Avant-garde

expressionismcubismfuturism

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. ...We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto del Futurismo, 1909

Luigi Russolo, The Revolt 1911

Wyndham Lewis founded Blast Magazine, 1914

Ferdinand Léger, Soldiers playing cards, 1917

Malevich, Kazimir (1878-1935) - The Knife Grinder

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Bursting Shell, 1915

Norman Wilkinson inventor of dazzle camouflage

E. Wadsworth, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, 1919

Gino Severini, Armored Train, 1915

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, La Mitralleuse, 1915

Reality

"At that moment, another whistling sound rang out up in the air; we all felt it, our hearts in our mouths, this one's for us. Then a huge, deafening din - the shell had landed right in the midst of us.

Half-dazed, I got to my feet. In the huge shell-hole, machine-gun cartridge belts set off by the explosion glowed with a crude pink light. They lit up the heavy smoke where a mass of twisted blackened bodies lay and the shadows of survivors were running away in every direction. At the same time many appalling screams of pain and appeals for help could be heard.

The dark mass of people turning around the bottom of this glowing, smoking cauldron opened out for a second almost like the vision of a hellish nightmare, the deepest abyss of horror."

Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel, 1920

Otto Dix, Trenches, 1917

Claude Shepperson, Advanced Dressing Station, 1917

M. Bone, Waiting for the Wounded at a Collecting Station in the Field on the Somme at Montauban, 1915

Otto Dix, Wonded Soldier, 1916

Otto Dix, Shock Troops with Gas Masks, 1916

William Orpen, Zonnebeke, 1918

C. R. W. Nevinson, Paths of Glory, 1917

Adolf Erbslöh, Destroyed Forest near Verdun, 1916

Otto Dix, Transplantation, 1924

Otto Dix, Players, 1920

H. Hörle, Monument of the Three Unknown Prostheses, 1930

Otto Dix, War Triptych, 1929-32