REMEMBERING THE GREAT WAR

Of the capital’s major commemorations of the centenary of the First World War’s start, perhaps the most poignant is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Floor 1) on Queen Street.

It comprises portraits, photographs and sculptures chiefly in the SNPG’s holdings, and a section centred on Peter Cattrell’s remarkable photography of the present-day landscape of the Battle of the Somme in which over 57,000 British men were killed or wounded on its horrific opening day, 1 July 1916.

Space permits only a mention of the following Scots whose images haunt this haunted assembly in works of art of high distinction – Sir John Reith, Naomi Mitchison (painted by Wyndham Lewis), the Queen Mother, John Buchan, James Maxton (pacifist, subsequent leader of the Independent Labour Party, painted by Sir John Lavery), Ramsay Macdonald, J.M. Barrie (painted by Sir William Nicholson), Sir Harry Lauder (his morale-boosting anthem ‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’ was written for his only son John), Violet Jacob (the great poet of Angus), Dr Elsie Inglis and C.K. Scott Moncrieff (first translator of Proust and friend of Wilfred Owen for whom he tried to get a home posting before Owen’s final fateful return to the Front).

Most were bereaved, all were subsequently marked by gradations of grief or anger, or, in the case of Elsie Inglis, great heroism. This superbly curated exhibition opens a page on the lives and thoughts of these celebrated figures which may have been hitherto unknown to the viewer. But one example is Naomi Mitchison, writing on Vera Brittain who lost a brother, fiancé and two closest friends:

[she] did not realise that she and her generation were being smashed up and killed, not for honour and love of dear community, but to uphold a system which they had scarcely thought about, but would have known as evil if they had.

Here too are three astonishing photographs of wards in Springburn Hospital, Glasgow, where wounded soldiers were treated. Their sombre faces confront the camera with a lost, bewildered look as the nurses stand sentinel in white, their angels of mercy come to earth.

Spurtle readers may remember Peter Cattrell's stark images of the Somme from a previous SNPG exhibition in the 'old' Gallery. Here, they punctuate the overwhelming sadness of this commemoration. Of the photographs, perhaps the most telling is the image of 'Stubble fields, Beaumont Hamel, Somme' (from the series The Front Line, 2000), with acre on acre of harvested maize stems, white spectral poles which echo the row on row of gravestones in the war cemeteries. Standing before these images one has a sense of dreadful stillness and profound silence.

The final section continues the tenebrous silence. Here is a bright, faintltly blurred film of the 4th Cameron Highlanders, swiftly marching in full battle kit during training at Bedford in August 1914–February 1915. On they march, almost jauntilty, kilts swinging, many smiling, some waving – a portion of 'half the seed of Europe' pitching forward to sacrifice. Nearby are five of Peter Cattrell's images of shrapnel, each a silent scream, suggestive of contorted faces in a Francis Bacon painting.

Rightly, the exhibition closes with Wilfred Owen’s unbearably beautiful ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, and a final image by Cattrell of ‘Shadows of War Graves, France 1998’.

This marvellous exhibition – which is, in effect, itself a collective work of art of immense sensitivity and loving care – continues until 5 January 2015. —John Ross Maclean [An abbreviated version of this review appears in Issue 233.]

Image 1 is a detail from Alice and Meredith Morris Williams' bronze Frieze in the Scottish National War Memorial.

Image 2 is by Rhys Fullerton of the wild poppy meadow sown this summer in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Image 3 is by an unknown photographer of a 'Red Cross Hospital Staff and Patients', courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Images 4 and 5 are by Peter Cattrell, courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.