Otto Dix & Trite Poppies?

The Tower of London poppies are fake, trite and inward-looking – a Ukip-style memorial

Four million people will flock to see the 888,246 ceramic poppies deposited in the Tower’s moat to mark Remembrance Day. It’s disturbing that, 100 years on, we can only mark this terrible war as a nationalistic tragedy

Jonathan Jones - Guardian 28/10/2014


Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas!Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Jonathan Jones on art + First world war

History and all its grisly facts are worth more than the illusion of memory
Cameron is wrong. Poppies muffle the truth about world war one

Jonathan Jones - Guardian 31/10/2014