Meanwhile, a generation of traumatized artists on both sides made art that was poignant, cautionary, and incendiary. The work of those who rebelled is examined in the books complementing both exhibitions: The Getty’s Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I (edited by Hughes and Philipp Blom) and the Wolfonian’s Myth + Machine: Art and Aviation in the First World War (written by Jon Mogul and Peter Clericuzio).

Courtesy of Wolfsonian-FIU

Yet not all the artists were dissenters. For those who served in combat roles directly there was little time, opportunity, or access to materials to produce artworks, Hughes explains. And for those who could not serve in combat—often due to age or health—designing visual warfare was their way of contributing. That was the case with one of France’s leading avant-garde artists, Jean Cocteau, who both volunteered to drive an ambulance and published the anti-German Le Mot with the illustrator Paul Iribe. According to Hughes, Le Mot mobilized a French modernist aesthetic that was overtly propagandistic.

Courtesy of Wolfsonian-FIU

Battlefield carnage was so nightmarish and unprecedented that a new language had to be created to visually and textually describe it. “Most artists and writers, even those who were fairly aesthetically conservative prior to the war, tended to view traditional forms of image making or writing as wholly inadequate to the task of representing the experience of modern warfare,” Hughes said. He pointed out Italian Futurism, and the watercolor drawings on cigarette boxes by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as examples of the period's new visual vocabulary. It was, he said, an “effort to find a visual or written idiom that could represent, even if inadequately, what by its very nature cannot be represented.”

How did artists and designers choose to represent the unrepresentable? That’s the questions driving the exhibit at the Wolfsonian, according to its curator, Jon Mogul. The typical answer in art history is that World War I was a trigger for avant-garde innovation, since the war alienated artists from the established culture. That's not wrong, said Mogul, and there's evidence for that in the exhibition—works by Wyndham Lewis and Paul Joostens that depict soldiers and machines as nearly abstract geometric forms, a poster by Jean Carlu that incorporates a photo of a badly disfigured French veteran.

Courtesy of Wolfsonian-FIU

Courtesy of Wolfsonian-FIU

But Mogul was just as fascinated by the resilience of conventional, unrebellious depictions. Despite the rise of Cubism, Expressionism and, later, Dadaism, Mogul says that if you look at the art of period broadly, there’s more there than the modern-leaning, angsty stuff. He refers to a series of lithographs portraying the medical care of wounded British soldiers by an artist named Claude Shepperson, which avoided showing any evidence of wounds themselves or further suffering.