Badger Moody

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946), was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I.

Nevinson studied at the Slade School of Art  under Henry Tonks and alongside Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler. When he left the Slade, Nevinson befriended Filippo Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, and the radical writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, who founded the short-lived Rebel Art Centre. However, Nevinson fell out with Lewis and the other 'rebel' artists when he attached their names to the Futurist movement. Lewis immediately founded the Vorticists, an avant garde group of artists and writers from which Nevinson was excluded.

At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French and British soldiers. For a very brief period he served as a volunteer ambulance driver before ill-health forced his return to Britain. Subsequently, Nevinson volunteered for home service with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He used these experiences as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used the machine aesthetic of Futurism and the influence of Cubism to great effect. His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote at the time that Nevinson's painting La Mitrailleuse, 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.' In 1917, Nevinson was appointed an official war artist, but he was no longer finding Modernist styles adequate for describing the horrors of modern war, and he increasingly painted in a more realistic manner. Nevinson's later World War 1 paintings, based on short visits to the Western Front, are considered by some art historians as lacking the same powerful effect as those earlier works which had helped to make him one of the most famous young artists working in England.

These same art historians - before the pioneering work of Jonathan Black - lazily underrated Nevinson's post-war art. This is certainly not how it looked to people at the time. In an article 'The True Genesis of Mr Nevinson's Art', published in <em>An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors</em>, Reginald Grundy wrote the following: 'His <em>Portrait of a Singer</em>, which, one believes, portrays the one-armed artist known to Bohemia as "Badger" Moody (who died during September), was drawn with circumspection and handled with a proper forcibility. It is probably the best work Mr. Nevinson has ever produced'. The highly regarded critic P.G. Konody echoed these views, comparing it to earlier etched portraits by Augustus John in terms of its impact and skill.

Ten years earlier, the bass-baritone singer and painter 'Badger' had been the 'toughest of the lot' of what Nevinson called 'The Slade coster gang', referring to his stint as a student at the Slade School of Art: 'We were the terror of Soho and violent participants, for the mere love of a row, at such places as the anti-vivisectionist demonstrations at the "Little Brown Dog" at Battersea. We also fought with the medical students of other hospitals for the possession of Phineas, the bekilted dummy which stood outside a tobacconist's shop in Tottenham Court Road and was rightly or wrongly considered the mascot of the University College of London'.

See:

Allinson Gallery, 'Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson', http://www.allinsongallery.com/nevinson/badger.html

Wikipedia, 'Christopher R.W. Nevinson', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._W._Nevinson

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018