During the first world war, 124,702 British soldiers were victims of gas attacks. They suffered blisters, burns or temporary blindness and 2,308 of them died. In July 1918, the Ministry of Information sent American society portraitist John Singer Sargent to the front. There he witnessed the aftermath of mustard gas attacks and was inspired to make a six-metre wide tableau called Gassed depicting a procession of wounded men stumbling, blindfolded, towards a dressing station, while in the foreground more men lie dead and dying, their bodies entangled.
Recently cleaned to reveal a rosy evening light (and even Tommies playing an incongruous football match in the painting’s background), Gassed is the centrepiece of the Imperial War Museum’s new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries in London. This permanent exhibition features about 500 works tracing the history of war art from July 1916 when Muirhead Bone became the first official artist making etchings in the Somme’s killing fields, to the 21st century and works such as Paul Seawright’s 2002 photograph Mounds, which unwittingly echoes Bone’s work by depicting an Afghan landscape bombed senseless, unpeopled and riddled with mines.
