A Deep Dive into The Deception of Machines: Exploring the Degenerative Effects of Machines on Humanity as represented in “La Mitrailleuse” by C.R.W. Nevinson
Contextual Overview
Title: La Mitrailleuse (The Machine Gun)
Artist: C.R.W. Nevinson (United Kingdom)
Year: 1915
Location: Tate Britain
Dimensions: 24” x 20” (61cm x 51cm)
Media specifications: Oil paint on canvas
Christoper Richard Wynne Nevinson was a British painter and printmaker. His work included landscapes, urban scenes, figure composition, but he was most famous for his war art of World War I. While serving in France with the Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1914 -1916, he found his ideal subject matter (“Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne.”). Nevinson was inspired by the cruelty and chaos he had witnessed exhibited by humankind in union with the newly introduced mass production of killing machines in World War I. So during this war period, he dedicated his artworks to expressing his sightings and sentiments of the gruesome actualities of war. However, some of his work like the Paths of Glory (1917) displaying British soldiers as victims of war(dead) was considered so grim and grotesque that it was deemed unworthy for public viewing and so was censored. La Mitrailleuse, on the other hand, was positively received by art critics in March 1916 when he exhibited it with the Allied Artists Association at the Grafton Galleries (“Christopher R. W. Nevinson.”). The painting encapsulates his style that drew on both Cubist and Futurist ideas that were popular in the early 20th century. Though, his techniques were closer to Vorticism as displayed through his use of geometrics that tended towards abstraction (“Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne.”). Even though Nevinson borrows from futurism which “glorified the modernity and speed brought about by the machines”(Kramer), he does not convey any radiant joy in his illustrations of war and violence, especially in La Mitrailleuse. Nevinson created La Mitrailleuse in London during his honeymoon and week-long leave from the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915 (“‘La Mitrailleuse’, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson). By this time, he had experienced many of the horrors associated with trench warfare, and combined with his Futuristic and Vorticist techniques, he used these experiences as muses for his more realistic and time-freezing depictions of WWI in paintings like La Mitrailleuse. A year after its production in 1915, Nevinson’s futurist comrade, Walter Sickett described the painting as “the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting” (“‘La Mitrailleuse’, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson).
Analysis + Interpretation of Visual Form and Design
The word “Mitrailleuse” is a French word for “machine gun,” a weapon that revolutionized warfare after its invention in 1884. Nevinson’s use of it as the title provides some commentary on the centralization of the lifeless machines in the painting. The painting as a whole is suggestive of a broader lifelessness emerging in the world of eroding humanity replaced by stagnancy, fear, anonymity, and machines. The artwork’s aesthetic and formal characteristics, and the patterns and relationships between them, work together to deliver these meanings. The most salient of these traits, which I will analyze below, include the artist’s use of shape, value, form, space, line, and color in his painting. From my first glance of the painting, my eyes are immediately pulled in to trace the straight rigid thick lines that formulate the male figures’ forms. Their faces are so angularly shaped and the dark gray and navy color scheme of their clothing is so somber, it frightens the viewer. There is an overpowering dark shade in the figures’s eyes that creates a sense of rage and urgency in the stillness of the painting making the moment captured feel immediate and the viewer feel like an intruder. The figures’ eyes cannot be seen, they are either covered by their tilted metallic hats or smudged as black triangular streaks emphasizing the absence of warm emotion and the growing presence of frigidity. It takes a while longer for the eye to notice, but there is a fourth figure. His lifeless body is kept hidden by the dark tones and shadows surrounding him, but the mechanical structure of his face is still visible. Even though they are portrayed as “physically” alive, the three figures still share a similar emotionless rigidity to the fourth figure that is portrayed as dead. These cold characteristics of the male figures merge with characteristics of the machine gun and its chain of bullets waiting to be spat out at the enemy. The soldiers and the machine gun are fused in marriage by their lifeless qualities — the artist intentionally uses similar shades and tones of navy blue for the figures’ uniforms to resemble the machine gun and also mechanizes and sharpens the figures’ forms to accentuate the “till death do us part” bond with the gun.
There is a formation of a single, but yet opposing entity between the figures and the machine which is marked by the soldiers crouching down seeking safety behind the gun, while still using it to unleash violence upon the enemies. The faces of the soldiers portray anger that is projected towards the enemies — the ones they are fighting with the machine gun and those who stationed them in these positions that require them to detach their emotions and personify a machine. On the other hand, the faces of the soldiers also portray fear — a fear of the unknown and unseen enemy on the other side of the war field/canvas and a fear for their dwindling humanity. There is an illusion of unity and brotherhood among the soldiers that the artist depicts by using indistinguishable repetition of color and lines that form their identical facial structures and clothing, and by the crammed pictorial space in which the figures are placed. These elements together create a visually pleasing agreement that romanticizes and almost justifies the critical situation that these soldiers are in. However, the artist then reveals this false sense of unity through the strategic positioning of the soldiers on the canvas. The backs of the living soldiers are turned against each other, with the dead soldier lying openly in the middle — this setting exposes the illusion of togetherness and only verifies that it is every man for himself on the war field.
The artist is still able to create a three-dimensional perception of the painting through the combination of geometric shapes that make up the figures and the positioning of the figures on the canvas. The geometrical application of lines and the artist’s manipulation of negative and positive space on the canvas create ugly contortions in the facial forms of the figures that evoke horror in the viewer. The artist intends to develop an appalling scene revolving around the corrupting nature of the “machine,” but in doing so, also suggests that this wickedness can be passed on to humans. This transference can be noted in the way one of the soldiers tightly grips the machine. The structure of his hand dissolves into the lines forming the gun reinforcing a harmonious oneness set on unleashing harm and destruction. The aforementioned wickedness can also be detected by the artist’s creation of movement in the painting.
After applying the Rule of Thirds to the painting, it is revealed that each of the soldiers’ warped faces is confined in the solitary blocks, with their backs against each other. A fear-filled scurry to protect themselves from enemy fire or intrusion is what seems to be happening in the painting. Despite the unifying colors and patterns the artist uses to paint the male figures, their distant positioning on the canvas in proportion to each other is evidence of the artist’s use of dissonance. This dissonance emphasizes the underlying loneliness that soldiers develop as a result of the cold and mechanistic nature that they have to allow themselves to be consumed by in order to inflict pain and violence, in a similar ruthless fashion of a machine gun. For the viewer of La Mitrailleuse, this kindles feelings of pity for the soldiers fighting and losing themselves in a senseless war.
In La Mitrailleuse, Nevinson succeeds in merging humanity and machines as a single force of nature while simultaneously introducing this union as catastrophic. Nevinson refuses to buy into the justifications of war at that time and creates a controversial take that demonizes not only the war but also the machines used in expediting and exacerbating the killing process. The machine portrayed in La Mitrailleuse deceives its users by giving them a false sense of safety and comfort to stand behind its small insignificant presence and shoot blindly into open space. Even with one of their comrades down, possibly killed by an incoming bullet, the soldiers continue to trust in the capabilities of their machine to protect their own individual lives. By doing this, these soldiers are unknowingly losing their sense of reasoning and humanity morphing into a lifeless replica of the killing machine, a concept that Nevinson skilfully illustrates on the canvas. La Mitrailleuse expresses the inception of dwindling humanity, lost in a black hole of increasing reliance on cold, hard, and lifeless machines. Machines are constantly taking while giving the illusion of reciprocity to humans. Human beings are trapped in a bubble that embraces both the greater good and greater evil brought about by machines, unable to realize that this kind of relationship is unsustainable and is degenerative in the long term. The greater good and the greater evil of machines is not equal and is in constant fluctuation, but there is something sinister about the mere existence of a greater evil.
Works Cited
“Christopher R. W. Nevinson.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 16 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._W._Nevinson.
Kramer, Professor Alan. “Dynamic of Destruction : Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War.” Google Books, OUP Oxford, 12 July 2007, books.google.com/books?id=WecdxSfLfN0C.
“Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne.” Benezit Dictionary of Artists, www.oxfordartonline.com/benezit/view/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.001.0001/acref-9 780199773787-e-00129935?rskey=JPDkKc.
Tate. “‘La Mitrailleuse’, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1915.” Tate, 1 Jan. 1970, www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nevinson-la-mitrailleuse-n03177.
