World War I: War of Images, Images of War, which closes on April 19, 2015, is the third exhibition since the GRI expansion and has been tremendously popular, drawing more than 150,000 visitors to date, more than any exhibition at the GRI.
On view since, November 18, 2014, World War I: War of Images, Images of War examines the art and visual culture of the First World War. Drawn principally from the GRI’s Special Collections, and including key loans, the exhibition demonstrates the distinctive ways in which combatant nations utilized visual propaganda against their enemies and explores how individual artists developed their own visual language to convey and cope with the gruesome horrors they witnessed.
Featuring the artists Umberto Boccioni, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fernand Léger, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Natalia Goncharova, Félix Vallotton, among many others, the exhibition contains 150 objects that represent a range of media, including satirical illustrated journals, print portfolios, postcards, photographs, and firsthand accounts such as a war diary, correspondence from the front, and “trench art” made by soldiers. The work on view is primarily from Germany, France, Italy, Russia and the United States.
“World War I was as much a war of visual culture as it was a war of geo-politics,” said Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute. “Because our Special Collections are rich in material from Europe at the time, the GRI is uniquely positioned to tell the story of the role that imagery played in the start of World War I as well as the impact of the war on art and artists.”
World War I: War of Images, Images of War is curated by Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Director of the GRI; Nancy Perloff, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the GRI; Anja Foerschner, Research Specialist at the GRI; Gordon Hughes, Mellon Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Rice University; and Philipp Blom, independent scholar.
The exhibition will travel to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis in fall 2015 and is accompanied by the book Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I, published by Getty Publications in 2014.
Visit World War I: War of Images, Images of War for more information.