Original Cubo-Futurist drawing on an inscribed WWI photograph

Dunkirk n.p.. 23 January 1915.

A recently discovered Cubo-futurist drawing by Nevinson. Photographic postcard (105x150mm) showing Nevinson standing in front of a British Red Cross Society ambulance. On the verso Nevinson has inscribed "A ma petite amie Simone du C.R.W.Nevinson". He has also drawn, in pen and ink, a biplane flying over a group of houses and a landscape. The houses and landscape are executed in the Cubist style while the aeroplane, superbly capturing the frantic blur of the propellers, the wings and the tail, is a brilliant, brief essay in Futurism, the politically controversial but aesthetically dynamic art movement which drew its inspiration from the speed, mechanism and violence of the modern world. After leaving the Slade School of Art in 1912, Nevinson moved to Paris where he met Picasso and fell under the influence of Cubism. A little later he was pulled into the orbit of the Italian Futurists, Marinetti and Severini. 1914 saw a huge a row with Wyndham Lewis when Nevinson published Vital English Art in which he criticised the "passéiste filth" of the London art world in contrast to the life-force of Futurism.
Not long after this split with Lewis, WWI broke out and Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit. From 13th November, he spent nine weeks in northern France with the Unit and the Red Cross tending to badly wounded French soldiers. Although Nevinson was proud of this work, his own health was weak and he had to return to England at the end of January. This photograph was therefore taken just before he left France and was clearly meant as a heartfelt parting gift to Simone Lengrand who was working as a nurse at the Florence Fiennes Hospital near Dunkirk. "Petite amie" suggests a romantic link between them but one soon to end. This important little card is a record of an important moment in Nevinson's life - in love, carrying out vital war work and bursting with Cubo-futurist creativity.