Gas Alert

Amongst William Roberts' most collectible and celebrated works are his wartime drawings. Depicting the First World War and life at the front, Roberts’ drawings serve as a powerful recording of one of the most devastating events in 20th Century history and stands as one of the most original and significant contributions to British War Art. Twelve of his wartime drawings are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.

Roberts was to spend two long years at the front and was left weary by the monotony and horror of warfare. In April 1916 Roberts was called-up for active service, joining the Royal Field Artillery as a gunner. First located at barracks in Woolwich it was not long before Roberts embarked for France, where he was posted to the Vimy Ridge, later fighting at Arras and Ypres.

Gas Alert, comes from one of the artist's most furtive periods, executed a year after the Great War ended, when Roberts had greater access to the materials he lacked in the trenches. The top two record prices for Roberts’ works on paper at auction, War Celebrations and The Wiring Party, were both executed in the same year.

In Gas Alert,Roberts depicts a group of British soldiers, the title an ominous reminder of the impending threat they constantly faced. Layering and overlapping his figures Roberts’ reduces space and perspective. Here, the sense of the individual is abolished with Roberts presenting them instead as a unified mass, or one being, emphasised by their systematic uniforms and helmets, set at jaunty angles. Their gas masks reveal themselves as a series of tubular shapes that emerge from their gas mask bags, worn around their necks, to safeguard them from the threat of toxic gases and airborne pollutants. These cylindrical shapes are reminiscent of the ‘tubular’ style of Fernand Léger, who’s Cubist work, along with that of Picasso and Bomberg’s, played a great influence on Roberts’ work, felt most strongly in his pre-war Vorticist period. Roberts, himself encountered the terrifying gas attacks by the Germans, recalling:

‘On that first night when they bombarded us with 'Wizz-bangs' and gas shells, I spent the night in the shelter of the gun-pit under cover of a tarpaulin wrapped in my blanket and without a gas mask, listening to the thud, thud of those gas shells hitting the ground above’ (W. Roberts, 4.5 Howitzer Gunner RFA: Memories of the War to End War 1914–1918, London, 1978).

We are very grateful to David Cleall and Bob Davenport for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.

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