How did WWI affect popular art in the 1920s?

World War I was jarring in many ways. It was one of the largest, if not the largest, collective trauma the world had experienced up until that point. One thing it changed forever was traditional notions of Western art.

It was the first world war, and many young men entered it idealistic and left feeling completely disillusioned and hopeless. In the 1920s they became known as the "lost generation," a phrase coined by famed American...

World War I was jarring in many ways. It was one of the largest, if not the largest, collective trauma the world had experienced up until that point. One thing it changed forever was traditional notions of Western art.

It was the first world war, and many young men entered it idealistic and left feeling completely disillusioned and hopeless. In the 1920s they became known as the "lost generation," a phrase coined by famed American author and WWI veteran Ernest Hemingway.

The end of WWI sparked the entrance of modern art into the spotlight in popular art. Surrealist and Expressionist painters began to emerge from various corners of the world, and art, rather than depicting a beautiful, perfect world, began to depict the struggles, chaos, and splinters of the world with distorted figures and mangled bodies. Picasso's "Guernica," which was actually a response to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is an example of how WWI changed art forever.

Art and literature began to have pervasive themes of dystopia rather than utopia and the idea that new inventions and technology might destroy rather than help humanity. In literature, the lovely, poetic language of Victorian prose was replaced by a darker and more rugged language. Cynicism and a backlash against the upper class led to art and literature that was far more direct and devoid of traditional rhetoric. Ernest Hemingway, perhaps best known for this post-WWI style, said in A Farewell to Arms:

"Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

Some other well-known authors and artists from the 1920s include Virginia Woolf, Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Dos Passos, Alban Berg, and T.S. Eliot.