Art and the Great War: Witness, Shock and Dada

World War I (1914–1918) killed millions and shattered faith in progress, and artists responded in different ways. Some served as official war artists; British painter Paul Nash depicted ruined landscapes and titled one painting 'We Are Making a New World' (1918) with bitter irony. German veteran Otto Dix later produced 'Der Krieg' (1924), etchings that confronted viewers with the horror of the trenches.

Poets such as Wilfred Owen, killed one week before the armistice, challenged patriotic images of glorious death. In neutral Zurich in 1916, artists at the Cabaret Voltaire launched Dada, an anti-art movement that used nonsense, chance and provocation to mock the society that had produced the war. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a factory-made urinal titled 'Fountain' to an exhibition, challenging the very definition of art.