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  • GREAT WAR VORTICIST WORK BY C.R.W. NEVINSON AT SOTHEBY’S

    C.R.W. Nevinson – A Dawn

    An iconic depiction of French soldiers in 1914 by the leading British war artist C.R.W. Nevinson – A Dawn – comes up at Sotheby’s Modern and Post War sale in London on November 21.  It is from a landmark moment in the  career of Nevinson, who is widely considered the definitive British artist of the First World War.

    The painting encapsulates the best of his Vorticist style of the period between 1914 and 1916. It shows a seething mass of soldiers reduced to mechanical forms. First exhibited at Nevinson’s acclaimed 1916 solo exhibition at the prestigious Leicester Galleries, attended by the likes of Sir Winston Churchill and G. Bernard Shaw, it is one of very few paintings from this landmark show still in private hands.

    Simon Hucker, Senior Specialist in Modern & Post-War British Art, said:
    “Nevinson’s A Dawn ranks alongside the Tate’s La Mitrailleuse and the Imperial War Museum’s French Troops Resting as the very best of the artist’s war paintings, works that define our vision of the Great War. With the majority of Nevinson’s most important works in major museums, the term ‘museum-quality’ can be applied with total confidence to this profoundly powerful painting.”

    “It happened that I was the first artist to paint war pictures without pageantry, without glory, and without the over-coloured heroic that made up the tradition of all war paintings up to this time…. No man saw pageantry in the trenches.” (Nevinson).  The work is estimated at £700,000-£1 million.

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