THE BIG PICTURE
On the evening of January 4, 1919, the prominent art critic Paul Konody met British press baron Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, for dinner at a London restaurant. The city was awash with excitement over the official opening that evening of the Canadian War Memorials—the first large exhibition of World War I art. Max Aitken, the Canadian-born owner of the British newspaper the Daily Express, had come up with the idea for the exhibition—an ambitious effort to portray the war from Canada’s point of view—and had tapped Konody to serve as the artistic adviser for the project and Rothermere to head the fund that would raise money for the effort. The result was more than 1,000 works, some of them still drying on the gallery walls at Burlington House, the home of the Royal Academy of Arts and the venue for the exhibition.
As the exhibition opened in London that
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