Paths of Glory

Andy Farr

Acrylic on Canvas, 2014

In March 1918 an art exhibition called War opened in London’s Leicester Galleries. One painting stood out from the rest, its grim subject of dead British troops partially obscured by a strip of brown paper inscribed “CENSORED”. This painting was entitled Paths of Glory, its artist was a former medical orderly Christopher Nevinson.

The painting so alarmed the War Office that they banned it - because “representations of the dead have an ill effect at home”.

The central figures have been replaced within the painting with the artist’s sons, who would, had they lived 100 years ago, been part of the “Lost Generation” sacrificed to the mud and wire of Flanders