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‘Fiddling while Rome is Burning’: Hostility to Art During the First World War, 1914–18

While the wartime experiences of British soldier-artists have received much scholarly attention, rather less is known about the artistic impact of the First World War on the home front. This article draws on a large amount of contemporary discourse (including government legislation, academic essays, tabloid editorials, publicly issued pamphlets and private letters) to describe how the inflammatory domestic climate precipitated a widespread questioning of the social value, ethical legitimacy and political validity of art. The conflict not only caused art to be considered a trivial, unproductive and degenerative luxury; it led to a demonization of artists as shirkers, profiteers, elitists and foreigners. The article concludes that these discursive patterns were symptomatic of a wartime desegregation of public life and the cultural sphere that may well have shaped the more socially motivated artistic trends of the inter-war period.