It begins not with an artwork but with a helmet. Three helmets, to be precise: rusted, dented, shattered sheets of metal that can’t have offered much protection to the wretches wearing them on the Western Front.
These are the first objects we encounter in Tate Britain’s stunning and unforgettable new exhibition, Aftermath, which marks the centenary of the First World War. With plain-speaking eloquence, they evoke the show’s central theme – that, between 1916 and 1932, artists in Britain, Germany and France didn’t engage in pointless aesthetic game-playing, but responded, head-on, to a new, dreadful reality, in vital, essential art.
The First World War, of course, blew everything apart: not just...