I’m Holly. Postrgraduate History Student Based In Wellington New Zealand.
Welcome to the Blog!
Militarised Masculinity, how the official War art of Britain recaptured the artistic opportunity to exemply masculine values:
In the First World War, marital masculinity can be considered through the visual cultures of that period. The discussion of these masculine themes has been mostly pinpointed in historical discourses, are the war recruitment posters of the time; another visual culture of equal importance is paintings. Makers of the visual cultures in the First World War used symbols that associated the image of soldiers with the ideal man. The idealisation of the soldier was necessary because Britain’s army was initially made up of all volunteers, whereas army recruiters relied on tactics like shame and humiliation to attract volunteers. In the aftermath of the war, the ideology of manliness slowly changed as the consequence of mechanised warfare showcased through the many deaths these weapons caused, exposing soldiers as the basis of masculinity. British post-war culture and the emotions crafted through the destruction caused by mechanised warfare coincided with the continued celebration of martial masculinity prevalent in the re-emergence of those traditional gender roles and boundaries in British society from the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Focus:
This website focuses on the study of masculinity in the First World War. The thesis concerns the art of the period and the development of the official war art scheme in Britain. The main research areas examined the conceptions of British social and cultural conditions that influenced how the soldier and battlefield were conceptualised and depicted in different artworks. Focus has been placed on the artists, their works, and most importantly, the functions of the official war art schemes and the different exhibitions that these artists worked and were involved in throughout and directly after the war. The website investigates questions the most popular and widely circulated war art that depicted soldiers engaged in heroic acts of bravery and compares that to artworks depicting the opposite to understand how and why that changed. The thesis attempts to provide insight into how landscape and the environment were crucial in this discussion and how different artistic movements helped portray the reality of warfare in art. The investigation into how and why the British Government appointed official war artists to record events they witnessed on the battlefield has been a huge focus.