I believe that Jonathan Jones’ critique of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower (1 November) does a disservice to the many people who have been moved by the poppies, and the important consequences of expressing those feelings, in passing on a shared memory. My great-uncle Frank died in 1917, serving in the Royal Flying Corps. No one in the family ever spoke of him and there is no one left to ask. After some research, I learned that he drowned when the Aragon was torpedoed outside Alexandria harbour. When I heard that a roll of honour was being read each evening at the Tower I submitted his name.
One summer evening, I stood in a large crowd overlooking the poppies. Most were in family groups, talking softly about those whose memory they had come to celebrate. Older people were explaining to young children the circumstances in which their far-distant relatives had died. As the sun went down, a yeoman warder read the names. There were few officers: Frank was the only air mechanic in that evening’s list. A bugler played the Last Post and the crowd dispersed quietly.
The people attending those ceremonies and flocking to look at the poppies may not share Mr Jones’s deep understanding of history but they certainly know the horror of war, through their own family histories. Indeed, Mr Jones uses his own family’s experiences to illustrate his argument. Children who have been taken to see the poppies will remember the family stories they are told there. This seems to me to be a valuable endeavour.
Laura F Spira
Oxford
Jonathan Jones says a true work of art about the first world war “would need to be as obscene as cancer”. In 2014, surely a true work of art about war, in any place, at any time, would capture the miserable nature of men so incapable of resolving their differences that they slaughtered each other in their millions in order to win. Win what exactly? To be top dog for a while? Isn’t it time we grew up?
Art seems to be forgetting its job, to tell the story of the time we live in, and to truthfully show us ourselves and our nature within that time, including contemporarily reviewing the past. Artists now, as never before perhaps, need to be emotionally mature in their perceptions to be able to accurately depict this in whatever medium they choose with any depth. And critics need to be equally perceptive about what artists are endeavouring to express in order to usher their work into the public consciousness. A cool mind, please, JJ, it’s an important job you do. This war of words over the difference between what is an artwork and a memorial is in fact a war of words over art itself. Discuss.
Judy Liebert
Nottingham
Congratulations to Jonathan Jones for his robust defence of his earlier critique (The Tower of London poppies are fake, trite and inward-looking – a Ukip-style memorial, theguardian.com, 28 October) of the poppy memorial. The Daily Mail, which criticises him, was a cheerleader (along with the Times and Telegraph) for Britain entering the first world war, as shown in the excellent new book by Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days (Review, 20 September). These newspapers, aided by politicians such as Churchill, spewed out anti-German and militaristic rhetoric in the days leading up to the outbreak of the war, hence undercutting the chances of a peaceful resolution to the crisis. The last thing we need is more memorials which encourage poignancy; we need memorials to remind us that, as Newton argues, the only uplifting element in the story of that war is in the struggle to avert it.
Professor Jim Tomlinson
University of Glasgow
Anyone looking at the 888,246 poppies cannot but be moved that so many lives were lost. Many, like me, will be reinforced in the belief that war can only ever signify failure. This is not to deny the reality. But if huge numbers are moved to ask why, then the ceramic poppies are far more than the art installation Jones sees.
Peter Young
Banchory, Aberdeenshire
There are many truths about the Great War and Jonathan Jones is correct in saying that the display of poppies around the Tower of London is not a balanced summary . Pretty though it may be, the poppy installation does communicate one truth, that unfathomable numbers of beautiful beings were lost in that tragedy. Somehow these ceramic poppies do this more effectively than any array of pale gravestones or lists of names have done.
In contrast, Jones cites work by Otto Dix and Wilfred Own that gives us hazy glimpses of a different and uglier reality, that war involves horrors that we in our safe suburban lives can barely imagine. But had these works succeeded in communicating and connecting with people in the way the Tower’s massed poppies have done maybe we would be less inclined to think of war as an acceptable evil.
Richard Evans
Winchester
Jonathan Jones’s arguments, his passion and his opinions deserve respect. So too do the opinions of others. Like many people, I do find poignancy and relevance in the field of poppies at the Tower of London. Flowers symbolise loss and also regeneration: they too wither and die and are replaced by new growths. Graphic art and harsh words may depict horrors in a more forthright manner - and yet are still only representations of actual events. What is essential in any art work is its capacity to move the human heart; for me, the red poppy symbolises the blood of the lives lost and its beauty enhances rather than diminishes that awareness.
The collective loss of millions of men is not represented in the moat; only those from these shores. Perhaps we need, from time to time, to consider those losses within our immediate family of nations, just as at times of individual grief families sometimes close their own doors. Not a deliberate act of exclusion, therefore, rather an opportunity to consider those who fought for us and provided us with the opportunity to remember them now, in this way, in this country.
The brutality of war, the barbed wire and the bones – these must not be forgotten. Neither must hope be forgotten, for is it not hope – for an end to war, for a future without war, for a more reasonable way of solving differences – that motivated these men as they fought?
Bones and bloodshed, poetry and poppies. Respecting Jonathan Jones’ opinion is what matters most of all.
June Lowe
Brighton
The way the poppies spill from the battlements into the moat will remind many of William Blake’s poem London: “And the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls.” You don’t even need to know Blake to see the blood.
Paul Stephenson
London
Many of Jonathan Jones’s comments might apply to Wilfred Owen’s cultivated, generally “tasteful”, Keatsian verse. Owen rhymes. He uses metre. Imagery. There aren’t many who don’t: but Jones might have chosen a more skeletal poet such as Richard Aldington or Wilfrid Gibson - one who didn’t have the popular emotional uplift that he calls sentimental. One of the finest trench poets, Edmund Blunden, who endured more than most, surviving the Somme and Passchendaele, captured the war in poetry and prose that is a veritable torrent of ceramic poppies. He understood the power of artifice, of beauty indeed, as well as he understood the bones and mud of the battlefield. Not every war requiem has to be atonal.
John Greening
St Neots, Cambridgeshire
Ernst Jünger is not “all pure horror”: in Storm of Steel there’s also camaraderie, heroism, excitement, even exhilaration. More substantially, the catastrophist notion that the war “smashed the modern world off the rails and started a cycle of murderous extremism” overlooks what “the modern world” had been doing in colonial contexts for decades before 1914: the murderous battle of Omdurman (1898) prefigured the Somme, but the victims, being proto-Islamic extremists, get overlooked. Likewise the Herero genocide of 1904-07 anticipated atrocities in Europe and Asia. It might be better to say that, post-1914, murderous extremism came home to roost.
Alan Knight
Emeritus professor of history, Oxford University
Why should the poppies at the Tower of London be viewed, and then judged, as an artwork that somehow fails to tell the truth? They are not there to communicate the horrors and bestiality of war, in the way that Otto Dix’s skull does. Why should they? They are a memorial – a commemoration of the hundreds of thousands of (predominantly) men of these islands who died during the First World War. The poppies bring their deaths to our minds and help us to commit their sacrifice to memory.
Do we condemn Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen because it is not Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est? I hope not.
Philip de Ste Croix
Clayton, West Sussex
Arguably the most worrying outcome of the ceramic poppy installation at the Tower of London is that the taboo on challenging the tainted symbolism of the red poppy is now being enforced even more obsessively than in previous years. This supposed work of art manages to be both overbearing - swamping our sensibilities with a single non-negotiable image; and fragile – composed as it is of brittle and delicate material. In both respects it might be said to reflect the attitude of those who over the course of 2014 have hijacked the debate about the first world war and prevented the nation from having a proper reasoned discussion about the true nature of that terrible conflict.
Historical soul-searching is not something we Brits are good at. Sometimes in life we make bad decisions. When this happens we can either admit it, put our hands up and reverse the decision; or we can exacerbate the situation by doing more of the same. In doing the latter we necessarily construct a kind of edifice of self-delusion and false belief, and this edifice can become so important to our psyche that its collapse is synonymous with the collapse of the psyche, and must therefore be prevented at all costs. Our society is morally rigorous – we are judged harshly on the smallest misdemeanour - yet Somehow the edifice of delusion which we have created around the first world war manages to explain away 888,246 grisly deaths and the criminally insane decisions which brought them about, as some sort of sad political necessity. No-one has ever called us to account as the Germans were called to account, and so the delusions persist. We rename what is essentially murder as sacrifice, implying that there was a moment, somewhere, when each of these young men was actually able to make an informed and heroic choice whether they wished to live or die.
Similarly, most of the revisionist arguments seeking to justify this slaughter are centred around “the greater good” and the implication that Germany would have otherwise conquered and enslaved us all. Like all such arguments, this is one of those reverse-logic postulations which starts from the necessity to prove something and then manipulates the facts to fit, even to the extent of placing so many thousands of horrific deaths in the balance with a highly doubtful selection of what-ifs and letting the what-ifs win.
So perhaps the sea of poppies is not about the war of 1914-18, but about a very different conflict, which is still raging in 2014. I mean, of course, the conflict between those who want us to believe that everything is all right (even if some bad things happen) - that everything that was done in the last 100 years turned out okay in the end, and will continue to do so; and those who know in their hearts and minds that things are not okay – that the events of the past decade, whether about banking, climate change, poverty or war, are signals to us that we need to do things differently. Perhaps a dried-up castle moat full of enormously expensive fake flowers is a very potent symbol after all – just not the one the artist intended.
Nick Moseley
Chesham, Buckinghamshire
