Question

What are some specific examples of literature, art, and music in which artists responded strongly to the devastation of World War I and World War II?

Answer 1

• Art and literature paint the first world war as shockingly brutal and disillusioning. Many artists and writers were involved in the war as soldiers, medics and auxiliary personnel. They witnessed suffering, narrated and visualised modern, industrial violence.
• During and after World War I, flowery Victorian language was blown apart and replaced by more sinewy and R-rated prose styles. In visual art, Surrealists and Expressionists devised wobbly, chopped-up perspectives and nightmarish visions of fractured human bodies and splintered societies slouching toward moral chaos.
• Irony and dissonant humor permeated the music of classical composers such as Alban Berg and Benjamin Britten, a pacifist who parodied marching-band pomposity in his Piano Concert in D.
• Today, some contemporary artists are exploring how stories of reparation and therapy are being used to paper over the actual and metaphoric wounds of 21st-century warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Horace Pippin, a forgotten self-taught painter and a soldier in the 369th Battalion, consisting of African Americans. His naive style provides an arresting contrast to the grimness of war.