Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946)

Nevinson studied at St John’s Wood School of Art (1907-08), at the Slade School (1908-12), and at the Académie Julian in Paris (1912-13), where he met Modigliani and Apollinaire. He was much influenced by the Italian Futurists, Marinetti, Severini and Boccioni, and in 1913 he exhibited in the ‘Post-Impressionists and Futurists’ show at the Doré Gallery. In the same year he was a founder-member of the London Group, and in 1914, with Marinetti, he published a manifesto called Vital English Art: A Futurist Manifesto, in which he proclaimed his affiliation to the Futurists. In 1915 he participated in the Vorticists’ Group Show at the Doré Gallery, and contributed to the second edition of Blast.

Nevinson was made an Official War Artist in 1917, and was one of the first artists to draw the combat from the air. His attempts to show the horror of war earned him a reprimand from the War Office. After the war he visited New York, where he responded to the city’s dynamism and vertiginous scale. Nevinson became a member of the New English Art Club in 1929, the Royal Society of British Artists in 1932, and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1939. A centenary exhibition of his work was shown at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge in 1989.