Scar Tissue

Ryan Vu sends along a link from Dennis Cooper's blog, The Weaklings, about facial prosthesis in WWI, a topic that Bitter Laughter broached early in its life. This post has a number of nice images, but I should warn you that they are a bit gory. To the right is an Otto Dix painting showing a facial injury.

The officers had a hard time explaining the concept of a machine gun or the power of an artillery shell to young soldiers who hadn't seen them. A soldier might stick his head out quickly to peek over the trench wall and get his nose shot off, or his chin or his cheek or his eyes and so on. This was a common occurrence on the front. Doctors had no idea how to deal with this swell of facial injuries.

These soldiers were called "The Men with Broken Faces" or "gueules cassées". There were so many of them during and after the war that in some combatant countries, a number of benches were painted blue indicating that the man sitting there would be distressing to look at. They endured total social isolation and alienation. Their faces were taken away from them and transformed on the battlefield to resemble the mud-churned pits of the trenches themselves. These men were the quintessential social pariahs of the day, not only for their specific disfigurement, but because their faces directly embodied the horrors of war and quite literally bore the inescapable reality of what we are capable of doing to each other. They often only found solace in each other and gave up any hope of leading a normal life. A unique brotherhood was formed where they pressed for their right to have underground social places of their own where they could be together without frightening the general public. Some of the veterans even took their families and started their own small communities far away from general society.

Part of what fascinates me about the facial prosthesis of the "Great" War is that it is in some ways the most extreme and spectacular form of prosthesis that proliferated after the war. I think it's hard to recover just how mended the streets of Europe looked in the mid 1920s--how many people would have donned crutches, fake arms, etc. But what's really striking about the facial prosthesis is that it is a cipher of the insane distance that science created between technologies of destruction and technologies of reconstruction. WWI inaugurated the century of technology and technological warfare, and the facial prosthesis that followed the war is a sign of just how gruesome this war was. And since we tend to think of World Wars through one of two images--mushroom clouds or gas chambers--the image of the reconstructed face is a reminder of all those figures that physically survived into the century, carrying the wounds of Continent on their bodies.

Art Class - George Grosz

I plan tomorrow to write the follow-up to Friday's post on punk rock careerism. In the meantime, I give you another installment of Art Class.

This week's bitter laughter image, entitled "Suicide," comes from George Grosz (1893-1959).

Like last Otto Dix, the subject of the last Art Class installment, Grosz was a participant in the First World War, an experience that was to leave a lasting mark upon his art. After the war, Grosz joined the German Communist Party (KPD), but left a year later after visitng Russia, where he met both Trotsky and Lenin.
The 1920s saw Grosz's art work destroyed (like Dix) after he allegedly insulted the German army. In order to escape the rule of the Nazis, Grosz left Germany in 1932, settling in New York, where he stayed until the final days of his life. He became a naturalized citizen in the 1950s, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954.

Grosz's art resembles Dix's in its content. Largely Grosz is remembered as a satirist ofWeimar Germany and his unflinching look at its people. His early work has all the formal bravado of Dada, but what makes him perhaps distinctive from the diverse array of talented modernists working Berlin in the 1920s is that his work seems at times prescient of the imminent comeuppance of another art form--the cartoon. The way in which Grosz deploys the charicature, however, prevents most viewers from assimilating his human forms to that medium, largely because the backgrounds of these paintings contextualize the people in them in such a way that the flatness of the people is not immediately legible.
This is seen best in "Grey Day" (1921) and "Republican Automatons" (1920). In "Grey Day," (left) a worker, maimed soldier, business man, and a fourth figure stand are set amid a factory setting. The human figures are given exaggeratedly different features; while the soldier is more or less realistically portrayed, the worker is faceless--a mere geometry. The two walking figures move in direct lines to the left and right of the canvas, and though the scene has depth, it is accomplished despite the flatness of these movements. The flatness of these characters is most bluntly put by the businessman in the foreground, who has no depth. Set amid the factoryscape, these figures and their apparent incongruity to each other is disturbing.
The cityscape is also a prominent feature in "Republican Automatons," (right) where all the human figures are overly rounded, blank mannequins. Their thoughts are fed to them, and their actions prompted by the gears at the lower right, suggesting the utter emptiness of a seemingly meaningful gesture--the waving of the flag. The city scape is again a conspicuous feature, suggesting that somehow the city is to blame for the citizenry's inability to self-actuate.
Other of Grosz's pieces that resonate with me are his drawings. Here the cartoonishness of his work really comes out, and the bleakness of the black and white brings home the utter absurdity of inter-war Germany, to say nothing of inter-war Europe as a whole.

Late in life, Grosz was to depict the Nazi era (cf. his Hitler painting, "Cain, or Hitler in Hell"), but by far his most successful work was his efforts to depict all aspects of Weimar society--soldier, socialists, prostitutes, military doctors, aristocrats, etc.

Galleries of his work can be found here, here and here.

Wednesday Art Class

A little info on Otto Dix, the creator of this week’s image, “Prager Street.”

From Wikipedia: Otto Dix (December 2, 1891 - July 25, 1969) was a German painter and printmaker. Noted for his ruthless depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war, he is one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).

Dix was an interesting character. He was a decorated German military officer during the WWI (where he was wounded several times), but made a name for himself after the war as an avant garde artist of the Dadaist sort. He was prolific through the 1920s, but was deemed a degenerate artist by the Nazis, who burned a number of his paintings. He was employed by the Nazi government to paint properly German landscapes, conscripted to serve the Motherland during WWII, captured by the French, and eventually left to live out his life in post-war Europe, where he continued to detail the lives of those that the war spared, however maimed.

Especially impressive are Dix’s “War” etchings, which he completed in 1924, many of which can be seen here. These etchings, which are indebted to Goya's war paintings, don't flinch from the ugliness of warfare. They include depictions of ariel bombing, rape, chemical warefare, and disfigurement. As etchings, these pieces avoid the trap of over-aestheticizing --and thus glorifying--the bodies mangled by the war. (See "Meal Time in the Trenches," left.)

The "War" etchings differ from much of Dix's output, which often features multimedia (collage) and vibrant colors. Whereas the "War" series works under an obligation to the physical reality of the times, much of Dix's work combines an adherence to the physical realities of post-war Europe with a kind of neurotic, grotesque and even nightmarish perspective that highlights the interior, psychological aspects of inter-war Europe. On the right is a painting entitled, "The Skat Players," from 1920. It depicts several military officers engaging in mundane activity--playing cards--but irrevocably disfigured. Arms, eyes, legs, noses, and even a heart are replaced by the machinery of Europe, which has atomized them.

Even where his work is not explicitly filled by the content of war, as in his portraits, there is an uncanny oddness to his work (some great examples can be seen here). Often set amid unfamiliar backdrops, the subjects of his portraits evince a kind of inner stupidity or madness, as slumping bodies project blank expressions toward the viewer. In some paintings, we leave the sad world of the war's practitioners and enter the even sadder world of the aristocracy, whose ugliness is perhaps even more jarring than the spectacle of the victim.


Dix's work veers close to Surrealism at times, and as the years went on, he lost some of the modernist flare that gave his paintings their power. But on the whole, he left a tremendous legacy testifying to a world riven by its inability to control the the tools of modernity that it had forged.

I offer this tiny history here both for my own benefit and for the education of any readers I may have. My feeling is that we don't live in a time so different from Dix's, and that though in the Empire we aren't confronted by casualty every day, it still infects us. With just a little focussed looking, you can see it.

Dix is all over the internet, but here's one more gallery that has a nice range of his work.

Body Artist

I just finished writing a paper on prosthesis in Russia in the 1920s, so I've been thinking a lot about body extension, the various binding/liberating qualities to modern technology. So following on yesterday's WWI art post, I thought I'd add an image from and link to a Smithsonian article on facial prosthesis.


"Wounded tommies facetiously called it "The Tin Noses Shop." Located within the 3rd London General Hospital, its proper name was the "Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department"; either way, it represented one of the many acts of desperate improvisation borne of the Great War, which had overwhelmed all conventional strategies for dealing with trauma to body, mind and soul. On every front—political, economic, technological, social, spiritual—World War I was changing Europe forever, while claiming the lives of 8 million of her fighting men and wounding 21 million more."