Visual Source 20.5: The Aftermath of War

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Among the many outcomes of the Great War was the presence in every European country of disillusioned, maimed, and disfigured veterans, many of them literally “men without faces.” For some intellectuals and artists, they represented the fundamentally flawed civilization that had given rise to such carnage. Often neglected or overlooked, such men were reminders of a terrible past that others wanted to forget. The German artist Otto Dix (1891–1969), who served in his country’s military forces throughout the war and was seriously wounded, portrayed this situation in a 1920 painting called Prague Street, shown here as Visual Source 20.5. In 1924, he joined with other artists to mount an exhibition entitled “No More War.” His antiwar activism later earned Dix the enmity of the Hitler regime, which fired him from his academic position and destroyed some of his paintings. Artistically, Dix worked in a style known as the new objectivity, which focused heavily on the horrendous outcomes of the war. It deliberately included subject matter that was upsetting and even ugly, and it made little attempt to create a unified image, preferring to present disconnected “particles of experience.”

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Visual Source 20.5 The Aftermath of War (Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VC Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
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