World War One

CRW Nevinson's painting Paths of Glory is a distant cry from the rallying recruitment posters that appeared at the start of the war. It depicts the bloated corpses of two dead soldiers, stretched out in the mud, against a backdrop of tangled barbed wire somewhere on the Western Front. Unsurprisingly, it was censored at the time. Allan Little considers the continuing power of Nevinson's painting and the role of art both in recruiting soldiers and in denouncing war.