ART OF WWI

Activity

Write a one to two paragraph answer to our unit question, using art as an example. Please reference specific pieces in your answer.

First, you need to describe what the state of art was prior to the war. Make reference to one piece that you think represent this time period. Impressionism, La Belle Époque, and Romanticism, are all good places to start.

Only when you understand what has come before can you understand how people have change.

Second, look at the art and some of the descriptions below to gain an understanding of the radical changes in culture, specifically art.

 Max Beckmann, Sinking of the Titanic, 1912

 Franz Marc, The Wolves (Balkan War), 1913

By 1913, Marc sensed the impending disaster of world events. The Wolves (Balkan War) is a personal allegory of the 1912-13 war that ultimately led to World War I. He no longer used peaceful and gentle animals like horses and deer; instead, he presents a pack of wolves.Marc himself was called to World War I and sent to the front. The great loss of life hurt him greatly, including the many animals that were killed in the war. He wrote to his wife from the battlefield about a painting similar to The Wolves: "it is artistically logical to paint such pictures before a war—but not as stupid reminiscences afterwards, for we must paint constructive pictures denoting the future." This reflects his orientation towards the future and gives The Wolves the function of a warning. Marc was killed at Verdun, France, in 1916.

“We left the schoolrooms, the school desks and benches, and the few short weeks of instruction had bonded us into one great body burning with enthusiasm. Having grown up in an age of security, we all had a nostalgia for the unusual great perils. The war thus seized hold of us like strong liquor. It was under a hail of flowers that we left, drunk on roses and blood. Without a doubt, the war offered us grandeur, strength and gravity. It seemed to us like a virile exploit: the joyous combats of infantrymen in the meadows where blood fell like dew on the flowers." (Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel)

 Max Beckmann, Der Kriegsausbruch (Declaration of War), 1914

Beckmann was in Berlin and was in the street to see the joyful demonstrations and the nationalist fervour provoked by this news both in Berlin and in Paris. A group of passers-by learns the news. Their faces betray their mixed feelings ranging from exaltation to anguish. Thus begins the artist's war chronicle in the form of drawings and engravings in 1914 and 1915.

 Marcel Gromaire, La guerre (War), 1925

Aftermathby Siegfried Sassoon (1919, last stanza)

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack-And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then

As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching backWith dying eyes and lolling heads-those ashen-grey

Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?Have you forgotten yet?...

Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

Conrad Felixmüller, Soldat im Irrenhaus [Soldier in the Madhouse], 1918

 Otto Dix, Self-Portrait, 1914

When the First World War erupted in 1914, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the fall of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part of the Battle of the Somme. He was seriously wounded several times. In 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia. Back to the western front in 1918, he fought in the German Spring offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.

 Otto Dix, Stormtroopers during a Gas Attack, 1924

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and would later describe a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including his famous portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg (The War), published in 1924 by Karl Nierendorf. You can see the whole series on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Otto Dix, Machine Gunners Advancing, 1924

"We are unfeeling dead who, through some dangerous trick of magic, are still able to run and kill. A young Frenchman falls behind; they catch up with him and he puts his hands up; in one of them he is still holding his revolver; we cannot tell whether he wants to shoot or to surrender. A stroke with a shovel splits his face in two. Another seeing this tries to escape, but a bayonet whistles into his back. He jumps in the air and, arms outstretched, stumbles screaming as the bayonet moves up and down in his spine." (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front)

 Henri de Groux, Masques à gaz (Gas Masks)

 Ernst Barlach, The Avenger, 1914

 Albin Egger-Lienz, Den Namenlosen (Those Who Have Lost Their Names), 1914

 Charles de Groux, The Assault, Verdun, c. 1918

 Adolf Erbslöh, Destroyed Forest near Verdun, 1916

 Otto Dix, Trenches, 1917

Georges Leroux, Hell, 1917

 Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919

The battle around Ypres lasted as long as the war itself. This appalling blood-bath was for the Commonwealth troops like Verdun for the French:

an endless carnage in a marshy landscape where the wounded were swallowed up in the mud. 

William Roberts, Gunners pulling cannons at Ypres, c. 1918

"We gingerly crossed the valley of Paddebeek through a hail of bullets, hiding behind the foliage of black poplar trees felled in the bombardment,

and using their trunks as bridges. From time to time one of us disappeared up to their waist in the mud, and if our comrades had not come to their

rescue, holding out their rifle butt, they would certainly have gone under. We ran along the rims of the shell-holes as if we were on the thin edge of a honeycomb. Traces of blood on the surface of some heavy shell-holes told

us that several men had already been swallowed up." (Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel)

 Gino Severini, Visual Synthesis of the Idea: "War", 1914

 Gino Severini, Armored Train, 1915

 John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1918

 Umberto Boccioni, Charge of the lancers, 1915

BLAST Magazine, UK, July 1915

Vorticism was a short-lived but radical movement that emerged in London immediately before the First World War. 'The vortex is the point of

maximum energy', wrote the American poet Ezra Pound, who co-founded the Vorticist journal Blast with Wyndham Lewis in June 1914. The journal

opened with the 'Blast' and 'Bless' manifestos, which celebrate the machine age and Britain as the first industrialised nation. Lewis's painting Workshop epitomises Vorticism's aims, using sharp angles and shifting

diagonals to suggest the geometry of modern buildings. Its harsh colours and lines echo the discordant vitality of the modern city in an 'attack on traditional harmony'. The group's aggressive rhetoric, angular style and

focus on the energy of modern life linked it to Italian Futurism, though it did not share the latter's emphasis on speed and dynamism. Artists associated

with Vorticism included William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, CRW Nevinson and David Bomberg. The First World

War demonstrated the devastating reality of pitting men against machines and Lewis's attempts to revive the movement in 1919 came to nothing.

 C. R. W. Nevinson, Machine-gun, 1915

Apollinaire praised Nevinson as being one who "translates the mechanical aspect of modern warfare where man and machine combine to form a

single force of nature. His painting Machine-gun conveys this idea exactly. Nevinson belongs to the school of the English avant- garde influenced by

both the young Italian and French schools."

 Félix Vallotton, Dans l'ombre, 1916

 Albin Egger-Lienz, Finale, 1918

 Amos Nattini, Inferno, Canto III, 1919

Otto Dix, Transplantation, 1924

 Otto Dix, A Skull, 1924

Marc Chagall, Wounded Soldier, 1914 

 Gottfried Brockmann, The Existence of a Cripple, No. 4 (Krüppeldasein IV), 1922

 Heinrich Hoerle, Monument of the Three Unknown Prostheses, 1930

Works Cited:

Sources and text from Weimar: http://weimarart.blogspot.kr/2011/02/art-of-first-world-war.html