Behind the Twisted Wire explores how artists, who served at the Front were affected by World War I. This is NOT just another war book but an attempt to look at the soldier-artists and the commissioned war artists and to see how their lives were changed by their experiences in the war. Two of them, Archibald Nicoll and John Weeks, had an important influence on post-war NZ artists as they taught at art schools in Christchurch and Auckland.

It is also, through the lives of these men, especially discussing the role as artists pre-war with their life in the 1920s, that we show how the war affected their lives and their art.

Very few of the paintings used in the book are on public display – some do appear occasionally in exhibitions but most war paintings are in the storerooms of National Archives or in the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

It is a book which poses numerous questions about the artists and about New Zealanders and their attitudes and roles in the war. Among these questions are:

• Why did Moore-Jones’ painting ‘Simpson’ and his donkey become such an iconic study of the war?

• Why did it take so long for Dick Henderson, the Auckland school teacher, to be recognised as the stretcher bearer/donkey handler in that famous painting?

• Why are most of Moore-Jones’ paintings now in the Australian National War Museum in Canberra, and not in New Zealand?

• How did an artist like Nugent Welch, who was a landscape painter who focused on the beauty of the environment, come to create paintings on the horror of trench warfare?

• How did war artists cope with army censorship on the subjects they could paint?

• In Butler’s case, what were his beliefs that he incorporated into his paintings?

• What symbolism did these artists use?

• Why are there no surviving paintings by Captain Alfred Pearse, the third war artist?

• How did the war incapacitate Arthur Lloyd so that he never reached his full potential as an artist?

• How did Walter Bowring capture the ‘end of innocence’ in New Zealand about the war?

• Why was John Weeks given Field Punishment No2 and what affect did this have on his life and art?

• Why did Francis McCracken become a recluse and an almost forgotten artist in Edinburgh?

• Are these World War I artworks art or documentary treasures?

• How did this World War I art collection become forgotten in the basement of the National Art Gallery?

These are just some of the questions that emerge in this hugely important and very timely book. Both the text and the paintings reproduced in the book will bring these issues alive and will offer a whole new perspective of how artists recorded the war and how the lives of those who served were altered for ever.