Many works by some of the better known traditional artists of World War I are likely to be looking for new homes during its centenary with a few foxed equally undistinguished water colours of grey battleships included.
However, a university project is providing a more interesting contemporary take on the subject.
The project has unveiled a new regiment of Australian and international artists with a profound link with the "Great War " – now enjoying a new popular awareness thanks to the stage play War Horse.
Concrete, an exhibition at the Monash Museum of Art in Melbourne from May 3 to July 21, has added to the stock of collecting opportunities from the war in which 16 million people died and the world learned for the first time what brute mechanised warfare meant, but history has put on a bit of a back burner.
The opportunities tend to be more institutional than domestic because of their size and volume. But a few are manageable none the less.
"Monash", is a name closely connected with the war as Sir John Monash was one of its leading generals. Apparently this is purely coincidental to the venue..
Concrete the exhibition is not to be confused with Concrete Art, the abstract and geometrical art movement which emerged in Europe in the 1930s.
The exhibition has emerged from the university's Anzac Voices 100 Stories, a project of the Monash Faculty of Arts under the direction of Professor Bruce Scates.
According to MUMA's senior curator, Geraldine Barlow, the exhibition draws on the dissection of the concept of commemoration which the faculty has put under the microscope.
Essays in the comprehensive catalogue eloquently articulate how the Great War can be read into the artist's oeuvre, even if at times the curator has drawn a long bow on the subject.
The obviously 'not for sale' exhibition comprises loans from Australian and overseas institutions, some shipped from Europe, as well as works from MUMA's own collection.
The exhibition should provide a lot of inspiration for photographic collectors but contemporary rather than vintage, from which the main historical exhibitions elsewhere will be drawn.
Concrete brings to mind heavy building blocks – some as sea shore defences appear in photographs in the exhibition – and bunkers.
New Zealand born Laurence Aberhart's photographs of war memorials, which help define the exhibition, are the most readily associated World War I material. The artist is represented by Sydney's Darren Knight Gallery.
The more exotic of the overseas inclusions is Carlos Irijalbas drilling core from Guernica, the target of the famous World War II bombing.
Lego features eminently in the work of Ugandan born Justin Trendall's work which is also on show at Sydney's Sarah Cottier Gallery.
The same commercial gallery is simultaneously holding an exhibition by Jamie North of columned pots made out if slag with Spanish moss and native tree fern. Standing at up to two metres high, several have sold at $8000 each.
James Tylor is a promising new Adelaide artist working with inkjet prints.
Callum Morton's work in polyurethane is conscripted to head the up the installation brigade.
From the Milani Gallery's, Tom Nicholson's 9 stacks of prints Comparative Monument (Palestine) follow the similarly less marketable exhibit at the Melbourne Now exhibition at the NGV.
Those artists who were around during the War and many practising into the 1920s enjoyed a big following during their day. But although their work should have been equally less easy to live with, its subject matter was more easy to read.
Gallery shows advertised the inclusion of war artists with great pride even as if pictures of great tanks in action deserved as much pride of place in the lounge room as flower pieces although there were often plenty of poppies being mowed down.
The issue will be whether these will be rescued for posterity after being out of mind for many years.
Some of the work was so ghostly or spiritual that it is completely removed from the current mind set.
Will Longstaff was often high on this content which arose from a generation many members of which sought to contact their loved ones through ouija board sessions and churches devoted to spiritualism.
Longstaff painted Menin Gate, the monument near Ypres in Belgium in 1927 after being at its unveiling and it was immediately purchased by Lord Woolarvington for 2000 guineas and presented to the Australian War Memorial.
One thousand reproductive prints were made and sold for 10 guineas each. It is a mystery where they have all disappeared to. The centenary may well bring some out, if they have not already been jettisoned.
A marked decline in enthusiasm for the subject was shown in the 1980s one of Longstaff's chef d'ouevres, was sold for a reputed $20 and was later hammered at auction for a distressed $2800.
World War I fell out of favour so much that hardly anyone turned a head when portraits of distinguished French generals and commanders of World War I were sold off by the Art Gallery of NSW in a major clean out in August 1996.
Such portraits have at least documentary value as the exhibition The Great War in Portraits that has just closed at the National Portrait Museum in Trafalgar Square show.
The NPG's exhibition included a portrait of Marshall Foch who was the main strategist behind the repulse of the Germans during the Battle of the Marne.
The NPG exhibition also included as a loan from the Imperial War Museum portrait by Colin Hill of Captain A Jacka, billed as Australia's most famous WWI soldier, who was awarded the VC for his actions at Gallipoli.
World War I is still being put conveniently on the back burner over the years as those alive who can remember it fade away.
The Leeds City Art Gallery had to take down its stunning photograph mural from the collection of the Imperial War Museum, showing forces marching through the mud in some foreign field taken by an anonymous Australian member of the Imperial Armed Forces.
This is because it conflicts with a prize British art show it has been awarded. It has made up for this somewhat, with an exhibition devoted to landscape and the manner in which it blackened as consciousness of the war intensified..
Henry Lamb's work has not been supported Down Under because the Australian-born artist was with the British Army and left Australia while young.
He devoted much of his career to portraiture although in Palestine, some delightful watercolour desert flower studies he did turn up for mere three figure sums from time to time.
Australian War Memorial's major contributions are centred on Gallipoli, the opening of its World War I galleries delayed till well after the centenary of the outbreak of the war. World War II came first it seems with the 70th anniversary of Normandy and an outstanding exhibition devoted to the second travelling around Australia.
Concrete is a largely male domain but some of the best prices for World War I painting has been for women artists such as the valiant Iso Rae one of whose chefs d'oueves (not a war painting though) went ironically to a German buyer for €10,000 plus 25 per cent.
But World War I German art itself was far more incisive, and grossly more expensive, no pun intended, as in the words of one of the many dramas it incited, it was not a lovely war - a point better made by people like Otto Dix and George Grosz and not Norman Lindsay.
