In the Air (from The Great War: Britain's Efforts and Ideals - Building Aircraft) by C.R.W. Nevinson, lithograph

Nevinson made this print in 1917 as part of an ambitious multi-artist lithographic project known as 'The Great War: Britain's Efforts and Ideals' - a propagandist publishing scheme commissioned by the government’s Department of Information. For the 'Efforts' side of the series, nine artists each made six prints on assigned themes. Nevinson's theme was Building Aircraft, while others included Making Soldiers, Making Sailors (curiously there was no ‘Making Airmen’), Making Guns, and Building Ships. The aim of the series was to persuade people to contribute to the war effort, as serving personnel in the Armed Forces, factory workers or fabricators.

At this time, lithography in Britain was a lesser-utilised print medium than etching and drypoint, wood engraving and woodcut, associated more with commercial design and illustration than with fine art printmaking. Nevinson's preferred print medium was drypoint, a technique he took up in 1916 for 12 prints which recalled his experiences in wartime Belgium and France (while volunteering as an ambulance driver in 1914-15), which he exhibited to critical acclaim, encouraging his appointment as an Official War Artist. He had briefly tried lithography in 1912, under the instruction of master-printer Francis Ernest Jackson, before returning to it in 1917, taking up the Efforts and Ideals project Jackson had proposed for the Department of Information's War Propaganda Bureau. A co-founder of the Senefelder Club for the Advancement of Lithography (est. 1908), in the first quarter of the century Jackson tried, and ultimately failed, to popularise fine art lithography, and it was not until after the Second World War that it began to flourish in Britain. Nonetheless, for this First World War project he succeeded in persuading the government that the medium could be an ideal means of widely disseminating propagandist fine art. Lithography had the advantage of yielding large print editions without the surface degradation that occurred with, for example, Nevinson’s favoured drypoint printing (if the plate was not steel-faced, the ‘burrs’ of the incised metal would be easily worn away, limiting the number of impressions). The Efforts and Ideals project was also practical to implement: rather than typically drawing directly onto heavy limestone slabs with a crayon, artists were invited to do so with greater ease onto transfer paper, before their designs were transposed by Jackson onto stone and then printed, proofed and published. First exhibited at the Fine Art Society, London, in July 1917, the series went on to be widely displayed at other venues across the UK and Allied nations, each print published as an edition of 200 signed and 100 unsigned impressions. Nevinson made his drawings for Building Aircraft in June 1917, a month before returning to France as an Official War Artist. The resulting suite of six prints represents aircraft manufacture (Making the Engine, Acetylene Welder) and assembly (Assembling Parts), being airborne (In the Air, Banking at 4000 Feet) and, finally, aerial operations against the enemy (Swooping Down on a Taube). While two of the factory subjects evidence women's unprecedented and substantial contribution to aircraft manufacture, soaring aerial perspectives authentically recall Nevinson’s earliest experiences of flight. On 19 June 1917 Nevinson took his first flight with Air Vice Marshal Sir Sefton Brancker in a BE2C reconnaissance biplane over Hendon, and later concluded that ‘in all modesty I still think my aeroplane pictures are the finest work I have done. The whole newness of vision and the excitement of it infected my work and gave it an enthusiasm which can be felt’. In the Air celebrates a bird’s-eye view of vast patchwork fields receding into the horizon – a landscape perspective Nevinson had not directly encountered before. Banking at 4000 Feet places us in the rear, passenger, seat of the cockpit, as if sharing Nevinson’s vertiginous experience of the aircraft sharply banking to the starboard side. The passenger’s hand, exposed to the air and grasping part of the airframe as it turns, amplifies a sense of excitement and precarity in the scene. Signed and numbered 24. Purchased from Peter Nahum in 1978. Crown Copyright: expired / RAF Museum.