pneumonia, which nearly killed him. By then he had seen more than enough of service to know that there was no beauty to be found in strife and he became a committed and active pacifist. This was not just a moral stance but an artistic one too, and in his paintings he sought conflict’s opposite – a hermetic stillness and silence.
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