To the left of the entrance to The Spanish Civil War: Dreams + Nightmares (the exhibition runs until 28 April) is the Sargent Room. At the moment it contains three big World War One pictures: Sargent's own Gassed, Stanley Spencer's picture of wounded men on stretchers in Mesopotamia and Nevinson's of troops crossing a desolate, shell-pocked battlefield. To the right of the entrance are galleries with pictures from World War Two: Eric Ravilious's paintings of empty rooms in pale stippled watercolour, Laura Knight's group of women setting up a barrage balloon, emphatically modest and determined to be unheroic. The emotional tone of British war art goes down many notches from the First War to the Second and its manner becomes almost prim in its discretion.

LRB 3 January 2002 | PDF Download