One of the things they never tell you about the WWI dazzle ship painting thing is that it made it hard to tell how big a painting of a dazzle ship is.
I had to dig around in three years worth of National Gallery of Canada Instagram to find an installation image of Edward Wadsworth’s 3-meter tall Dazzleships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). So thank you, @arunprasaad, for your service.
I was wondering why Wadsworth painted this—I was about to say “so big,” but if you’d spent the war painting 2,000 actual ships, 10 feet would seem like a major downsizing. Oh hey, speaking of scale, he put Little Guys with brushes in there.
But I reading the 2015 Liverpool Biennial Journal about Dazzle and its history, I now understand that it was an awarded commission to commemorate the Canadian involvement in the war. And that the Memorial Committe basically said No Modernists, No Cubists. So Wadsworth, determined to revive the pre-war manifesto of the Vorticists, made a naturalistic painting of an abstract painting project.
Meanwhile, there was actually a time when the National Gallery emphasized the scale of their pictures (though tbh, that was partly to use square footage to justify the price they paid for their Barnett Newman.)
Even a couple of years after Wadsworth, Gerald Murphy had no trouble in communicating the scale of his 18 x 12 foot lost masterpiece, Boatdeck (1924):
The scale of which, it must be said, is rather hard to gauge from a picture of the picture alone. I once missed an eBay auction for an old photo of Boatdeck by a day. I’ve been crushed ever since.
Previously, related: A Domestic Proposal: at home with Voice of Fire
What I looked at today: Gerald Murphy; Giant Picasso Painting By Prince Alexander Schervachidze