Aftermath

A ground-breaking exhibition at Tate Britain, scheduled to mark the end of the 1918 centenary commemorative period, will be the first to examine the memorialisation and the social and aesthetic impact of the First World War. It will explore how memories of the war have been filtered through specific cultural forms and political agendas. These range from memorial painting and sculpture, to representations of the destruction of bodies and landscape, and new aesthetic developments in art which offered ways of critiquing and re-imagining post-war society. It will compare visual responses to the war in Britain, Germany and France and include painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, film and medical collections. This accompanying publication will examine how processes of commemoration and mourning were represented through the visual arts in Britain, Germany and France. Illustrations will range from artworks specifically commissioned as memorials of war - such as commemorative painting cycles and memorial sculpture - to those associated with formal and intellectual developments such as Dada and Surrealism, which created new visual forms to process experiences and memories of the conflict.