The First World War, which was fought between 1914 and 1918, had an immediate impact on popular culture. Over a hundred years since the war ended, the war has resulted in many artistic and cultural works from all sides and nations that participated in the war. This included artworks, books, poems, films, television, music, and, more recently, video games. Many of these pieces were created by soldiers who took part in the war.

Art The years of warfare were the backdrop for art, which is now preserved and displayed in such institutions as the Imperial War Museum in London, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Official war artists were commissioned by the British Ministry of Information and the authorities of other countries.

After 1914, avant-garde artists began to consider and investigate many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, "The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe."Cohen, Aaron J. (2008). Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917, abstract. In this same period, academic and realist artists continued to produce new work. Traditional artists and their artwork developed side by side with the shock of the new as culture reinvented itself in relationships with new technologies.Hughes, Robert. (1981). The Shock of the New, p. 15.

Some artists responded positively to the changes wrought by war. C. R. W. Nevinson, associated with the Futurists, wrote that "This war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness."British Art Since 1900, Frances Spaulding, 1986 His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote that Nevinson's painting La Mitrailleuse (now in the Tate collection) 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.'Sickert, The Burlington Magazine, September/October 1916.

Pacifist artists also responded to the war in powerful ways: Mark Gertler's major painting, Merry-Go-Round, was created in the midst of the war years and was described by D. H. Lawrence as "the best modern picture I have seen"(Letters, 9 October 1916) and depicts the war as a futile and mechanistic nightmare.

The commissions related to the official war artists programmes insisted on the recording of scenes of war. This undermined confidence in progressive styles as commissioned artists conformed to official requirements. The inhumanity of destruction across Europe also led artists to question whether their own campaigns of destruction against tradition had not, in fact, also been inhuman. These tendencies encouraged many artists to "return to order" stylistically.

The Cubist vocabulary itself was adapted and modified by the Royal Navy during "the Great War." The Cubists aimed to revolutionize painting — and reinvented the art of camouflage on the way.Glover, Michael. The Times. March 10, 2007.

British marine painter Norman Wilkinson invented the concept of "dazzle painting" -— a way of using stripes and disrupted lines to confuse the enemy about the speed and dimensions of a ship.Fisher, Mark. "Secret history: how surrealism can win a war," The Times. January 8, 2006. Wilkinson, then a lieutenant commander on Royal Navy patrol duty, implemented the precursor of "dazzle" on SS Industry; and in August 1917 HMS Alsatian became the first Navy ship to be painted with a dazzle pattern. Solomon J. Solomon advised the British Army on camouflage. In December 1916 he established a camouflage school in Hyde Park In 1920, he published a book on the subject, Strategic Camouflage. Alan Beeton advanced the science of camouflage.The Influence of the War on art, Frank Rutter, in The Great War, ed. H.W. Wilson & J.A. Hammerton, London 1919

An early influence of the War on artists in the United Kingdom was the recruiting campaign of 1914–1915. Around a hundred posters were commissioned from artists by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, of which two and a half million copies were distributed across the country. Private companies also sponsored recruitment posters: Remember Belgium, by the Belgian-born Frank Brangwyn and The Only Road for an Englishman by Gerald Spencer Pryse were two notable examples produced on behalf of the London Electric Railways. Although Brangwyn produced over 80 poster designs during the War, he was not an official war artist.Libby Horner, Frank Brangwyn. A Mission to Decorate Life, The Fine Art Society & Liss Fine Art, p137 His grim poster of a Tommy bayoneting an enemy soldier (“Put Strength in the Final Blow: Buy War Bonds”) caused deep offence in both Britain and Germany. The Kaiser himself is said to have put a price on Brangwyn's head after seeing the image.

Brangwyn states in 1917 that Will Dyson's cartoons were "an international asset to this present war." His exhibition of "War Satires" in 1915 was followed by his being appointed an Australian official war artist.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1915 was noted for the paucity and general poor quality of paintings on war themes, but The Fighting-Line from Ypres to the Sea by W. L. Wyllie was noted for its bold experimentation in showing a bird's-eye view of war from an aeroplane. George Clausen's symbolist allegory Renaissance was the most memorable painting of that 1915 exhibition, contrasting ruins and oppression with dignity and optimism.The Influence of the War on art, Frank Rutter, in The Great War, ed. H.W. Wilson & J.A. Hammerton, London 1919 When exhibited in the spring of 1916, Eric Kennington's portrayal of exhausted soldiers The Kensingtons at Laventie caused a sensation. Painted in reverse on glass, the painting was widely praised for its technical virtuosity, iconic colour scheme, and its ‘stately presentation of human endurance, of the quiet heroism of the rank and file’.Paul Gough (2010) ‘A Terrible Beauty’: British Artists in the First World War (Sansom and Company) p.20. Kennington returned to the front in 1917 as an official war artist.

The general failure of academic painting, in the form of the Royal Academy, to respond adequately to the challenges of representing the War was made clear by reaction to the 1916 Summer Exhibition. Although popular taste acclaimed Richard Jack's sentimental Return to the Front: Victoria Railway Station, 1916, the academicians and their followers were stuck in the imagery of past battle pictures of the Napoleonic and Crimean eras. Arrangements of soldiers, officers waving swords, and cavalrymen swaggering seemed outdated to those at home, and risible to those with experience of the front. A wounded New Zealander standing in front of a painting of a cavalry charge commented that "one man with a machine-gun would wipe all that lot out."

Charles Masterman, head of the British War Propaganda Bureau, acting on the advice of William Rothenstein, appointed Muirhead Bone as Britain's first official war artist in May 1916.Vale Royal Borough Council. (2005). "Whitegate Conservation Area Update," p. 11. In April 1917, James McBey was appointed official artist for Egypt and Palestine, and William Orpen was sent to France. Orpen's work was criticised for superficiality in the pursuit of perfectionism: "in the tremendous fun of painting he altogether forgot the ghastliness of war".

The most popular painting in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1917 was Frank O. Salisbury's Boy 1st Class John Travers Cornwell V.C. depicting a youthful act of heroism. But of more artistic importance in 1917 was the establishment on 5 March of the Imperial War Museum and the foundation during the summer of the Canadian War Memorials Fund by Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere and significant work by Australian war artists.

David Bomberg's experiences of mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches - as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme - permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age. This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version. Percy Delf Smith created realistic depictions of his time in the trenches and more fantastical depictions based on medieval dance of death imagery.

At the 1918 Royal Academy exhibition, Walter Bayes's monumental canvas The Underworld depicted figures sheltering in a London Underground station during an air raid. Its sprawling alien figures predate Henry Moore's studies of sheltering figures in the Tube during the Blitz of World War II.

See also the Comité des Étudiants Américains de l'École des Beaux-Arts Paris.

Painting Walter Richard Sickert's The Integrity of Belgium, painted in October 1914, was, when exhibited in Burlington House in January 1915 at an exhibition in aid of the Red Cross, recognised as the first oil painting exhibited of a battle incident in the Great War.

John Singer Sargent

Among the great artists who tried to capture an essential element of war in painting was the Society portraitist John Singer Sargent. In his large painting Gassed and in many watercolors, Sargent depicted scenes from the Great War.Little, Carl. (1998). The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent, p. 135

Wyndham Lewis British painter Wyndham Lewis was appointed as an official war artist for both the Canadian and British governments, beginning work in December 1917 after Lewis participated in the Third Battle of Ypres. For the Canadians, he painted A Canadian Gun-Pit (1918, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) from sketches made on Vimy Ridge. For the British, he painted one of his best-known works, A Battery Shelled (1919, Imperial War Museum)(see ), drawing on his own experience in charge of a 6-inch howitzer at Ypres. Lewis exhibited his war drawings and some other paintings of the war in an exhibition, "Guns", in 1918.

Alfred Munnings

An unlikely war artist was Sir Alfred Munnings, who is best known as a painter of purebred racehorses; but he turned his painter's skills to the task of capturing images of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade in the war.Norfolk Museums: Watering Horses, Canadian Troops in France, 1917; Art Gallery of new South Wales: A Canadian Soldier His mounted portrait of General Jack Seely (later Lord Mottistone) on his charger Warrior achieved acclaim.Scott, Brough. "The mighty Warrior, who led one of history's last-ever cavalry charges," The Telegraph (London). March 23, 2008. Forty-five of his canvasses were exhibited at the "Canadian War Records Exhibition" at the Royal Academy,Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum: the artist including Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron at Moreuil Wood in March 1918. Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew of Lord Strathcona's Horse cavalry was awarded the Victoria Cross for leading the attack.Canadian War Museum: Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron; Dictionary of Canadian Biography: Gordon Flowerdew

Less well known are paintings which feature teams of workhorses in the staging areas behind the front lines with the Canadian Forestry Corps.Peter Nahum, Leicester Galleries: Archive: Draft Horses, Lumber Mill in the Forest of Dreux ; Canadian War Museum: Moving the Truck Another Yard The artist later recalled these days in his autobiography: My next move was unexpected and unlooked-for. Amongst the officers who came to have a look, as the news spread that my pictures were to be seen on the walls of ... [headquarters] ..., there were two colonels, both in the Canadian Forestry Corps ... persuading me that I must go with them and see the companies of Canadian Forestry who were then working in the many beautiful forests of France ....Munnings, Alfred. (1950). An Artist's Life, pp. 313-315.