The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks

and sculpture had been changed by the War. Wood’s own ‘War years’ were what gave him the time and the urgent desire to be a painter; but for the artistic generation before him, the experience of the War itself had two devastating effects. In France it drove many of the most experimental artists back on themselves; and in England it cut offthe first attempts, notably those made by Wyndham Lewis, to build bridges across the Channel.
    David Bomberg, a student at the Slade, had done what Wood did as early as 1913. He went to Paris and met Derain, Picasso and Modigliani; he picked up some of the rush and clamour of Futurism and showed elements of Cubism in his pictures. But when the war came and he was asked to depict the work of a Canadian tunnelling company, his pictures were rejected. Only when he redid them in a traditional style did they find favour, and he never resumed his pre-War experiments. C. R. W. Nevinson, also strongly Futurist in style before the War, struggled to express the flesh-and-blood aspect of what he saw in such a machine-dominated idiom, and his pictures became old-fashioned, almost journalistic. Even Wyndham Lewis, shaken by the death of his friend Gaudier-Brzeska, had qualms about trying to express the destructive force of military machinery.
    The only English painter who appeared to flourish was Paul Nash, who initially enthused, in letters that are shocking to read, over the pictorial aspects of trench warfare. By the time of Passchendaele in 1917, however, he was sick to his soul: ‘Sunrise and sunset are blasphemous,’ he wrote, ‘they are mockeries to man.’ He continued in his own way after the War, out of touch with the mainstream of Modernism as it eventually developed in England in the 1930s when its most important early figures included Wood’s painting partner in 1928, Ben Nicholson.
    The French painters enjoyed a remarkable rate of survival, but found their lives and their art changed by the War. The Cubist movement ended on 14 August 1915 when Braque, Gleizes, Léger, Lhote, Villon and Duchamp-Villon were mobilised. Braque was wounded but was able to resume his work after the War. Léger served as a sapper and was so impressed by his fellow engineers and the materials they handled that he forsook the abstract art towards which he had been moving and vowed never again to ‘let go of objects’. Andre Breton worked in a hospital where the use of psychoanalytic techniques laid the basis for the unconscious or automatic elements of Surrealism. Juan Gris and Picasso, the Spaniards, stayed behind, and Picasso mocked the War and its effects. ‘I took Braque and Derain to the station,’ hewrote, but ‘I never found them again.’ This epigram, spoken for effect, contained some truth about the ending of the first phase of Modernism. After the War, Braque concentrated on consolidation. Derain rejected experiment to become a classical, at times almost wilfully old-fashioned, painter.
    By the time Christopher Wood emigrated to Paris in 1921, the city had become a different place. The greatest holocaust ever seen in Europe had been enacted within earshot, and twice within gunshot, of Montmartre. Paris was depicted, largely by Americans, as a rodeo of reckless novelty, of sex and drugs and the frilly underwear of the Folies Bergères, but in fact it was a quieter place than before the War. Picasso, while scornful of his former Modernist confreres, had himself shown an interest in neo-classical forms. Matisse had left Paris for Nice where he was painting in a sensuous, highly coloured style. The new movements of Dada and Surrealism made noisy claims on an artist’s attention, but there was no obligation to sign up.
    When Wood arrived he was making a move less bold than Bomberg in 1913. But while he might be said to be in the second wave of English, the first one had been extraordinarily small: even as Paris began to fill with American students and Bohemians, a nineteen-year-old boy from