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clean white world THE GREAT WAR Some called it 'the great remedy', and welcomed it as a 'cleansing' that would purge the world of its corrupt ways. Many of Europe's artists and intellectuals couldn't wait to join in. The Futurists, a bung of high-octane artist mostly from Italy, set out for it on bicycles, as if they were going on a picnic - it was a bloody mess: The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath ... The flies entered the trenches at night and lined them completely with a density which was like moving cloth. We killed millions by slapping our spades along the trench walls but the next night it would be just as bad. We were all lousy and we couldn't stop shitting because we had caught dysentery. We wept, not because we were frightened but because we were so dirty. Leonard Thompson, quoted in Peter Vansittart (ed.) Voices from the War The Great War was a cesspit that drowned an entire generation in mud, blood and shit. It decimated the ranks of the avant-garde and seriously dented the Nietzschean optimism that had inspired them to fight. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Umberto Boccioni, Charles Peguy and many other great creative talents were killed at the front. Many more died in misery from disease: tuberculosis, typhus, syphilis, cholera and dysentery - all traditional camp followers. Then, in the spring of 1918, there came the 'Fourth Horseman':

a global outbreak of influenza that killed more people in Europe than the war itself. It raged out of control for a year, exacerbated by the conditions of demobilisation, and disrupted the Versailles Peace conference. Guillaume Apollimaire, Rayamond Duchamp-Villon and Egon Sciele were among the millions who died from it. These two apocalyptic events - the war and the 'flu pandemic - ruthlessly imposed themselves on the imagination of those who survived. For the next 20 years, Modernism was to struggle with an experience that, above all, had driven dirt, decay and disease into the artistic consciousness. An in so doing, Modernism acquired a compelling new imperative: to clean up, to sterilise, to re-order, to eliminate chaos and dirt. There has never been any sustained analysis of Modernism in terms of 'clean' and 'dirty', and yet, during the 1920's and 1930's, it was driven by this debate more, perhaps, than by any other. Many of the avante-garde - and especially architects - became obsessed with hygiene and cleanliness, and made it into a value system in their work. They sought a new Eden, a clean, white world blanched of the stains of the past. And they came up with a new aesthetic: hygiene. But, initially, with the indescribable squalor of the war still sharp in the memory, dirt and the subject of the body became the obsessive focus of many artists. In Germany, a nation crippled by defeat, Otto Dix and Georg Grosz made wounding and mutilation the golden section of their work. They had both served at the front (Dix had been a machine-gunner, Grosz had suffered two nervous breakdowns), and for them, the clinical reality of rotting flesh and broken limbs refused to go away.

(we wept, not because we were frightened but because we were so dirty ) dirty.