Margaret Hutchison

Michael Walsh

Andrekos Varnava

Romain Fathi

Exiting war explores a particular 1918–20 ‘moment’ in the British Empire’s history, between the First World War’s armistices of 1918, and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. That moment, we argue, was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation, and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918–20 ‘moment’ and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system.

The British Empire and the 1918–20 moment

Exiting war

Steven Trout

Interdisciplinary collection of essays on fine art painting as it relates to the First World War and commemoration of the conflict Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of painting played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public's appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet provide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes. Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding panoramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public's understanding of the war. Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contributors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume's overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.

Painting, Memory, and the First World War

Portraits of Remembrance

Examines the official art scheme as a key commemorative practice of the First World War.

Margaret Hutchison

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