The Great War in Portraits - National Portrait Gallery

The centenary commemorations of the Great War have started… Things kicked off this month with unseemly political squabbles about the relative merits of old TV show Blackadder and how history should be taught. And there’s still four years to go.

These ideas are important, if often irritatingly put across. But if you want to dive into the real spirit of remembrance, and find out more about the war that devastated the UK and left a legacy of memorials around the country, then go to the National Portrait Gallery’s Great War in Portraits: the best WWI exhibition thus far and a real kicker for the next four years.

The exhibition sets a very high benchmark. For a start, it takes an ecumenical view, featuring international works of art – it was, after all, a ‘world’ war – and uses pictures of people: politicans, poets, civilians, medal-winners, heroes and prisoners. There’s a photograph of handsome poet Wilfred Owen, and stand-out historical photographs including one of Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the turnkey moment of WWI. It’s a great way of learning about WWI, among other virtues.

But it is the art – and its development through the tumult of the time – that is of most interest here. While we often think of the Edwardian era as sombre and conservative – a judgement that William Orpen's portrait of Winston Churchill underlines - there are several startlingly modernist pieces. From the Tate comes Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill; from Germany comes Max Beckman's Hell: The Way Home and Ludwig Kirchner's Selbstbildnis als Soldat - Self-portrait as a Soldier: the latter both exemplars of jagged, urgent Expressionism. It bolsters the argument that WWI was the schism that led directly into the Modernist era and in the show, it's salutary that some artists are looking forward, while others look back.

Such is the even-handed ethos of the NPG is that there are two pieces of footage of the Battle of the Somme – both released during the war and shown here for the first time – one for the  British and another for the Germans. 

The NPG has underscored its growing role as one of the UK's great emotional centres with the launch of an NPG-led project called National Memory – Local Stories, which looks at local WWI collections in the UK. There’s also a book by curator Paul Moorhouse with an essay by Sebastian Faulks, whose book Birdsong, is a more than adequate companion.