Making the Engine
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946), Making the Engine, lithograph, 1917, signed, dated, and numbered (55) in pencil lower margin. Reference: Leicester Galleries 27, Imperial War Museum 57. With condition issues: several soft folds and flattened creases, generally unobtrusive but some across matrix; about a dozen (repaired) tears in the margins and stopping just outside of the matrix, one about 1/2 inch into matrix upper left. Printed on a warm white wove with the watermark Holbein. The full sheet, 15 3/4 x 11 15/16, the sheet 20 1/8 x 15 1/8 inches, archival mounting.
A fine bright impression of this iconic image.
Making the Engine was issued by Britain’s Office of the Ministry of Information in a 6 lithograph publication entitled Building Aircraft – The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals. This is from the edition of 200 signed sets.
Nevinson had of course been influenced by the Italian Futurist movement, and his appointment as Official War Artist enabled him to use this idiom to illustrate the great technological achievements undergirding modern warfare in a dynamic, modernist way. Whatever the merits of the technology and the war – and by 1917 Nevinson was thoroughly disillusioned with war and increasingly with modernism itself – Nevinson’s cubist/futurist portrayals have become monuments to British modernism.