London, Leicester Galleries, Memorial Exhibition of Pictures by C.R.W. Nevinson, May – June 1947;
London, Imperial War Museum and toured to Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, C.R.W. Nevinson: The Twentieth Century, October 1999 – January 2000 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 122, p. 177);
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: The Impact of War, 15 October 2014 – 4 January 2015;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Road to Abstraction, 21 May – 24 July 2016
Literature:
Albert Rutherston (ed.), Contemporary British Artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Ernest Benn, London, 1925 (illustrated pl. 18);
Albert Rutherston (ed.), Paint and Prejudice, London, 1937
Nevinson studied at the Slade School of Art 1909-1912. After his education he became close friends with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti was the founder of the Futurist movement and introduced Nevinson to this mechanical style of art. Later Nevinson was appointed Official War Artist during the First World War and often visited the front lines to draw inspiration for his paintings. Nevinson’s paintings focused on the mechanisation of warfare. He painted machine guns and trenches bringing attention to how modern wars were now being fought. After the war he turned to landscape and genre painting – La Corniche is an example of this. He retreated from his futurist style and increasingly created work in a more traditional practice. This painting was included in a retrospective of Nevinson’s work held at the Imperial War Museum, 1999-2000. It is an interesting counterpoint to his First World War imagery – as with many of his fellow artists he leaves the traumatic subject matter of war behind in this colourful depiction of a town on the Cote d’Azur.
