James Fox, the author of British Art and the First World War: 1914–1924, is probably best known in Britain as the personable and enthusiastic presenter of a number of fine visual arts documentaries for BBC Television. Although by Fox's own admission the book is based on his doctoral dissertation, which took him more than eight years to complete (thus, as he wryly observes, possessing “the dubious honour of lasting twice as long as the war itself” [xi]), and is evidently aimed at an academic readership, he manages to achieve that rare combination of erudition and lightness of touch, which makes his first major publication a pleasure to read.

Fox makes his aims clear at the outset. Setting out to counter the still-prevalent notion that the outbreak of war in 1914 sounded the death knell for British art, and to shift the focus away from familiar “high art” images by artists such as John Lavery, Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Eric Kennington, he is unashamedly more “interested in art's social status and function than in its aesthetic qualities” (8). (Readers craving a practitioner's insights into the creative process in wartime are advised to turn instead to Paul Gough's 2010 book, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War. A more recent publication, Toby Thacker's 2014 book British Culture and the First World War, although structured chronologically, also remains firmly focused on individual painters, writers and musicians.) What provides this volume with its real value in an already crowded field is its detailed yet lively analysis of the complex network of often overlooked “people, organizations and practices which constituted the art world in wartime Britain” (8)—“far removed from the familiar narratives of trauma in the trenches,” but just as important, Fox contends, “as those front-line epiphanies in shaping the art that ultimately emerged from the conflict” (28).

Not only artists—and unsurprisingly, Fox puts popular illustrators, poster artists, amateurs and old-fashioned naturalistic painters on an equal footing with the avant-garde—but also “collectors, dealers, curators, administrators, critics, publishers and scholars … museums, galleries, artists' organizations, art schools and art-related businesses … government policies, public discourses and private gestures” (8) are thus subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny. Deploying an impressive array of documentary evidence, he argues persuasively that after a deeply unpromising start, the art world was soon mobilized, both from within and without, to play a crucial part not only in the British war effort but in forging a far closer relationship between art and society than had existed before 1914, one that would, moreover, persist well into the postwar period.

An abundance of potentially dry facts and figures are fleshed out and thus made meaningful by reference to under-studied or forgotten individuals and unfamiliar anecdotes, many of them simultaneously amusing, surprising, and poignant. We are reminded, for example, that Hungarian-born society portraitist Philip de Lázsló was accused (and indeed imprisoned) for being a spy; that Howard Kemp-Prosser's pioneering ideas about art therapy found expression in the painting of an officer's ward in encouragingly spring-like colors (as evidenced by a 1918 paint advertisement); and that Bert Thomas's immensely popular 1914 cartoon Arf a ‘mo’ Kaiser!, which adorned every packet of cigarettes sent to the front, so annoyed the Germans that British prisoners of war were banned from smoking!

I do, inevitably, have some less favorable comments. For one thing, the layout of this book can be frustrating. The eleven color plates are gathered together (undoubtedly for stark financial reasons) in the center of the volume, cutting chapter 5 unceremoniously in half, and one wonders why the two John Nash images (one representing a “War Picture” and the other a “Peace Picture,” which Fox, presumably prompted by Grace Brockington's 2010 book Above the Battlefield: British Modernism and the Peace Movement 1900–1918, rightly sees as two sides of the same coin) are not placed side by side for ease of comparison. Moreover, the quality of some of the black-and-white images is so poor that it renders the comparison Fox draws between Nash's We are Making a New World of 1918 and William Rider-Rider's 1917 photograph Passchendaele, Now A Field of Mud almost risible. It is interesting, too, that Fox chooses not to mention the fact that Nash's painting was selected for the cover of the government publication British Artists at the Front, thus undermining his argument that the painting is a straightforward “condemnation of the conflict” and providing further evidence of his lack of interest in a nuanced scrutiny of individual artworks. Surely it is precisely because this painting remains fundamentally ambiguous in its messages that it has had such iconic and enduring power—one reason, no doubt, that it was chosen, paradoxically, to adorn the cover of this book.

In addition, Fox's habit of summarizing his argument so far at regular intervals is, it seems to me, overly pedantic, more than a little irritating and ultimately—given the relatively modest length of his text—unnecessary. I was also struck by his occasional failure to pursue potentially fruitful areas of enquiry (albeit not strictly within his remit): notably, the relationship between war art and religion, the thorny issue of gender (admittedly already well explored by Sue Malvern and Gabriel Koureas), the conflation of the terms “German or Jewish” (43), and the use by Laura Knight of the term “holocaust” in a World War I context (127). Although Fox generally refrains from passing value judgements, words such as “exploited” and “false” occasionally creep in, but without further comment. The claim, moreover, he makes at the end of the book that British artists' role during World War I was more decisive than during World War II is more than questionable. And for a book that otherwise reads so cogently, the concluding paragraph is oddly abrupt and unsatisfactory.

Last but not least, given the book's focus, its title seems curiously inappropriate. Wouldn't something like “British Visual Culture during and after the First World War” have been closer to the mark? But it may well be that the decision to use the more circumscribed term “British Art” was intentional, expressly designed to ensure that those who persist in ignoring the burgeoning field of Visual Culture Studies be forced to rethink their position.