Mud, glorious mud. The dank, sodden environment of the trenches is so instilled into public memories of WWI you’d be forgiven for imagining the only colour a 1914-18 war artist needed in their paintbox was brown.
But Alfred Munnings’s oil paintings from the final year of the war make use of the entire rainbow and then some. Lavender, chalky grey and Dolly Mixture pink streak the sky, while lush greens – the type found in a Cézanne landscape – pop out from the rolling hillsides and a glorious sunshine yellow bounces off cracked tree trunks. There’s also a strange, but not unpleasant, iridescence to all the paintings, which almost shimmer, the way wet duck feathers do.
Munnings travelled around war-torn France with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. In keeping with the era’s conventions, blood and brutality are absent from the images. Instead, his scenes convey the sheer scale of wartime operations, from the felling of whole forests to the astronomical number of horses involved, many of which ended up injured or dead.
Munnings, who later became president of the Royal Academy, is partly remembered for giving a drunk rant about Picasso being shite, live on BBC radio. It dented Munnings’s reputation somewhat, but this exhibition demonstrates why we should give the English artist a bit of a break.
There’s a genuine uniqueness to Munnings’s war art, in how the beauty of impressionist brush strokes and vibrant colours collides with the sadness and destruction of war. Given their subtlety, it’s a shame all the paintings in the show are dwarfed by seriously chunky gilt frames – equivalent to placing a massive tyre around a shire horse’s neck.
Not that the horses in the pictures couldn’t take the weight. Equine art was a Munnings speciality, and the ones here are mainly robust, sturdy creatures, different to the streamlined thoroughbreds ordinarily blessed with an oil-paint portrait. With their stumpy legs, wide necks and bulky flanks, these are beasts to rely on. That’s real horse power.